This week preliminary homicide data for the first half of 2021 was released by Mexico’s National Institute on Geography and Statistics (INEGI per its Spanish acronym). Right of the bat, the data appears promising: the national homicide rate is down compared to the same period of 2020. As a Mexican, I want to be optimistic. As a Mexican social scientist, I know to be cautiously optimistic.
Reasons for my cautious optimism abound. We have been here before. If we look at the data for 2014 and 2015, the homicide rate in Mexico reduced to 17 per 100,000 after reaching a peak of 24 per 100,000 in 2011. To this day, we have yet to reach consensus on why homicides declined in that period only to increase in subsequent years reaching a rate of 29 per 100,000 in 2020. Therefore, while preliminary data may show a decline in 2021, we are still well above the sub-10 rate of the mid-2000s and well above the global average of 6 per 100,000.
My optimism is also tempered considering we cannot analyze homicides data in a vacuum. The lessons of Nayarit state during governor Roberto Sandoval’s administration (2011-2017) are clear: homicides statistics can decrease because criminal and state actors, either on collusion or independently, forcibly disappear people. In light of our forensic crisis, it would be naïve, not to say negligent, to ignore data on disappearances and zero in on homicides as the only piece of evidence for determining if we are faring better. In her last hearing at the Senate in 2021, Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission declared that as of October 4th there were 92,794 officially missing people. This is to say that celebrations of decreasing homicides are premature and misguided as long as we fail to account for the almost 100,000 who have yet to returned home.
Equally important, as my colleague Paul Frissard pointed out, when we look at the disaggregated data by sex, homicides did not decrease for women. This only highlights the urgency of mainstreaming gender into discussions of violence. Not as a “separate” women’s issue but as the means to having adequate representation for effective policy making. After all, if we are interested in having an honest conversation on the state of lethal violence in the country, we can’t talk about an average homicide rate that invisibilizes half of the population is getting killed at the same rate than last year.
Do I hope the homicide rate in Mexico continues to decrease? Absolutely. Do I think we should temper our enthusiasm around the recently released data? Evidence strongly suggests we do.
* Cecilia Farfán Méndez is head of Security Research Programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Twitter: @farfan_cc
