The Most Dangerous City in the World...

It is the most dangerous city, in the most dangerous region, of the most dangerous country in the entire world. For at least two years it’s had the highest murder rate on planet earth. Every act of depravity, brutality, and violence you can imagine happens right here, on the Mexican streets of Colima. But what is this “murder capital of the world”?

And what is the mysterious reason why no matter what the Mexican government do, the situation just seems to get worse? This isn’t just cartel country; it’s the single most hostile place on earth.

Colima – State, City, Warzone

Colima is both a state of Mexico and the capital city of that state. It sits on the West coast, due West itself from the Mexican capital, Mexico City. I know, very original. It’s one of the smallest states in all of Mexico, with the lowest population of any state in Mexico, and yet, today, it has a reputation for incredible levels of violence unseen anywhere else in Mexico, or actually anywhere in the whole world.

Every few years, charts get published of the deadliest cities in the world based on the murder rate per 100,000 people. Mexican cities always feature, it’s a symptom of having such a huge cartel problem. And for a number of years now, Colima has been up there, and in very recent years, it’s taken top spot. With a murder rate of a staggering 140.32 per 100,000 people in 2024.

The next closest, Cuidad Obregon sits at 117.83. 10th place, the Mexican city of Juarez, has almost half the murder rate of Colima at 77.43. Colima doesn’t just win the “dangerous city” ranking, it simply wipes the floor with its competition and leaves them in the dust.

Even Mexico’s Citizens’ Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice when publishing its 2022 ranking of the world’s 50 most violent cities put Colima at the top, with a staggering rate of 181.94 homicides per 100,000 residents. That same report states that Colima’s murder rate is not dissimilar to the rate in Medellín, Colombia between the late 1980s and early 1990s during the height of Pablo Escobar’s power, when he and his cartel waged a campaign against the state to prevent his extradition to the US. So, when we’re talking about how dangerous Colima is, it’s not just dangerous for 2024. We’re talking about one of the most dangerous places of all time not fighting a war.

And Colima has it all, not just murders. Fraud, robberies, domestic violence, threats, damage to property, drug dealing, burglary, car theft, assaults, money laundering, extortion, arms trafficking, drugs trafficking, human trafficking, kidnap and ransom. I could go on all day, if it’s a crime, it’s happening in Colima.

And yet this is supposed to be just a place like any other. Colima the state and even Colima the city was not always this way. Every Mexican region has its share of organised and violent crime. But in 2006, Colima’s murder rate wasn’t 180 per 100,000 people, it wasn’t 140, it wasn’t 100.

It was five. Just five murders per 100,000 people. The state is a capital of fruit and crop production, a beautiful, diverse vista with reserves containing thousands of species of plants, one third of the bird species in all of Mexico and a full quarter of its mammals. A place of industry where palms are grown for their fibres to make all kinds of items, so much so that “the city of palms” became its nickname.

It has stunning volcanoes, one of which is the most active in all of Mexico, beautiful beaches, mountains, art and culture and people.

And yet today it is defined by criminality, by violence, by murder. Where the only thing more explosive than the volcano on its horizon is the violence on its streets. So that begs the question. What the f*ck happened here? Well to set the scene, we need to go back, and show you a little of the history of Colima. To illustrate how even throughout its history, it has existed parallel to violence, and how that laid the foundations for it all to erupt in the 21st century.

Where the Violence Began

Alright, quick crash course on Colima. The area has been inhabited for a long time. Between 2000 BC and 1000 AD the Otomi, Nahuatl, Tolteca, Chichimeca and Tarasca cultures flourished there. Then it was mostly a group known as the Purépecha from around 1100 to 1530, along with the Colimas Indians who were closely related. But these two tribes were fighting a war against each other at the worst possible time. Because then came the Spanish, I’m sure nobody was expecting them.

At the time, much of West Mexico was under the political control of the Kingdom of Tzintuntzan, which was the second largest and most powerful Mesoamerican Empire. Its influence stretched from the state of Mexico into Guanajuato, around the shores of Lake Chapala and through part of Colima to the Pacific coast. However, this system appeared to allow for some autonomy among regions as King Colimán, the leader of the Colima Indians and the first reference for what the region would eventually be named after, was running things in Colima itself after winning the war against the Purépecha and forcing them south.

Colimán saw the writing on the wall with the arrival of the conquistadors, and he resisted their initial incursion. The indigenous forces won several smaller skirmishes, but in 1523 they lost a decisive battle, and a Spanish settlement was established, known as San Sebastian de Colima, in what is now the city of Colima.

The Spanish would then build roads and infrastructure between Colima and the already established Mexico City. This route would make Colima a vital centre for trading goods and funnelling things like silver back to the Spanish crown, with the port of Manzanillo nearby being particularly useful for carrying goods by sea on Spanish galleons. They could never have known it at the time, but half a millennium later, Manzanillo would still be a vital port for Mexico, and Colima would still be an integral part of moving other kinds of goods throughout the different Mexican states. But we’ll get to that.

