Publications by Diego Valle-Jones
How the expiration of the assault weapon ban affected Mexico
There has been a lot of attention paid to the role of US guns exacerbating the violence in Mexico. The assault-weapon ban expired on September 14, 2004, but with the recent spiraling of violence in Mexico the ban has attracted renewed attention. Just recently the Mexican President stood before the American Congress and blamed the ass...
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The 2009 homicide data for Chihuahua has been updated
As I described in this post, the reported number of homicides[1] in Chihuahua during 2009 turned out to be incomplete. Guess what? The SNSP just released [xls file] an updated version of the homicide data, and Chihuahua went from having 2,523 homicides to 3,156. My estimate was 3,256, so I came pretty close. And the homicide rate for ...
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The dead of Juarez
Ciudad Juárez became the most violent city in Mexico as a consequence of the vicious war between the Juárez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. So far more than 6,500 people have been murdered in this city since the war started. With the Juárez Cartel significantly weakened, 2010 is set to be the most violent year yet… Here are some ...
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Mapping drug war related homicides in 2010
There have been some very good visualizations of the Wikileaks data so I decided to create one of the drug war in Mexico The above map was made using data collected by Walter McKay, mainly from El Universal and El Diario reports. The data is stored as a Google Map and is already structured to include the number of deaths. That saved...
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Recent developments in the drug war
The Mexican government recently released data on all crime statistics from January 1997 to October 2010, as reported by the various police forces operating in Mexico. This information provides an unprecedented look at what has happened since the drug war began and allows for a frank assessment of the deterioration of security in Mexico. For some...
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Some problems with the Mexican mortality database
I’ve written before about how I couldn’t find the Acteal Massacre in the homicide database available at the INEGI. So I decided to check if the deaths that occurred as a consequence of the massacre were misclassified as other types of violent death, and indeed they were. In the municipality of Chenalhó, where the massacre occurr...
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Homicides in Mexico 2006-2009
Just today the Mexican government released to the public the mortality database for 2009, and as you can see from the chart Mexico has suffered from a steep rise in homicides from 2008 onward and very likely reached the highest violence rate in recent history last year. Since the Mexican government also recently made available a database of homic...
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Homicides in Mexico 2010
Recently the Mexican government released to the public the final homicide data for 2010, and as you can see from the chart Mexico has suffered from a steep rise in homicides since 2008, and in 2010 reached the highest homicide rate in recent history. The Mexican government had actually released preliminary homicide data a couple of months ago, ...
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Express Divorce in Mexico
On October 2008 Mexico’s capital, the Federal District, approved a version of no-fault divorce locally known as “express divorce”. With the new law the requesting spouse no longer had to provide a cause to dissolve the marriage and the couple no longer had to live apart before filing for divorce. Furthermore, the process of determining chil...
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Proportion of marriages ending in divorce
Over the last two decades families in Mexico have undergone rapid social changes. The proportion of marriages ending in divorce has risen for each cohort since data became available, this is independant of the recently approved express divorce law in the Federal District. Looking at the the period during which marriages are more likely to end in...
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