Interactive map of the drug war in Mexico

Click on the image to visit the interactive drug war map. Or try the Spanish version

If you're interested at all in what's happening in Mexico you can't miss the interactive map of the drug war I just made. You can link directly to cities or whole regions within Mexico and post them to Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the "Share This Map" link at the bottom of the box. You can even compare 2007 México with 2010 México and switch between drug war-related homicides and total homicides (the ones from the INEGI). If you hover over the chart you'll get the monthly values and information on important events. To top it off you can export the monthly data to csv. You'll need a latest generation browser to use it.

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Homicides in Mexico 2010

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.

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Crime at the municipal level

Click on the image to go to the interactive map

The Mexican government recently released crime data for 2011 at the municipality level. Sadly, it is no disaggregated by month, but beggars can't be choosers. To analyze the data I made an interactive map with d3 that includes the locations of the municipalities with the highest drug plant eradication and a 2d kernel density estimate of the location of meth labs based on newspaper reports.

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One less general

Former Mexican Army general Jorge Juárez Loera was shot dead last Saturday when getting out of his Mini Cooper after a traffic accident in Mexico City.

Juárez Loera had just retired on May 16th after turning the mandatory retirement age of 65. Before leaving his post he was an Oficial Mayor of the Secretary of Defense, the third most position in the Mexican military.

During 2007 he was the commander of the XI Military Region, headquartered in Torreón (part of the metropolitan area of La Laguna), as such he oversaw military operations in La Laguna:

Sources: Mortality Database SSA/INEGI, Segundo Informe de Labores - 2008 - SSP

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Tijuana is more violent than ever

The security strategy implemented in Tijuana has been praised to the stars and is frequently portrayed as the way to beat the cartels. The L.A. Times wet so far as to claim that Tijuana's chief of police Julián Leyzaola Pérez was "the model for the kind of law enforcement muscle the Mexican government needs to battle organized crime."

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Drug War Hotspots

It turns out it is really easy to customize maps with Fusion Tables and the Maps API so I recreated the above map of the number and rate of drug-related homicides by municipality or metropolitan area.

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Strengths and weaknesses of crime data in Mexico

With so much data pertaining to the drug war released recently it's hard to keep track of it all. And as with all things in life there are different pros and cons associated with each of the datasets: The homicide data from the police (SNSP), the homicide data from the vital statistics (INEGI), and the different estimates of drug war related deaths from Reforma, Milenio, and the database of homicides presumed to have been committed by organized crime.

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