Data on crude monthly municipal-level homicide rates is available in mexico-muni-month-homicide-rates-2000-2022.csv; state-level aggregations are available in mexico-state-month-homicide-rates-2000-2022.csv. Note that both files use | as the separator.
If you use R you can use readr package to load the file and specify the separator with readr::read_delim("PATH_TO_FILE", delim = "|")
The code to reproduce the homicide rate calculations is in the code subdirectory and divided into three groups of tasks: census-data, deaths-data, and homicide-rates. The census-data and deaths-data tasks assume that the requisite data is in a top-level directory called data.
To replicate the results, first run the import sub-task within the census-data task using the Makefile in the census-data/import directory. This task reads in data from the 2000, 2010, and 2020 censuses, extracts municipal-level population counts, and verifies that they sum to the total population. This task expects three census data files from INEGI in a sub-directory called census within the top-level data directory. The files are:
- cgpv2000_iter_00.csv, retreived from https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/ccpv/2000/#Datos_abiertos (download data for "Estados Unidos Mexicanos")
- iter_00_cpv2010.csv, retreived from https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/ccpv/2010/#Datos_abiertos (download data for "Estados Unidos Mexicanos")
- conjunto_de_datos_iter_00CSV20.csv, retreived from https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/ccpv/2020/#Datos_abiertos (download data for "Estados Unidos Mexicanos")
Next run the interpolate sub-task within the census-task using the Makefile in the census-data/interpolate directory. This task uses the population counts from the import sub-task to linearly interpolate mid-year (1 July) population counts for each municipality from 2000-2022.
After running both sub-tasks in the census-data task, run the sub-tasks in the deaths-data directory. Again, this task begins with an import sub-task, which you can run using the Makefile. This task reads in death certificate files published in .dbf format by INEGI and writes their contents to .csv files. This task expects death certificate files from 2000-2022 in a sub-directory called death-certificates within the top-level data directory. These files can be downloaded from https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/mortalidad/#Microdatos.
Next, run the homicide-counts sub-task using the Makefile. This task uses the death certificate files imported in the deaths-data/import task to generate counts of homicide deaths in each municipality in each month from January 2000-December 2022. The cause of death classification file, found in the hand subdirectory follows the cause of death classification scheme used by Elo, Beltrán-Sánchez and Macinko (2014). Note that deaths that occurred outside of Mexico and deaths that were missing cause of death, country of occurrence, or municipality of occurrence were excluded from these calculations. We also opted to use data from the location where the death occurred rather than the location where the individual was from because this information was more complete for homicides. One day we might impute this information and recalculate the counts accordingly.
Finally, run the top-level homicide-rates task to calculate the monthly municipal-level crude homicide rates for January 2000-December 2022.
If you use this data please use the BibTeX entry below or see the OSF repository for other citation formats:
@misc{Gargiulo_Aburto_Floridi_2023,
title={Monthly municipal-level homicide rates in Mexico (January 2000–December 2022)},
url={osf.io/u8dc3},
DOI={10.17605/OSF.IO/U8DC3},
publisher={OSF},
author={Gargiulo, Maria and Aburto, José Manuel and Floridi, Ginevra},
year={2024},
month={March}
}