SAN DIEGO — Since President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, AMLO, took office in December 2018, 156,136 people have been murdered in Mexico, according to the Institute of Statistics and Geography in Mexico.

The agency calls it the “most violent” presidential term in Mexico’s history.

AMLO’s tenure is scheduled to end in December 2024.

Under former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, there were slightly fewer.

The Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox’s administrations saw dramatically even less homicides.

The agency also noted AMLO has led the country through the most violent years in Mexico’s history including 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 and has had the most months with at least 3,000 homicides recorded in a month.

Last year in Mexico, a country of about 128 million people, there were 30,968 homicides committed, according to that country’s security minster Rosa Isela Rodríguez.

By comparison, in the U.S. with 332 million residents, 26,031 homicides took place in 2022, says the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.

Figures published by Mexico’s National System of Public Security, through May 24 of this year, indicate there have been 12,000 homicides already committed in Mexico.

“It’s a problem we inherited from previous administrations that had no interest in guaranteeing peace and security,” said AMLO last month during a visit to the state of Zacatecas. “The ones who were in charge of public security were part of organized crime.”

The president was referring to Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former public security secretary under the previous administration.

Earlier this year, García Luna was found guilty in a federal court in New York of taking bribes from the drug cartels he was supposed to be fighting against.

“The line has been drawn now, one thing are the criminals and others are the authorities, they don’t have their working arrangement like they had before,” said AMLO.