In the 2019 ranking of the 50 most violent cities in the world, for the third consecutive year, a Mexican town is the most violent in the world.
MEXICO CITY (CCPSCJ) – Mexico has 19 of the 50 most violent cities in the world. According to a study by the “Citizens’ Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice,” the Mexican cities with the most homicides are Tijuana; Ciudad Juarez; Uruapan; Irapuato; Ciudad Obregon; Acapulco and Ensenada, among others.
During a video conference, José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, president of the Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, said that “Mexico is the world epicenter of violence.”
While presenting the 2019 ranking of the 50 most violent cities in the world, he said that for the third consecutive year, a Mexican town is the most brutal. Tijuana is number one on a list of 50 cities of more than 300,000 inhabitants with the highest homicide rates in the world.
“We are making this ranking intending to call attention to urban violence, particularly in Latin America, so those in power are pressured to fulfill their duty to protect the governed, to guarantee their right to public safety,” said Ortega.
The five most violent cities in the world were all Mexican: Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Uruapan, Irapuato, and Ciudad Obregón. The country had 19 of the 50 cities with the most homicides registered in the entire world.
“Almost 40% of all the most violent cities in the world are Mexican. Only in 2016, Brazil reached such a figure of the most violent cities in the world. Certainly, the cities of Tepic and Coatzacoalcos came out of the ranking. Still, in their place came Cuernavaca (a re-entry, since it had come out in 2015), Guadalajara, León, Morelia, and Zacatecas,” he said.
He said Tijuana has a rate of 134 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Followed by Ciudad Juarez with a rate of 104.54; Uruapan with 85.54; Irapuato 80.74; Obregon with 80.72; Caracas, Venezuela, with 74.65; Acapulco, Guerrero, with 71.61; Cape Town, South Africa, with 68.28; Saint Louis, United States; 64.54 and Victoria in Brazil, with a rate of 60.01 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
The ranking also included the Mexican cities of Victoria, Tamaulipas, Cancún, Quintana Roo; Culiacán, Sinaloa; Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz; Celaya, Guanajuato; Tepic, Nayarit; Reynosa, Tamaulipas; and Chihuahua, among others,
José Antonio Ortega said that there is a criminal information system of the National Public Security System (SNSP) in Mexico that presents data disaggregated by state and municipality for more than 60 types of crimes, including intentional homicides and modalities of the crimes. “The problem is that the information does not refer in most cases to homicides (i.e., the number of victims) but to the investigation files that for that crime are opened from criminal events in which there may be more than one victim.
He considered that the anti-crime policy followed by the federal governments before the current one “were extremely incompetent in controlling violence, but at least it seemed that they were trying to stop the violent ones.”
He added that the policy of the current federal government “is much worse than the policies of previous governments, resulting in unprecedented levels of violence. The central problem is that this government, while treating criminals as victims, is hostile to the real victims.
