Mexico 2020–2021: The World's Epicenter of Homicidal Violence

"Yaqui" for Borderland Beat

Mexico: Now Achieves 18 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the World

"Mexico has been the world epicenter of homicidal violence for two years. It is not a coincidence. In 2019 and 2020 the worst crime 'control' policy has been applied, by the Government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

On one hand, by not acting against the criminal groups, mainly responsible for the violence, more than exceptionally, under the assumption that if the forces of order do not bother the thugs, they will behave well; on the other hand, applying vast subsidy programs with the hope that criminals, in exchange for them, will stop committing crimes," the organization's statement highlights.

According to the 2020 Ranking, six of them occupy the first places: Celaya, Gto; Tijuana, BC;  Ciudad Juárez, Chih; Ciudad Obregón, Sonora; Irapuato, Gto, Uruapan, Mich and Ensenada, Baja California.

Cajeme, Sonora is one of the 10 most violent cities in the world, so says the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice. 

The agency affirms that for the fourth consecutive year a Mexican city is the most violent: In 2020 it was Celaya, Guanajuato, with a rate of 109.38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

According to the list, Ciudad Obregón, Sonora registered 309 homicides last year, for a rate of 101.13 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

In seven of the thirteen annual editions of this ranking, the most violent city in the world has been Mexican (that is, in the years 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020). 

The most violent city in the world according to this organization is Celaya, Guanajuato with 109.38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants , followed by Tijuana, Baja California with 105.15, Ciudad Juárez in third place with 103.61, Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, 101.13, Irapuato Guanajuato 94.99 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants, Ensenada, Baja California 90.58 homicides.

The top 10 is completed by the American City of St. Louis, Missouri in seventh place , the Brazilian City of Feira de Santana in ninth and the South African's Cape Town in the tenth place.

Of the 50 cities in the index, 18 are located in Mexico, 11 in Brazil, 6 in Venezuela, 5 in the United States, 4 in South Africa, 2 in Colombia, 2 in Honduras, one in Puerto Rico and another in Jamaica, said José Antonio Ortega, president of the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice. 

José Antonio Ortega, denounces that violence continues in the country and has increased, due to the policy of President López Obrador who refused to act against criminal groups and his idea of ​​distributing money in social programs to try to stop criminals from committing crimes, which he has said, and the only thing he really wants to achieve is to obtain votes.

The report is presented in a context in which Mexico has recorded the 2 most violent years in its history with 34,681 murder victims in 2019 and 34,552 in 2020, according to official data.

The ranking of the Citizen Council is drawn up based on an analysis of official figures of intentional homicides in cities with 300,000 inhabitants or more that are not in a declared warlike conflict.

This is the fourth consecutive year that a Mexican city is the most violent in the world, Ortega lamented.

"What is the pattern that distinguishes them? It is that in these Mexican cities we see intense, stronger activity by the armed militias of the criminal groups that are fighting for the place (plaza), not only because of drug trafficking, ” the specialist explained.

The expert highlighted the contrast in Central America's progress by noting that Guatemala City left the index in 2020 and a year earlier San Salvador stopped being listed, while until 2014 the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula occupied the first position.

It also reported that the average rate of the 12 Brazilian cities included in the current ranking is 47.27 intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, while the average rate of the 18 Mexican cities was 67.09.

The specialist attributed the increase to the "failed" security strategy of President López Obrador, ie AMLO, whom he accused of evading the control of criminal groups despite his militarization strategy.

“Mexico has been the world epicenter of homicidal violence for 2 years now. It is not a coincidence. In 2019 and 2020, the worst crime control policy has been applied by the Government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” said Ortega, one of those responsible for the study.

The report is presented in a context in which Mexico has recorded the 2 most violent years in its history with 34,681 murder victims in 2019 and 34,552 in 2020, according to official data.

"Today the country is more violent currently than the state in which he received it, today we have more intentional homicides in the country than when he received the Presidency of this country (in December 2018)," he said.

