I’ve updated the mxmortalitydb package to include 2013 data. This data only package includes all injury intent deaths (accidents, homicides, suicides, and unspcified intent) that were registered in Mexico from 2004 to 2013. You can use the package to calculate changes and trends in homicide rates in the most violent metro areas (... [Read more...]

This is a data only package containing all injury intent deaths (accidents, suicides, homicides, legal interventions, and deaths of unspecified intent) registered by the SSA/INEGI from 2004 to 2012. The data source for the database is the INEGI. In a... [Read more...]

During 2007 and 2008 the Mexican state of Sinaloa had more drug war-related homicides than total homicides. This should in theory be impossible since drug war homicides are a subset of total homicides. How did this happen? Here is a chart from my old post highlighting the monthly difference between the vital ... [Read more...]

Ever since the end of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War violence in Mexico inched down in fits and starts from a high of about 60 homicides per 100,000 people to its lowest level sometime during the middle of the last decade (there's some uncertainty about the number of homicides in 2007). ... [Read more...]

Rates for Panama and Nicaragua are from 2009, all other countries 2010. Municipalities which are part of a metro area in Mexico are shown with the metro area homicide rate.Visit the interactive map of homicides Having just posted on violence along Mexico's northern border, I figured it's time to analyze what ... [Read more...]

Photo Credit: Jesús Villaseca Pérez Ever since March 2008 Ciudad Juárez began to register an alarming number of homicides becoming Mexico's most violent city. According to the Mexican vital statistics system Ciudad Juárez (coterminous with the Juárez municipality) went from having just 202 murders in 2007 to 1,616 in 2008, 2,397 ... [Read more...]

Keeping with this week's divorce theme, here's a map of the Mexican states where marriages are most likely to end in divorce. Perhaps not surprisingly, there seems to be an inverse correlation with the state percentage of the population that is catho... [Read more...]

Over the last two decades families in Mexico have undergone rapid social changes. The proportion of marriages ending in divorce has risen for each cohort since data became available, this is independant of the recently approved express divorce law in... [Read more...]

On October 2008 Mexico's capital, the Federal District, approved a version of no-fault divorce locally known as "express divorce". With the new law the requesting spouse no longer had to provide a cause to dissolve the marriage and the couple no longer had to live apart before filing for divorce. Furthermore, ... [Read more...]

Recently the Mexican government released to the public the final homicide data for 2010, and as you can see from the chart Mexico has suffered from a steep rise in homicides since 2008, and in 2010 reached the highest homicide rate in recent history. The Mexican government had actually released preliminary homicide data ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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, and indeed they were. In the municipality ... [Read more...]

The Mexican government recently released data on all crime statistics from January 1997 to October 2010, as reported by the various police forces operating in Mexico. This information provides an unprecedented look at what has happened since the drug war began and allows for a frank assessment of the deterioration of security ... [Read more...]

There have been some very good visualizations of the Wikileaks data so I decided to create one of the drug war in Mexico The above map was made using data collected by Walter McKay, mainly from El Universal and El Diario reports. The data is stored as a Google Map ... [Read more...]

Ciudad Juárez became the most violent city in Mexico as a consequence of the vicious war between the Juárez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. So far more than 6,500 people have been murdered in this city since the war started. With the Juárez Cartel significantly weakened, 2010 is set ... [Read more...]

As I described in this post, the reported number of homicides[1] in Chihuahua during 2009 turned out to be incomplete. Guess what? The SNSP just released [xls file] an updated version of the homicide data, and Chihuahua went from having 2,523 homicides to 3,156. My estimate was 3,256, so I came pretty close. And ... [Read more...]

There has been a lot of attention paid to the role of US guns exacerbating the violence in Mexico. The assault-weapon ban expired on September 14, 2004, but with the recent spiraling of violence in Mexico the ban has attracted renewed attention. Just recently the Mexican President stood before the American Congress ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

I've been complaining about how homicide statistics from police sources were too low in 2009, with the entire state of Chihuahua having less homicides than its biggest city. I was thinking of finding out if I could use the IFAI (Freedom of Information Access) to obtain the original CIEISP forms which ... [Read more...]