Women fall victim to violence in Mexico’s decade-old war on drugs.

MEXICO CITY: Denisse Velasco has been suffering from acute anxiety since spring, when she narrowly escaped being abducted from a busy street in Guadalajara, Mexico.

She was waiting at a bus stop one morning when a man jumped out of a taxi and tried to force her inside.

Velasco suspects it was a drug trafficker intent on kidnapping her for ransom.

“The same thing could happen again in any moment,” Velasco told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“I walk different routes every day to make sure I’m not followed.

“Velasco’s story is far from uncommon in Mexico, where violence against women has risen dramatically since the government declared war on organised drug trafficking 10 years ago.

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched the hard-line war on drug cartels in December 2006, heavily increasing the role of the military to enforce the law-and-order regime.

More than 170,000 killings have been reported since the crackdown commenced.

The offensive splintered trafficking gangs, creating dozens of new ones.

It also aggravated territorial disputes and made Mexico more violent, experts say, with women increasingly the victims.

Murders of women have risen by 84 percent to 2,383 last year from 1,298 in 2006, according to government statistics.

The death toll for women has been particularly high in the key battlegrounds of Jalisco, Guerrero and Mexico states.

Guadalajara, the site of Velasco’s attack, is the capital of Jalisco, where authorities say 1,171 girls and women went missing in 2015.The Mexican government acknowledges the link between its war on drugs and violence against women.

“There’s a strong correlation between the rise in violent deaths of women and the strategy to combat organized crime,” said Pablo Navarrete Gutierrez, legal affairs coordinator for the National Institute of Women (Inmujeres), a government agency charged with tackling gender violence and discrimination.

“From 2012, we started to see a slight decrease in homicides of women, but the number is nevertheless worrying.

This is a serious problem.”

The violence has resonated through the community as a whole, said Maria Guadalupe Ramos Ponce, a coordinator for the Committee of Women’s Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The drug war has normalized misogynistic violence,” Ramos Ponce said.

The violence has grown more gruesome toward women as well, with torture and dismemberment more common, she said.