1. List of the 50 most violent cities in the world in 2020

Study Presentation:

For the thirteenth and eleventh time that 50 cities are included, we present the ranking of cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants with the highest homicide rates in the world.

We make this ranking with the manifest citizen political objective of drawing attention to violence in cities, particularly in Latin America, so that rulers are pressured to fulfill their duty to protect the governed, to guarantee their right to public security.

What we are also looking for is that no one, neither the rulers nor the ruled of a country or sub-national jurisdiction, wants their city or cities to appear in this ranking and that if their city or cities are already there, they make every effort to get them out as soon as possible. . We are very pleased to hear about the reduction in homicides and especially that cities have come out of the ranking.

The fact that we pursue a political objective with this periodic study does not mean that we dispense with the greatest academic rigor that is possible.

A measurement effort like this can only be done with intellectual honesty, with adherence to the truth. There can be no room for half-truths or exaggerations.

We are not interested in including or excluding cities or twisting the data to attribute higher or lower homicide rates and their positions in the ranking, according to any political or ideological agenda. Our interest is simply to know the truth and publish it transparently.

The purpose of exposing the ranking methodology is to make as transparent as possible the way in which we arrive at the results presented here. If the operations of a ranking or any other measurement exercise are not transparent, verifiable and replicable, then its results cannot be taken as true and credible.

Of course, we are not exempt from errors, which we always make in good faith. The ranking is not 100% accurate and if it were you would lose your primary sense of timing. The exercise would perhaps be 100% accurate if done in 10 or 20 years. By then it would have a value as historical research, but not to exert citizen pressure and produce changes in public policies today.

The biggest obstacle that this effort faces is the lack of transparency of the governments of several of the countries with cities that are included in the ranking. But over the years, we must say, there is increasing transparency in most jurisdictions, although in others there are setbacks.

Now, a part of the figures used to calculate the rates and the positions in the ranking are estimates, when there are no official figures or they have not been published in full for the entire year in question at the time of closing the edition. In the latter case, when we later compare the estimated figures with the official ones, the differences are not very significant. In the vast majority of cases, the estimates are lower, since we opted for conservative estimates and precisely downward.

Likewise, when there are strong indications or evidence that the official figures are erroneous, contradictory or deliberately manipulated, the adjustments are made and the criteria and methods followed for the calculation are explained.

One more facet of the study will be to try, in all cases where possible, to include all the municipalities that make up a city and not just the municipality that is usually the capital of a sub-national jurisdiction (state, federal entity, province, etc.). That is, we look for conurbations, ie localities that form a single urban system, clearly distinguishable from others, independent of the geographical-administrative divisions within the countries.

How to distinguish a city? Just check a satellite map. These reveal how the urban area spreads continuously and to confirm it on the ground,  it is enough to walk and find one construction after another, with some interruptions of vacant lots or public green areas.

Authorities from different countries have recognized through laws and decrees the existence of metropolitan areas or zones that bring together several municipalities. In some cases these areas or zones coincide with the definition of city used here, but in other cases they do not, since the limits of the population centers are tens of kilometers from each other. In these cases it is about different cities and not the same one. Interruptions in the urban area of ​​10 kilometers or more indicate that nearby towns are not actually part of the same city.

Therefore, we opt for metropolitan areas or zones that coincide with cities, even if we leave out municipalities that are officially part of them.

It should also be noted that we do not include cities in countries suffering from open warfare, such as Syria, Sudan or Yemen, since most violent deaths do not correspond to the universally accepted definition of homicide, but rather deaths caused by war operations (as classified by the World Health Organization).

2. News in the 2020 ranking:

1. Mexico continues as the global epicenter of violence

• For the fourth consecutive year, a Mexican city is the most violent in the world. In 2020, that most violent Mexican city in the world was Celaya, in the state of Guanajuato.

• Of the 13 annual editions of this ranking, in 7 the most violent city in the world has been Mexican (that is, in the years 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020).

• In 2020, the six most violent cities in the world are all Mexican: Celaya, Tijuana, Juárez, Irapuato, Ciudad Obregón and Ensenada.

