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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”