The recent escalation of violence in Jalisco has resulted in the state surpassing the entire United States in the number of mass killings it has registered in recent years.
Since 2018, and until last March, in Jalisco, there were a total of 776 victims of massacres, such as multi-homicides, while in the same period, the US reported 736 victims, according to statistics gathered by academics from the University of Guadalajara” (UdeG) Department of Sociology, and the University Committee for the Analysis of the Disappearance of Persons.
In addition, the figures revealed that the rate of massacre victims per million inhabitants in Jalisco in 2020 was 41 times higher than the rate in the US, which was 0.56 victims per million inhabitants. In Jalisco, it was 23.4 victims per million.
“These massacres are the visible face of the mass murders that are taking place in Jalisco. The invisible face are the kidnappings motivated by the desire to end people’s lives. The origin of this violence is an open war between criminal organizations that are using any resource to achieve their purpose, including murdering innocent people as a means of signaling their brutality,” said Carmen Chinas Salazar, an academic at UdeG.
For her, there is solid evidence that the increase in violence against innocent people is a strategy of criminals to “heat up the plaza,” as happened, for example, in the murder of the 11 people that occurred in La Jauja, Tonalá, in February.
In addition, she said, the number of kidnapped people that has been on the rise in recent years is likely related to the recruitment of people to cartels. Kidnapped people are often given a choice of either working for the cartel or being killed.