This year Mexico has been breaking records left and right. We’ve had the most mariachi players playing together, the largest number of couples kissing, the biggest meatball, torta, and cheesecake, the longest catwalk, and the most people simultaneously dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. You name it, we sign up and start alerting the citizens around the country to join in, to break yet, another record.

It has been said if there were a world record for the country most obsessed with world records, Mexico would win hands down. There is however one record we have recently broken which was not planned nor desired: Ciudad Juarez, caught in the middle of two warring cartels has already registered almost 1000 more narco related killings than the previous year; lest we forget there are still two full months to go before completing this year.

The killings, averaging seven a day in the city of 1.5 million, can be blamed on an escalating drug war between the Sinaloa cartel run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the most-wanted man in Mexico, and the Juarez Cartel, said Chihuahua state Public Safety Secretary Victor Valencia. The cartels are fighting to control the lucrative smuggling route between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, just across the border in Texas. -AP

Police in New York City, which has an estimated population of 10 million registered 522 murders in 2008 and project about 457 murders in all of 2009. It should be noted that manslaughter is also included mixed among the New York City numbers.

While the final count for Juarez murders this year remains unforeseen, we can clearly predict this is not a record Mexico would like to have written into the books.

May 2010 bring renewed faith, peace, and security not only to our hermanos en Juarez , but to all of Mexico.