Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This is the tenth edition of the Mexico Peace Index (MPI), produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). It provides a comprehensive measure of peacefulness in Mexico, including trends, analysis and estimates of the economic impact of violence in the country. The MPI is based on the Global Peace Index, the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness, produced by IEP every year since 2007. The MPI consists of 12 sub-indicators aggregated into five broader indicators.
Mexico’s peacefulness improved by 0.9 percent in 2022. This was the third straight year of improvement following four consecutive years of deteriorations. Seventeen states improved, while 15 deteriorated.
Last year was marked by continuing shifts in Mexico’s organized criminal landscape. The market for illicit marijuana in the United States continued to decline, leading to a growing reliance on other forms of organized crime, including extortion, domestic retail drug sales, and the manufacture and trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Against this backdrop, there has been increased competition in recent years between organized crime groups. This is especially the case for the country’s two most powerful cartels, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel, who are in conflict over critical distribution routes to the United States as well as control of local rackets. According to data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 4,890 casualties resulted from their conflict alone in 2021.
In 2022, three of the five indicators in the MPI improved. Most notably, homicide experienced its largest improvement in the last eight years, with its rate dropping by 7.9 percent. As organized criminal groups have driven the changes in the homicide rate since at least 2015, it is likely that last year’s drop was associated with a decline in organized crime-related homicides. The homicide rate fell to 24.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022, its lowest level since 2017. This fall marks the third straight year of improvement for homicide following steep increases between 2015 and 2019. Despite this, homicides continue to be widespread in Mexico, with more than 30,000 victims each year since 2018.
Both the firearms crime and detention without sentence indicators improved. The rate of firearms crime has been decreasing annually since it peaked in 2019. In 2022, the rate declined by 5.5 percent. Similarly, the score for detention without a sentence improved slightly, by 2.8 percent. In 2022, there were about 78,000 unsentenced detainees, compared to approximately 79,000 in 2021.
Despite improvements over the past three years, Mexico was substantially less peaceful in 2022 than in 2015. In that time, peace in Mexico has deteriorated by 14.8 percent, with many crime indicators significantly higher than they were eight years prior. The homicide rate, for example, was 62.6 percent higher in 2022 than in 2015, while the firearms crime rate was 68.3 percent higher.
Two MPI indicators deteriorated in 2022: violent crime and organized crime. Last year, the violent crime rate increased by three percent, which was driven by increases in three out of its four subindicators. The rates of sexual assault, family violence and assault registered deteriorations. In the past eight years, the violent crime sub-indicators have followed divergent patterns. Assault and robbery rates have not varied more than 35 percent from their 2015 levels. However, the rates of reported family violence and sexual assault have increased each year, with both rates more than doubling over the period. It is difficult to know whether the underlying rate has increased or if heightened awareness of family violence and sexual assault has contributed to these crimes being reported more frequently.
In 2022, the organized crime rate reached its highest recorded level, with 167 crimes per 100,000 people. Deteriorations were driven by increases in the rates of extortion and retail drug crimes, which rose by 14.9 and 4.1 percent, respectively. The rate of kidnapping and human trafficking also registered a slight increase of 2.2 percent in 2022, after it had more than halved between 2015 and 2021. In contrast, the rate of major organized crime offenses, which include federal drug trafficking violations, fell by 15.3 percent.
Organized criminal activity has continued to be the main driver of homicides and gun violence in Mexico. Recent estimates of the proportion of homicides associated with organized crime have ranged from 68 to 80 percent, up from approximately 44 percent in 2015.
This means that, over the past eight years, the annual number of organized crime-related homicides rose from about 8,000 to more than 23,500, while the number not linked to organized crime stayed roughly the same. In 2022, the states with the highest homicide rates were Colima, Zacatecas, Baja California, Morelos and Sonora. In Colima, the epicenter of the violence shifted from the port city of Manzanillo to the inland capital of Colima City. The upsurge of violence in the capital occurred after the dissolution of an alliance between two criminal groups.
