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 homicide rates for Mexicans ... [Read more...]

The top six most violent municipalities are near the US border. Ciudad Juárez is in a class by itself with 113 homicides per 100,000 people. José Azueta is the municipality where Zihuatanejo is located. Mazátlan, another popular tourist destination, also appears on the list.  Lázaro Cárdenas is the ... [Read more...]

The 2009 homicide numbers collected by the SNSP (National System of Public Security) are finally out, you can download the data from the ICESI, which is a civic institution not affiliated with the government. If you remember, one of the conclusio... [Read more...]

On December 11, 2006 Felipe Calderon, as the first significant act of his presidency, sent the army to his home state of Michoacan. He claimed that it was to regain control of territories lost to the drug cartels, and indeed, a new cartel had started operating in Michocan. But the fact that ... [Read more...]

Keeping with the theme of the post below, I used a clustering algorithm to group the different countries according to what they eat. I simply played around with the number of clusters until I got something I thought resembled reality, so don't interpre... [Read more...]

Using this database of food consumption data the blog Canibais e Reis kindly put together, I calculated all values for which the US was at least 2 standard deviations from the world average. Here are the outliers in standard deviations from the w... [Read more...]

Yesterday the INEGI released the GDP figures for 2009, and since it was an annus horribilis for Mexico, I thought I'd put up a couple of charts. Looking through the Banco de Información Económica I found two series of historical seasonally adjusted GDP data available: GDP in 1993 pesos going ... [Read more...]