• Of the 10 most violent cities in the world, seven are Mexican. In addition to the six mentioned above, Uruapan appears.

• Mexico is the country with the highest number of violent cities: 18 out of 50.

• The cities of Guadalajara and Reynosa came out of the ranking, but the

Colima (metropolitan area).

2. It continues to confirm that policies that are complacent with the violence are a failure, while the opposite are successful

Mexico has been the global epicenter of homicidal violence for two years. It is not a coincidence. In 2019 and 2020, the worst crime “control” policy has been applied by the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: on the one hand, not acting against the criminal groups, mainly responsible for the violence, more than exceptionally, under the assumption that if law enforcement does not bother the thugs, they will behave well; on the other hand, applying vast subsidy programs in the hope that criminals, in exchange for them, will stop committing crimes.

Neither one nor the other has happened. Criminal groups are more violent than ever, even if they are not disturbed. The common thugs continue to commit crimes without restraint, no matter how much subsidies they are given and that are not really aimed at preventing crime, but at forming captive electoral clienteles.

The fact that in Mexico those responsible for 7 out of every 100 murders are barely punished (in 2007, 45 out of 100 were punished) has not resulted, as expected, that criminals stop killing. The greater the impunity, the greater the incentive to commit a crime.

In 2020, Guatemala City ceased to be part of the ranking, since its rate of 24.58 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants was much lower than the rate of the city that ranked 50.

A year earlier, San Salvador came out of the ranking. In 2020, this city had a rate of 19.91 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, that is, in El Salvador and in its capital, violence accentuates its downward trend.

In the editions of the ranking for the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula occupied the first position. In 2013 the city had a rate of 187.14 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2020, with a rate four and a half times lower (41.19), it ranked 33rd.

In the 2020 edition, the Colombian city of Palmira left the ranking and Colombia was left with only two cities and these with rates below the average (51.77).

In 2019, homicides in Brazil fell by 19% and certainly rose 5% in 2020, but the general trend continues to be downward in violence. The average rate for the 12 Brazilian cities included in this edition is 47.27 per 100,000 inhabitants, while the average rate for the 18 Mexican cities was 67.09.

The reason for this progress is that crime control policies are applied opposite to those applied in Mexico: no understanding or complicity with thugs, reducing impunity, not throwing taxpayers' money into the trash with subsidies that are actually for buying votes.

3. The difficulty in recognizing the magnitude of homicidal violence in some countries.

In Venezuela the dictatorship does not inform or lie; Furthermore, thousands of the murders are extrajudicial executions at the hands of the police. The media are dying between persecution and economic disaster. Plus the few NGOs that go to great lengths to count homicides act with little rigor.

Mexico is far from Venezuela's lack of transparency, but it has its problems. The responsible authority (National Public Security System) provides monthly data on homicide victims, but does not present them with a municipal disaggregation but with a state breakdown, which is absurd, because there is no way to have state figures except by adding those of the municipalities.

The National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI) presents homicide data disaggregated by state and municipality, but with almost a year of delay. In addition, both the National Public Security System and INEGI have under-registration problems.

In 2019, in 17 states, INEGI reported fewer homicides than those reported by the SNSP, while the reverse occurred in the remaining 15 states. If we start from the assumption, most of the time confirmed in Mexico, that the highest figures are the closest to reality, then in 2019 there were not the 35,632 homicides reported by the SNSP, nor the 36,661 reported by the INEGI, but 38,144 (sum of the highest figures reported by either of the two sources, in each state). These different absolute figures imply different homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively: 28.58, 29.40 and 30.59.

This without considering the disappeared. In 2019, the criminal groups disappeared 2,782 people, of which - almost certainly - all were killed. In this way, the closest figure to the reality of homicide victims in Mexico in 2019 was 40,926 and the rate of 32.82 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

Other novelties presented by the 2020 ranking are:

• Included in the 2019 ranking, the following six cities came out of the 2020 ranking: Manaus (Brazil); Palmira (Colombia); Guatemala (Guatemala); Guadalajara Mexico); Reynosa (Mexico); Ciudad Bolívar (Venezuela).

