The recent escalation of violence in Jalisco has led the entity to surpass 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 United States reported 736 victims, according to statistics gathered by academics from the University of Guadalajara (UdeG) belonging to the 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 was, during 2020, 41 times higher than the rate in the United States, which was 0.56 victims per million inhabitants, in Jalisco, it was 23.4 victims.
“These massacres are the visible face of the mass murders that are taking place in Jalisco, the hidden face are the disappearances 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 square”, as happened, for example, in the murder of the 11 people that occurred in La Jauja, Tonalá, in last February.
In addition, she said, the number of disappeared that has been on the rise in recent years is likely related to the recruitment of people to cartels.
