Mexico’s murder rate has increased exponentially in 2015, rising to almost 9 percent, despite the government's efforts to combat it.

Around 17,013 murders were reported last year. In 2014, the previous year, there were 15,653 reported homicides.

As Reuters reports, the recent increase in homicide is the first in four years.

Government data informs that as the murder rate has increased, other serious crimes, such as kidnapping and extortion, have actually gone down.

The current murder rate breaks down to about 14 murders per 100,000 people. In the United States, the murder rate is around five murders for every 100,000 people.

As the Wall Street journal reports, the new data points to a geographical shift in where the murders occur. In 2011, most murders in Mexico took place in the northern border states, such as Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. The newest numbers reveal that the murder rate is growing in center-south areas such as Guerrero, Guanajuato, Puebla and Mexico City.

According to Jorge Chabat, a security expert who hails from Mexico City's CIDE University, the increase in the murder rate has come as a major setback for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. “This is a hard blow for Peña Nieto, whose main asset on the security front had been until now the decline in murders,” said Chabat. “He can’t play that card anymore.”

In 2014, Peña Nieto proposed to dissolve the nation's 1,800 local police forces and unify all officers into 32 state forces which would, in theory, be more difficult for drug gangs to infiltrate or influence.

According to Chabat, the ability for cartels to infiltrate Mexico's state and municipal police is the crux of the problem. “As long as all government levels, local, state and federal, aren’t capable of solving this structural problem of corrupt, underpaid police forces, what we’ll have is gangs moving from one state to another, and the problem will never end,” said Chabat.

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