• The 2020 ranking included the cities of: Teresina (Brazil), which had appeared in the previous edition; Mossoró (Brazil) which is included for the first time; Memphis (United States), included for the first time; New Orleans (United States), which had appeared in the previous edition; Colima, included for the first time, and Cumaná, which appeared in the 2017 edition.

• Of the 50 cities in the 2020 ranking, 18 are located in Mexico, 11 in Brazil, 6 in Venezuela, 5 in the United States, and 4 in South Africa. Colombia 2, in Honduras 2 and there is one from Puerto Rico and one from Jamaica.

• Forty-six cities are located in the American continent and 40 in Latin America.

• In the 50 cities, the average rate was 51.81 (33,250 intentional homicides among 64,181,575 inhabitants). The top 20 cities in the ranking exceeded that average.

3. Selection Criteria:

The six main criteria to consider the inclusion of a city in the ranking are:

1) It must be a clearly defined urban unit. It cannot be an area or jurisdiction that is part of a city or belong to a municipality (or equivalent jurisdiction) that instead of being predominantly urban is predominantly rural.

2) The city in question must have 300,000 or more inhabitants, according to demographic data from official sources.

3) The data on homicides must correspond to the universally accepted definitions of intentional homicides or intentional homicides or deaths by assault (with the exception of deaths in war operations or the legally justified death - not in extrajudicial executions - of aggressors by law enforcement officers). Figures on attempted homicides are not included.

4) Homicide figures must come from official sources or alternate sources. In any case, the data, estimates and calculation methodology must be verifiable and / or replicable. In some cases, the data is the result of an own count, based on the analysis of journalistic notes.

5) The figures must correspond to the previous year in which the results are published. Only exceptionally can data from a previous year be considered (those from 2014 to 2015, for example), given the well-founded presumption that there was no substantial variation in the incidence of homicides.

6) The information must be accessible through the Internet.

We try, whenever possible, that the cities included are integrated urban units and not localities that are part of them, independent of political-administrative jurisdictions. Only when there is no city data do we consider the data of the municipality or "main city" of a city.

For definitive inclusion in the ranking, the city in question must be among the 50 with the highest rates.

The sense of considering only cities with 300,000 or more inhabitants responds to the purpose of recognizing the magnitude of urban violence.

Populations of a few thousand or hundreds of inhabitants present a different criminal reality than those of medium to large cities. In the latter, the general phenomena of agglomeration and anonymity are presented, as well as specifically criminal phenomena, among others, the distribution from higher to lower incidence from the centers to the periphery, in concentric circles or the higher frequency of murders in which perpetrator and victim did not know each other (which is characteristic of epidemics of urban violence and organized violence)

Likewise, in localities with a few thousand inhabitants, strong statistical distortions can occur. For example, a town of 5,000 inhabitants in country X, normally peaceful, in a year there may be five homicides (while in the previous year there was one and in the following year zero), because for example one subject went crazy and killed all the members of a family. Then that year the rate of intentional homicides would have been 100 per 100,000 inhabitants, when in large cities in country X it is on average 20. This would give the impression that this small population lives a true epidemic of homicides and not cities that for several years have had rates of 40 to 60 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

For this reason, small towns are excluded, in addition to the fact that according to our experience the smaller the population of a city the greater the difficulty - or outright impossibility - of obtaining useful data.

Now, to prepare the ranking, monitoring is maintained throughout the year, but it becomes more meticulous towards the end and beginning of the next when various government authorities release their annual data.

In principle, all cities with more than 300 thousand inhabitants are considered, although of course there are some cities that deserve more attention than others. In addition to some countries there is minimal difficulty in obtaining data, while in others there is great difficulty or outright inability to access.

The cities that deserve the most attention are those of those countries with the highest homicide rates, which does not imply assuming that in countries with relatively low rates there are no cities with high rates.

