In a study conducted by the “Citizen’s Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice” (CCSPJP), shows Mexico leads the list of the most violent cities in the world, it also shows that Latin America has 42 cities on the list of 50.
In the ranking of the most violent cities in the world, Tijuana has the highest homicide rate, 138.26 per 1,000 inhabitants, with 1,909,424 inhabitants and 2,640 homicides. Acapulco follows, with a rate of 110.5, whose population is 857,883 inhabitants and 948 homicides in 2018.
most violent cities in the world. Photo: El Economista Mexico
Of the six cities at the top of the list, five are Mexican. After Tijuana and Acapulco, the capital city of Venezuela, Caracas and it is followed by Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Irapuato, Guanajuato. All with a rate of more than 80 homicides per year.
According to last year’s data, Mexico displaced Brazil, the country that historically had led the list. While the South American country has presented a reduction in the rate of violence in cities, Mexico maintains a growing trend since 2015 and has not stopped adding cities to the ranking.
The methodology used by the to elaborate this study by the “Citizen’s Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice” (CCSPJP) details that only cities with more than 300 thousand inhabitants were included. However, the CCSPJP warns that other Mexican cities with smaller populations very well may have been part of the ranking because of their high homicide rates. “If the growing trend of violence continues, in coming years cities like Salamanca and Chilpancingo, among others, could also be included”. The CCSPJP expressed.
“They just don’t like the data, they don’t like reality” the CCSPJP says after Tijuana, Juarez, Irapuato and Acapulco discredit the methodology”.
After the publication of the study, on March 12, the governments of the municipalities of Tijuana, Irapuato, and Juárez and the state government of Guerrero (regarding Acapulco) have expressed their rejection of the work and have denied the positions of their cities regarding the study. In a statement, the CCSPJP denounces that they have tried to “discredit” the methodology of data collection.
Irapuato, presented a series of objections. They claim that leaving out cities with less than 300,000 inhabitants represents a “bias”. This parameter, however, was set 10 years ago and allows the transformations to be observed periodically. “A decade ago we could not predict that the governors of the municipality of Irapuato, of the state of Guanajuato or those of the country, would be so negligent, inept and omissive in their obligations as to allow violence to reach the levels at which it has reached in Irapuato,” the council said.
The Irapuato´s case draws special attention since it had never entered the ranking and in 2018 it was the sixth. Another observation of this municipality was that only 11 countries are included “so the related positions do not refer to reality around the world”. The CCSPJP’s response is that the number of countries included, it is not because of a lack of research but because “only in those there were cities with a homicide rate higher than 36.87 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The rejection of this study is growing on the part of state and municipal governments of Mexico and the other countries involved.
Information from: “Citizen’s Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice” (CCSPJP) / El Economista.
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