Colima ranked as the country’s least peaceful state, followed by Zacatecas, Baja California, Guanajuato and Morelos. Last year, Colima recorded both the worst overall score and the highest homicide rate of any state in the history of the MPI. It had a homicide rate of 110 per 100,000 people.
In contrast, Yucatán was once again the most peaceful state in Mexico, followed by Tlaxcala, Chiapas, Tamaulipas and Nayarit. Reflecting the great divergence in violence levels across the country, the average homicide rate in the most peaceful states was 9.2 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to an average rate of 74.6 in the least peaceful states.
In 2022, the largest improvements in peacefulness occurred in Chihuahua, Sonora, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí and Durango. In contrast, Colima, Nuevo León, Campeche, Hidalgo and the State of México recorded the largest deteriorations.
Violence against security forces, journalists and social activists in Mexico has been on the rise in recent years. In 2022, a total of 403 police officers were killed, with Zacatecas being the deadliest state for police. Last year also witnessed the killing of 13 journalists, making Mexico the second most deadly country for journalists, behind only Ukraine.
This number is the highest on record in Mexico and represents nearly 20 percent of the global total. Further, a 2022 study found that there has been an increasing number of environmental activists killed in Mexico over the past decade, with a record 54 killed in 2021.
In the past eight years, guns have become the primary cause of homicide for both men and women in Mexico. Between 2015 and 2022, the proportion of male homicides committed with a firearm rose from 60.9 percent to 71.9 percent, while the proportion used in female homicides – including the gender-based killings of women known as femicides – from 37.8 percent to 59.7 percent.
In 2022, the economic impact of violence in Mexico was estimated to be 4.6 trillion pesos (US$230 billion), equivalent to 18.3 percent of Mexico’s GDP. On a per capita basis, the economic impact of violence was 35,705 pesos, more than twice the average monthly salary of a Mexican worker. The economic impact of violence improved for the third year in a row in 2022, decreasing by 5.5 percent or 271 billion pesos from the previous year. The decrease in homicides drove the improvement nationwide, as its impact fell by 11 percent or 245 billion pesos.
n 2022, the Mexican government reduced spending on domestic security and the military, by 6.6 and 8.6 percent, respectively, which also contributed to the lowered overall impact. Spending on the justice system decreased, but only marginally, by 0.5 percent. Mexico’s spending on its criminal justice system was equivalent to 0.6 percent of GDP, which is the least of any Latin American country or member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 2022, spending on domestic security was lower than it was in 2008. Furthermore, spending on domestic security decreased by 29.7 percent from 2019 to 2022, while spending on the justice system decreased by 14.6 percent in the same period.
To tackle crime and violence more effectively, Mexico’s judicial system is especially in need of increased investment. The country has an average of 4.4 judges and magistrates per 100,000 people, one-fourth the global average. This has resulted in backlogs of unsolved cases and large numbers of people incarcerated without being sentenced. Strengthening the judiciary is of particular importance for combatting Mexico’s high levels of impunity.
Mexico’s socio-economic resilience, as measured by its Positive Peace Index (PPI) score, has deteriorated by 3.1 percent since 2009. This contrasts with an average improvement of 1.2 percent for the wider Central America and the Caribbean region. Positive Peace is a measure of the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. At the national level, Mexico’s deterioration since 2009 has been mostly driven by deteriorations in four Pillars of Positive Peace: WellFunctioning Government, Low Levels of Corruption, High Levels of Human Capital and Sound Business Environment. At the state level, high levels of corruption and poor governance are statistically related to crime and violence.
Effective peacebuilding strategies require a full understanding of the system dynamics associated with organized crime, policing, judicial processes, government decision-making, budgeting, corruption and more. IEP has developed a product known as Halo, which provides a 24-step, building-block approach to analyzing societal systems. This and other system mapping tools could be used to better understand how various social ills interact and to identify entry points to improve peacefulness in Mexico.