With the presidential election less than a month away and Noel Maurer baiting me into analyzing it, now is good time to start tracking vote intentions. But we have to keep in mind that since the 2006 election was won by .58 percentage points and before 2000 Mexico was ruled for 70 years by the PRI we really don’t have much data to go on. And most importantly, I don’t follow politics closely, if it wasn’t for a couple of big revelations shown during the debate I would have no idea there is a guy called Quadri running for president.

In an article published last year, security spokesman Alejandro Poiré and María Teresa Martínez argued that the Mexican government’s strategy of targeting high level drug lords did not increase violence. The authors analyzed the specific case of the killing of Nacho Coronel and concluded that the increase in violence in the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima did not start with the killing of Nacho Coronel, but rather preceded it and coincided with the kidnapping of his son, which started an inter-cartel war between his organization and the Beltrán Leyvas.

Over the last two decades families in Mexico have undergone rapid social changes. The proportion of marriages ending in divorce has risen for each cohort since data became available, this is independant of the recently approved express divorce law in the Federal District.

On October 2008 Mexico’s capital, the Federal District, approved a version of no-fault divorce locally known as “express divorce”. With the new law the requesting spouse no longer had to provide a cause to dissolve the marriage and the couple no longer had to live apart before filing for divorce. Furthermore, the process of determining child custody and alimony were now separate from the divorce trial. The Federal District has so far been the only federative entity in Mexico to adopt a less adversarial divorce system.

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.

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.

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.

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.