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Homicides in Mexico 2006-2009

Just today the Mexican government released to the public the mortality database for 2009, and as you can see from the chart Mexico has suffered from a steep rise in homicides from 2008 onward and very likely reached the highest violence rate in recent history last year. Since the Mexican government also recently made available a database of homicides presumably linked with the drug war we can divide homicides into those related to the drug war an those that are not:

Some problems with the Mexican mortality database

I’ve written before about how I couldn’t find the Acteal Massacre in the homicide database available at the INEGI. So I decided to check if the deaths that occurred as a consequence of the massacre were misclassified as other types of violent death,

Femicides in Mexico 2006-2008

Since the Mexican Human Rights Commission is working on a report of femicides in Mexico, but were only able to access data from the police forces of 18 states, I reran the program I used to analyze the homicides in Ciudad Juárez with data for all femicides.

The only problem is that since I’m using the death certificate database from the vital statistics system, and it takes time to gather all death certificates, I only have data up to the last day of December 2008 (the 2009 vital statistics are supposed to come out during late November/ early December)

How the expiration of the assault weapon ban affected Mexico




—Rangel Sostmann, ITESM Campus Rector


Myths about Ciudad Juarez

Last year there were over 2,600 murders in Ciudad Juarez, and if the more than 1,800 murders so far this year are any indications, there will be even more murders in 2010. Ciudad Juarez is a scary place, but it wasn’t always that way…

I learned from Noel Maurer’s Blog that Ciudad Juarez used to have a low murder rate before 1993, but it rose steeply after the local leader of the Juarez Cartel, Aguilar Guajardo, died, and Amado Carillo replaced him. After Amado Carrillo had firmly established himself thing calmed down somewhat, but by then the violence had switched to a new equilibrium. But anyways, go read Noel Maurer’s take on it

    Hacking the CISEN homicide data

    The director of the CISEN, the Mexican agency in charge of generating intelligence to safeguard Mexico’s security, said in a presentation yesterday that the number of homicides linked to the drug war was a little over 28,000 since the start of the Calderon administration.

    Guillermo Valdés didn’t provide the raw data so I used Engauge to digitize the slide with the homicide data from the presentation:

    Mystery solved: The discrepancy in homicide data




    Homicide in North America

    I’m surprised by how similar the trends are (excluding the drug war in Mexico). There were big decreases in the homicide rate in all three countries starting in the early nineties, which then slowed down around 2000.

    The municipalities with the highest and lowest homicide rates by sex

    The municipalities are ordered by their peak homicide rate and the dotted gray line is the average homicide rate over the 2005–2008 period. Since homicide is mostly a male phenomenon it’s not surprising to find Ciudad Juarez is the most violent city for men.



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