I’ve written before about how the deaths of the
Acteal massacre weren’t registered as homicides in the mortality database and about the large number of
deaths of unknown intent in Ciudad Juárez. There’s actually another large error in the database that occurred in January and February of 2007. Lots of accidents of unspecified injury mechanism were registered in the Federal District at the same time there was a never before seen drop in the number of homicides.
The drop didn’t just involve homicides but also all kind of accidental deaths, though that is not an error but a drop in the quality of vital statistics data (I only show accidental deaths by cause of transportation in the chart for clarity purposes)
Loking at the data for the whole metro area of Mexico City broken down by state of occurrence one can see that the error only occurred in the Federal District (the spike during late 2007 in the State of Mexico is due transport accidents misclassified as unspecified, though it is difficult to see in the data due to seasonal patterns)
The ages of accidental deaths by unspecified cause that took place during January and February 2007 look different than those that occurred at other times.
The male to female ratio of accidental deaths by unspecified cause that took place during January and February 2007 look different than those that occurred at other times. During January and February more males than females died, just as in homicides and accidental deaths by cause of transportation.
I don’t think there can be any doubt that some homicides “leaked” into accidental deaths by unspecified cause. I tried to classify the Jan-Feb accidents into homicides and accidents based on the characteristics of the dead (age, sex, place of occurrence) but given that the cause of death was left unspecified (firearm, suffocation, cut/pierce, etc) I was only able to obtain sensitivities and specificities of .60, which is only a little better than chance.
It looks as if the error didn’t just happen in the Federal District but all over Mexico (though obviously no the state of Mexico). You see the same pattern of a big drop in homicides at the same time accidents by unspecified cause rise. Perhaps someone hired his dump brother in law to administer the database and he screwed things up?
The most worrying part is that the error coincided with the first military operations of the drug war. Perhaps the Mexican government saw the drop in homicides and became a little too cocky about its capacity to take on the drug cartels.
In
Nuevo Laredo during the first months of 2007 there were more drug related homicides that total homicides according to the
INEGI.
