Mexico’s criminal and political worlds are shifting, and 2017 is off to the most violent start on record

Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, in one form or another, ran Mexico as a de facto one-party state from the 1930s until 2000, when Vicente Fox interrupted the PRI’s hold on the presidency.
The PRI returned to Los Pinos presidential palace in 2012, with the election of President Enrique Pea Nieto.
But that restoration of power appears to be on shaky ground, and the political shifts that the PRI and Mexico are seeing come as the country’s criminal underworld appears to be undergoing its own upheaval.
In many places, times of political and criminal instability have been accompanied by violence. That seems to be the case for Mexico: January 2017 was the most violent January in the last 20 years, and recent trends suggest the killing will not soon relent.
The first month of this year saw 1,938 homicide cases, according to official data from Mexico’s Executive Secretary for the National Public Security System.

This post was published at Business Insider