Mexico has suffered from a tidal wave of kidnappings and disappearances since the government's offensive on organized crime began in late 2006. That offensive destabilized long-standing patterns of criminal control over territories and markets, sparking a brutal struggle for power by splintering criminal entities and the state.
Cartels have fought other cartels, the state has fought some cartels but not others, and everyone has engaged in killings and kidnappings, often dumping the bodies in clandestine graves. Increasingly, the killers and kidnappers use grisly methods to defy attempts at identifying the corpses.
The scourge of disappearances has not been distributed evenly across the Mexican landscape. In total numbers, as seen in the graph below, the largest number of missing persons reported to Mexico's National Search Commission were in the states of Jalisco (13,390 victims), Tamaulipas (11,278), and the state of Mexico (7,031).
Raw numbers can mislead, however, as Mexican states vary dramatically by population, as is true for most countries.
To adjust for demographics, I divided the annual number of disappearances in each Mexican state from 2006 to 2023 by the state's population in 2015, the period's midpoint. There are more precise ways of doing this, but this method provides a useful, back-of-the-envelope estimate.
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 another border state, Tamaulipas (18.2), and the country's capital, Mexico City (10.7). The least hard-hit states were Campeche (0.5), Hidalgo (0.5), and Tlaxcala (0.6).
Mexico is dangerous: yes. But a lot depends on where you are, just like it does in any other conflict zone.
Today, Gaza is a horror show, but the Israeli town of Mitzpe Ramon located a short drive away, is entirely at peace. And so it goes in every country wracked by violence.
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