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.”

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.

Just by looking at the map it is obvious that the drug war is a dispute over the drug traficking routes to the United States; Mexico’sdrug-producing regions of the  “Golden Triangle” and “Tierra Caliente,” where lots of meth labs are located and opium poppies and mariguana is grown; the ports where cocaine and the precursors for producing methanpetimes arrive; and the routes to the airports in Cuernavaca and Mexico City (though maybe in Mexico City the local drug market is big enough to be important).

Just today the Mexican government released to the public the mortality database for 2009, and as you can see from the chart Mexico has suffered from a steep rise in homicides from 2008 onward and very likely reached the highest violence rate in recent history last year. Since the Mexican government also recently made available a database of homicides presumably linked with the drug war we can divide homicides into those related to the drug war an those that are not:

I’ve written before about how I couldn’t find the Acteal Massacre in the homicide database available at the INEGI. So I decided to check if the deaths that occurred as a consequence of the massacre were misclassified as other types of violent death,

The Mexican government recently released data on all crime statistics from January 1997 to October 2010, as reported by the various police forces operating in Mexico. This information provides an unprecedented look at what has happened since the drug war began and allows for a frank assessment of the deterioration of security in Mexico.

Since the Mexican Human Rights Commission is working on a report of femicides in Mexico, but were only able to access data from the police forces of 18 states, I reran the program I used to analyze the homicides in Ciudad Juárez with data for all femicides.

The only problem is that since I’m using the death certificate database from the vital statistics system, and it takes time to gather all death certificates, I only have data up to the last day of December 2008 (the 2009 vital statistics are supposed to come out during late November/ early December)