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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

as someone who vacations regularly throughout mexico (tijuana, rosarito, mexico city, chihuahua and baja amongst the destinations) i find these sorts of comments silly at best.

there is no "mexican civil war" there was the Cristero, the reform, and the revolutionary war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Civil_War

while organized criminal homicides are rising, it is nowhere near sixty-thousand. it has never been close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war#Casualties

the civilian casualties of the Syrian civil war numbered nearly 230,000 which is nearly quadruple your assessment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil...

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From your second link:

> 227,413 civilians had been killed between March 2011 and June 2022.

That's about 20k a year (assuming an even distribution across the entire conflict, which is probably a bad assumption.)

From your first link, there were 33k organized crime related murders in Mexico in 2021.

Probably both of these should be adjusted per capita (Mexico has ~6x the population of Syria), but in absolute numbers they seem to be in the same ballpark.

Gave you an upvote as your sources mostly confirm that Mexico is the worst war zone in the world. I may have the figures off, but, in 2016, at the height of the Syrian war, Mexico was second place to Syria[0]. Problem is, Mexico aren't counting missing people, and there A TON of missing persons, hundreds of thousands of them.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/mexico-deadly-...

The first line in your link says: It is often not clear what deaths are part of the Mexican drug war versus general criminal homicides, and different sources give different estimates. Which should be a clue that the actual casualties are very plausibly higher than those officially attributed to organized crime.

The total Mexican murder rate listed Wikipedia is 36,579/year. Given Mexico once had a fairly low murder rate, attributing much of this to organized crime seems plausible. Not 60k/year but the violence has gone up and down. Moreover, the "rate of disappearance" is substantial and I believe disappearances aren't counted as official murders of any sort.

And my point would be that all this is unknown. Given the cartels have corrupted and subverted local authorities and that their murders are kept as secret as they can manage, glib certainty about the extent of cartel murders seems unwarranted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

As someone who lives in Mexico since over a decade ago, and well outside the tourist bubbles, I'd say that your personal view of the situation is ridiculously rose-tinted. The violence isn't plainly visible as it's been in Syria, for example, but it's very real and vastly destructive. Not to mention the amount of homicide that goes unreported and the disappearances that likewise don't get reported. Furthermore, your own sources actually do more to back up the argument you're rejecting than to prove your own claim.

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