An investigation by Mexican journalists has revealed that the war between the state and drug cartels has left the Latin American country more than three times as violent as US-occupied Afghanistan.
An incredible 7,724 killings in 2009 alone - more than 21 each day - were found to be related either to organised crime or President Felipe Calderon's military response, reporters for Mexico's La Reforma and El Universal newspapers announced.
The figures include almost 900 people murdered in December, most of them executions by cartel members of people thought to be police informers, or of police officers themselves, in cities such as Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana on the Mexican-US frontier.
But other killings have included at least four city mayors, two military generals and an undetermined number of union and peasant worker activists whom the left opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) insists are being assassinated by landowners under cover of the drug war.
The spiralling number of deaths since Mr Calderon militarised law enforcement after his controversial defeat of the PRD in the 2006 elections has long since surpassed the violence in Afghanistan, the investigators for La Reforma and El Universal declared.
Latest figures from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan show that 2,038 Afghan civilians were killed in the first 10 months of 2009, while an estimated 2,118 died in 2008, but 13,354 Mexicans were killed in the drug war during that time.
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