For this reason, a first step in identifying the prospective cities to appear in the ranking is to first analyze the general homicide rates of the countries. For this we consider four main types of sources:

➢ Figures from periodic studies on crime incidence (and operation of criminal justice systems) of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

➢ Mortality figures from the World Health Organization.

➢ The figures on criminal incidence of the governments of countries, in addition to

the governments of subnational jurisdictions and metropolitan police.

➢ Journalistic information.

All of these cities (and hundreds of others) were considered for the ranking. If they do not appear, it is not due to lack of information, but because either the cities did not have more than 300 thousand inhabitants or the rates were not high enough (in the case of 20, the 50th place had a rate of 34.65 per 100 thousand inhabitants) .

We are informed that there are many cities with higher rates than those corresponding to position 50, but that do not meet the requirement of having a population of 300 thousand inhabitants, as is the case of the Colombian cities of San Andrés de Tumaco ( rate of 87.15) and Tuluá (rate of 66.89) or the Mexican Manzanillo (rate of 145.53), just to cite a few examples.

There are also dozens of municipalities in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador, in similar condition, but which are not cities in themselves (but part of others) or do not have more than 300 thousand inhabitants.

For a similar reason, cities such as Belize and Nassau in America and some in Africa are excluded.

It is necessary to make another clarification. As already mentioned, we try to recognize the reality of the incidence of homicides by city and not by municipalities and we also try to keep track of the behavior of this or that city year after year. The reality is that around a municipality that is usually the capital of a subnational jurisdiction (state, federative entity, federal state, province, etc.) there are other suburban municipalities that constitute a metropolitan area.

We prefer metropolitan areas over one of its municipalities, because that is closer to the reality of a city, beyond the political-administrative limits, which are largely arbitrary, which do not respond to the reality of economic integration and social of the cities.

Some governments already understand the need to recognize this reality, while others (the majority) remain only focused on classifying information according to narrow political-administrative criteria.

When there is no more information than from a municipality and not from the metropolitan area, we have no choice but to consider it, knowing that it only reveals a part of the urban reality and urban violence.

Now, sometimes there is only information on a municipality in a year, but the next there is data on the metropolitan area of ​​which it is a part and sometimes, the information is global for that area and is not broken down by the municipalities that comprise it.

Faced with this situation, we opted to take the information by metropolitan area, with the hope that for the following year there will also be data by area. We decided this, aware that continuity in monitoring the behavior of a locality or jurisdiction is broken, (when, for example, we no longer consider the municipality of Fortaleza in Brazil, but the metropolitan region of which the municipality is a part). But, between trying to recognize the reality of a city and monitoring the behavior of a locality or jurisdiction (municipality), we opted for the former, as it is closer to the purposes of the study.

Regarding the definition of homicides, in the first place, it is pertinent to point out that they must be completed homicides and not attempts. Second, it is necessary to avoid confusing terms such as “violent deaths”.

For example, Brazilian authorities classify the majority of intentional homicides into three categories: intentional homicide, death in the context of a robbery with violence or robbery, and death as a result of intentional injuries. The three categories are then added together in what are called "intentional lethal violent crimes."

But intentional homicide is not the same as death intentionally caused and carried out with violence. There are malicious homicides that are committed without violence, such as poisoning.

That is why the correct definition is that of intentional homicide or as part of an aggression, according to the concept of the World Health Organization (excluding war operations and “justifiable” homicides committed by law enforcement officers within the framework compliance with the law and that are not extrajudicial executions).

The dictionary defines violence as the act that "involves the use of force, physical or moral" while the definition of aggression is broader: "Act of attacking someone to kill, injure or harm".

Likewise, malicious homicides are those of a pre-intentional nature, defined as those in which the aggression has a result that exceeds the intention of the aggressor agent. For example, a subject uses a weapon against his victim with the purpose of intimidating or injuring him, although it ends up taking his life.

NOTE: Opinions expressed here are those of the Contributors of the Study. Go to the CCPSCJ link for the entire report by the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (CCPSCJ).

Sources: El Imparcial / CCPSCJ / Excelsior / Infobae