Homicides & Disappearances in Mexico: Visualizing the Publicly Available Data
- James Ron
- Mar 21
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 5
Earlier this month, a group of Mexican families searched for their missing loved ones unearthed the remains of multiple persons kidnapped, murdered, and incinerated, apparent victims of Mexico’s violence between the state and organized crime, on the one hand, and between different criminal groups, on the other. This backgrounder helps contextualize this event by summarizing what we know from official Mexican data on homicides and disappearances by year, state, and gender.
Mexico’s twin agonies of homicides and disappearances began escalating in late 2006 and early 2007 when the newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, announced a national offensive against organized crime. Experts offer various reasons for that decision, including Calderón’s desire to legitimate his presidency after a closely contested electoral contest, mounting criminal violence, and growing pressure from Washington.[1]
Before 2006, Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) had developed an unspoken modus vivendi with many of the country's cartels, allowing some to operate in relative peace within clear but informal boundaries. The PRI ruled the country from 1929 to 2000 but then lost power that year in the country’s first fully democratic elections.
By 2006, when Calderón assumed the presidency, these long-standing patterns of state-cartel accommodation were already beginning to break down. Calderón’s offensive accelerated the process, splitting up and destabilizing many of the country’s cartels, prompting criminal leaders to create new organizations and seek out new territories. The ensuing struggle between the state and the cartels on the one hand, and between different criminal organizations, on the other, sparked an explosion of violence.
Mexico’s Homicide Burden
One important indicator of this violence has been the country’s dramatic rise in homicides, described in Graph 1 below.
As Graph 1 indicates, Mexico's homicide rate was relatively constant or even in slight decline from 1990 to 2007. Murders began escalating in 2008, a year after Calderón’s crackdown commenced, and by 2018, the annual toll exceeded 36,000. Since then, annual homicides have subsided only slightly, with 31,000 recorded murders in 2023, the last year for which the country’s national statistics agency, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), offers publicly available data.
Overall, almost 671,000 persons were killed in Mexico from 1990 to 2023, including nearly 424,000 since 2006. The average annual murder count from 1990 to 2005 was 15,439, rising by 52% to 23,544 from 2006 to 2023. The burden has fallen most heavily on men and boys. As Graph 2 demonstrates, 89% of Mexico's murder victims from 2006 to 2023 were male.
As Graph 3 demonstrates, moreover, homicide victims skew younger; 41% of persons murdered from 2006 to 2023 were aged 0 to 29, while fully 69% were aged 39 and younger.
These killings are unevenly distributed across Mexico’s states. With over 47,000 murders, the state of Mexico was hit hardest from 2006 to 2023, followed by Guanajuato (34,258 murders), Guerrero (33,102), and Baja California (29,489). Graph 4 offers more details.
Total death counts can mislead, however, as the size of individual state populations varies. In 2020, for example, there were almost 17 million people in the state of Mexico, compared to only 731,000 in the state of Colima. Graph 5 adjusts for per capita numbers, using demographic data from 2015, the 2006-23 midpoint. The numbers in this instance are expressed as annual average homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, pooled over the years 2006-23.
In per capita terms, the country’s hardest-hit states were Colima, with an annual average of 57 victims per 100,000, Guerrero (52 per 100,000), and Baja California (49 per 100,000). The national average during 2006-23 was 20 per 100,000, roughly 40% higher than the 2023 average for all countries in the Americas.[2]
Mexico’s Crisis of Missing and Disappeared Persons
The violence has also triggered a crisis of missing and disappeared persons. Graph 6 presents those numbers, by year, from 1990 to 2023, as reported to Mexico’s National Search Commission, the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda, or CNB.
From 1990 to 2005, the CNB registered only 1,062 missing and disappeared persons in Mexico, for an annual average of 66. During the 2006-23 period, by contrast, it registered a staggering 93,552 victims, which produced a yearly average of 5,197. The number of missing and disappeared persons began increasing in 2007, shortly after the onset of the government’s war on crime, and has grown consistently ever since, rising to 10,274 in 2023.[3]
As is true for homicides, the burden of missing and disappeared persons is spread unevenly across Mexico’s political geography. Graph 7 shows that the three states with the highest numbers of victims were Jalisco (13,390), Tamaulipas (11,278), and the state of Mexico (7,031).
Since raw numbers may mislead, Graph 8 presents the same data in per capita terms. Chihuahua, a northern border state, experienced the highest average annual rate of disappearances (27.1 per 100,000 inhabitants), followed by a second northern border state, Tamaulipas (18.2 victims per 100,000). Overall, Mexico’s average per capita rate of annual disappearance rate was 4.3 persons per 100,000 inhabitants.
Once again, the scourge of kidnappings and disappearances has fallen most heavily on younger Mexicans. As Graph 9 notes, some 45% of missing persons during the 2006-2023 period were either aged 20-29 (30%) or 10-19 (15%), while fully 73% were aged 39 and younger.
As was true for homicides, most disappearance victims are men and boys. Of the 89,239 registered missing persons whose sex is known, 70,511, or 79%, were male, almost half of whom were aged 20-39 at the time of their abduction. Graph 10 demonstrates that Mexico's female kidnap victims skew younger, as 37% of the 18,562 missing women and girls were aged 0-19 at the time of their disappearance.
Notes
[1] Jorge Chabat (2005). Combatting Drugs in Mexico Under Calderon: The Inevitable War. CIDE research paper #205. Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE).
[2] According to the UN, there were 14.37 murders per 100,000 persons in the Americas in 2023.
[3] Graphs for missing and disappeared persons end in 2023 to remain consistent with INEGI homicide data. In 2024, the National Search Commission (CNB) recorded 13,615 missing persons, a 33% increase over 2023.
About James Ron
James Ron is an international research consultant who taught for 22 years in higher ed in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Before that, he was a consultant for Human Rights Watch and other international agencies and reported for the Associated Press.
Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James' ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their own research, visit his Google Scholar page.
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