Located along priceless drug trafficking routes, this city reported more than 600 murders in 2022, making it the deadliest city in the world.
Mexico secured nine of the ten top positions on the list of cities with the highest murder rates in the world, excluding those not at war, and with a population of at least 300,000 people. New Orleans in the US was the only non-Mexican city and took eighth place.
This list is based on 2022 data from The Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, an advocacy group based in Mexico City. Other cities were Zamora, Tijuana and Celaya.
However, the top spot was claimed by Colima – officially known as the Free and Sovereign State of Colima – Mexico's fourth smallest state and home to the country's smallest population.
It was once considered one of Mexico's safest and most sought-after vacation destinations and is said to have one of the highest living standards and lowest employment rates. However, it is the most dangerous city in the world. It has the highest murder per capita and one of the highest crime rates overall, as the ports are contested territory for cartels.
It is home to a series of murders of at least a dozen prominent public figures. On June 16, 2020, assassins killed Uriel Villegas Ortiz, a federal judge from Colima, and his wife Verónica Barajas in the state capital of the same name after being shot more than twenty times.
Villegas Ortiz had previously ruled in several cases involving the top leaders of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel, both groups considered Mexico's most feared and powerful. cartels.
Two weeks earlier, authorities discovered the body of Colima Congressman Anel Bueno in an unmarked grave. She had been kidnapped in broad daylight by a group of armed men over a month earlier while participating in an event to promote a new sanitation project during the pandemic.
Colima has topped every list for murders per capita since 2016 and in 2019 the state finished with a murder rate of 97 percent per 100,000 inhabitants. The second highest state, Baja California, received only 80 percent. Subsequently, in 2020, the country recorded more femicides than any other state. The state's homicide rate in 2015 was only a third of what it was in 2020.
Colima was also one of five states responsible for more than 50 percent of the clandestine mass graves excavated during the United States presidency. Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The port city of Manzanillo found itself at the center of the downward spiral in 2016. The city serves as an arrival point for chemical precursors from Asia and as a transit point for drugs heading to the US and the US. Europe, said Mexican journalist and organized crime expert Óscar Balderas. Some of the largest cocaine seizures in Mexican history have taken place in the Pacific port city.
A spike in homicides was subsequently attributed to a power struggle between the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG and Los Zetas over the states' coastal smuggling routes. It also coincided with the internal Sinaloa Cartel unrest in the absence of the central figure – the leader of the organization – once the most wanted man in the Western Hemisphere. This allowed the CJNG to make gains in Colima, according to Balderas.
The result was 206 murders in the first four months of 2016, compared to 44 in the same period last year. Since then the state criminal landscape has become even more divided, creating smaller cells that have resorted to extreme violence in the pursuit of territory and legitimacy.
This fragmentation has coincided with political instability, as Colima has switched political parties in each of the last three presidential elections and has seen eight governors in the past twenty years.