On May 15th, the NYT reported the latest in a series of reports from Mexico on drug violence:
Couples were walking hand in hand. Children were frolicking. Just down the road in this northern Mexican town, 49 bodies, headless with their hands and feet severed, had been found, then cleared away.
If you pay attention at all to reporting of goings on south of the border you would imagine one giant mass of headless bodies. And those still alive being kidnapped.
And yet…
According to a large scale study more Mexicans currently living in the United States are returning to Mexico than Mexicans currently in Mexico coming legally or illegally to the United States. Why? Because the Mexican economy is stronger than ours. Jobs are more plentiful. A minor glitch is that many of the Mexicans returning home don’t speak Spanish since they were born here.
The drug war is real. There have been over 47,000 drug-related murders alone in the past five years. Its murder rate – 18 per 100,000 according to this United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime report – is more than three times the US rate of 4.8 per 100,000. But it’s happening between the combatants fighting for territory as the Mexican government cracks down on the border territories where each gang has a territory (don’t get me started on why all this violence is really our fault since the drugs are coming to feed United States demand all because we have an irrational drug policy).
The killings are brutal but they are all about business, not random acts of violence. Tony Soprano isn’t going to walk up to some vacationer in his hood and put a bullet in him. But if you were to attempt to interrupt his financial mechanisms, he would most certainly enforce his will with the use of violence. Multiple that times a thousand and you begin to understand what is going on in very localized areas of Mexico where the drug trade occurs (another misunderstanding is the belief that the drug trade occurs throughout the huge geography of Mexico rather than a very small percentage of the country).
As a result if you are American the chances of somehow getting exposed to violence in Mexico are very slim. According to FBI crime statistics, 4.8 Americans per 100,000 were murdered in the US in 2010. The US State Department reports that 120 Americans of the 5.7 million who visited Mexico last year were murdered, which is a rate of 2.1 of 100,000 visitors. Regardless of whether they were or weren’t connected to drug trafficking, which is often not clear, it’s less than half the US national rate.
The gateway to Disney World, Orlando, saw 7.5 murders per 100,000 residents in 2010 per the FBI; this is higher than Cancun or Puerto Vallarta, with rates of 1.83 and 5.9 respectively, per a Stanford University report (see data visualization here, summarized on this chart, page 21). Yet in March, the Texas Department of Public Safety advised against ‘spring break’ travel anywhere in Mexico, a country the size of the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined.
Looking at the numbers, it might be wise for Texans to ignore their Public Safety department’s advice against Mexico travel. Five per 100,000 Texans were homicide victims in 2010, per the FBI. Houston was worse, with 143 murders, or a rate of 6.8 – over three times the rate for Americans in Mexico.
As usual, when all you do is read the headlines in the US press you get a very skewed view of reality. Is violence between warring drug gangs in Mexico a problem resulting in horrific violence? Of course. But there is a heck of a lot more to the story than that.
Lies, damned lies and statistics…
So it goes…
I see another problem with what you did, Tom. You compared the US rate as a whole (which includes drug related murders) to only drug related murders in Mexico. Think about it this way: I live in Baltimore. Consistently ranked in the top 5 -usually second place- of the most violent cities in the USA. Of the 200 and some odd homicides last year in a city of 600 thousand, 90 plus percent where young black males involved in the drug trade. The murder rate for black males not in the drug trade was far less , as was the… Read more »
Clarence I agree. I guess the point then is that if you are involved in the drug trade here or there you are a heck of a lot more likely to get killed. So don’t be black, brown, or poor.
I live in Chicago area … I don’t need to tell you about where it’s ranked with gang violence. I’d vacation in Mexico in a heartbeat. Mexico depends on people vacationing, it makes sense that they pump up their security. And with any vacation spot, ya need to know where you’re going and not go too far off the beaten path. I leaned that when I would go to New York on a regular basis.
But your right, the media puts out what they want, what will sell.
“The US State Department reports that 120 Americans of the 5.7 million who visited Mexico last year were murdered, which is a rate of 2.1 of 100,000 visitors.” The link provided in the text above is the same as the previous link, for the overall U.S. murder rate. Could you provide the link about number of US visitors to Mexico and murders of same? Also, while I’m sympathetic to the story (I believe USians on average have a wildly inaccurate impression of Mexico) murder rates for residents and visitors seem really incomparable. Visitors might be in Mexico (or whatever jurisdiction… Read more »
Mike I updated the link but here it is on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/10/travel/mexico-travel-warning/
You are right about the data on full year residents rather than visitors though I can’t find data on that broken out anywhere. If you have it let me know.
Thanks for the link. It doesn’t really support the points made in your column. In addition to the visitors/residents issue I noted, the article says number of murders of US visitors increased from 35 in 2007 to 120 in 2011. That’s pretty bad. I put at least half the blame on the US led drug war. http://travel.state.gov/law/family_issues/death/death_600.html is a database of US traveler deaths from “non-natural causes” in each jurisdiction that I imagine would be a starting place. Of course to do a proper comparison, one would need to know not only number of visitors, but also something about variation… Read more »
This is so interesting. I’m definitely one of those who was under the impression that things in Mexico these days were bad in a more generalized way. I visited Oaxaca years ago and I had kind of felt like it was somewhere Americans just couldn’t go now. But that Stanford map suggests that’s really not the case.