The Mexican government through the INEGI just released preliminary homicide data for 2011. I feel bound to remind my readers that the government also released preliminary data in 2010, with the state of Chihuahua missing over a thousand murders, so the data should be interpreted as strictly preliminary.

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 in 2009, and 3,686 in 2010.

Mexican and US officials explain the dramatic increase in violence as due to a conflict between the Sinaloa and Juárez Cartels. After a new governor was elected in October 2010 Ciudad Juárez does seem to have started turning around, but it is still an extremely violent city.

On Sunday, July 1, 2012 Mexican voters will go to the polls and elect a new president. In Mexico whichever candidate wins a simple plurality of the national vote is elected. Before the election of Vicente Fox of the PAN in 2000 Mexico had been ruled by a single party (the PRI) for over 70 years.

I now use the weekly average of the GEA-ISA daily tracking poll and I’ve added the Indemerc pollinf firm and some polls from Buendía y Laredo that were missing from ADN Político‘s poll of polls. None of the polls were conducted after the presidential debate. A chart including those who did not answer is provided after the jump

After 49 bodies were dumped on a highway leading from Monterrey to Reynosa you would have expected May to have been a particularly violent month in the Monterrey metro area. Instead it was one of the least violent months of 2012. Still, violence is an order of magnitude above what is was before the Zetas broke from the Gulf Cartel.