Mexican independence was won from the Spanish in 1810 following three centuries of exploitation of the new world. Colima the region was then made a Mexican state in 1857, and it’s from here that we now have to distinguish between both the state and city versions of Colima.

Come 1910, the Mexican Revolution began, which brought political instability to Colima as factions loyal to various revolutionary and anti-revolutionary leaders operated throughout the state vying for control over vital trade routes. In the 1920s, this conflict subsided as the PRI, also known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party came to power, dominating the political landscape in Mexico for the rest of the 20th century. During that time Colima grew, the world became more connected, and the port of Manzanillo became Mexico’s largest on its pacific side, ensuring all manner of goodies could flow in and out from all over the world. By this time, the cartels had established themselves, trafficking drugs from South America to the USA, using Mexico and Colima as a stop-off along the way.

It almost feels like the wheels were put in motion to make Colima a dangerous place hundreds of years ago when the conquistadors arrived on Mexican shores. But lots of what we’ve told you isn’t really much different to the rest of Mexico. So, what makes it such a hostile place today, with the highest murder rate in the entire world?

What makes Colima so Dangerous?

Ok, so really, in the grand scheme of things, Colima the state, and Colima the city, are really no different to many other places in Mexico. But then that begs the question; why does the murder rate the highest in the whole world, and so much higher than in other parts of already dangerous Mexican places? Mexico frequently has upwards of five cities appear in the homicide rate power ranking at any one time, so it appears its more of a Mexico problem than just a Colima one, and yet Colima stands alone.

There has to be a reason why Colima ranks higher. And there is, it’s a complicated mix of factors: from geography; to historical gang policy; to the individuals in the city and state itself; to the United States and its own policy towards drugs. Let’s break it down.

So, if you wanted a short answer for why Colima is so dangerous, the answer is gangs and drugs. There is a simple supply and demand issue here, which when aided by Colima’s geography, makes it a very dangerous place to live. As we know, Colima is near the Western coast, and nearby is the port city of Manzanillo, which as we mentioned, is Mexico’s biggest on its Pacific side.

You can’t talk about Colima and its danger without talking about Manzanillo, the two are joined at the hip like a pair of very violent conjoined twins. Manzanillo by itself ranks fifth on that world murder rate ranking by the way. A highly perilous area in its own right. And why is that? Well, because of what comes into the port there. Drugs.

Or at least, some drugs, but even more importantly, the chemical ingredients for drugs like fentanyl, the current opioid plaguing US streets. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, and 100 times stronger than morphine, making it very easy for opioid users to overdose state side, especially when fentanyl is used to cut other drugs like heroin. Just two milligrams of the stuff can be lethal in a person without a high tolerance.

The ingredients for fentanyl enter Manzanillo from countries like China and India, before they’re synthesised into the drugs we know within Mexico and sent up to the border to sell and make money for the cartels. This is a hugely lucrative operation, the drugs themselves can be made in large batches and sold at an enormous markup. In Philadelphia, one of the most openly brazen drug markets around, a gram of fentanyl can fetch a price of around $25 dollars a pop on the street.

It varies all over the nation, in San Francisco it’s cheaper, in New York City it’s more expensive, but the cartels make their money the whole way up the chain. And an addict has to use on average every three hours to stay well, so that’s a lot of money when you consider how widespread the problem is.

And whilst some of the largest police seizures of things like cocaine have taken place in Manzanillo, the police and armed forces just can’t get the flow of narcotics and their ingredients under control, as it evident by how big the opioid crisis in the US really is right now.

And Manzanillo, as Mexico’s largest pacific-side port is the lynchpin in all of it. Not only do drugs and their ingredients come into Manzanillo from the rest of the world. But Manzanillo also provides whoever has control over it access to the entire global market, where prices can vary wildly from country to country. Let’s take meth as an example.

A gram of meth in the US will cost you, on the low end 20 dollars, on the streets of Australia the same amount can go for around 10 times that price. So having control over Manzanillo doesn’t just give the cartels access to the US market, but the global market. We’re talking dozens of billions of dollars. More money than the average cartel gangbanger could ever hope to see in a real job if they lived a million lifetimes.

So, given all of that, you’d think that the cartels would want to hold onto Manzanillo at all costs, and those who don’t have it, want to control it at all costs. Manzanillo is where it arrives on Mexican shores, but Colima controls access to the port city. So, if you control Colima and the surrounding region, you control the entire supply chain. It’s normal for Mexican cartels to fight over territory, but the sheer financial incentive in Colima and Manzanillo makes the fighting even fiercer and contributes to the brutality on the ground, with everyday citizens caught in the crossfire.

And at present, it’s not just two cartels waging war in Colima to get control of the drug trade. It’s three, which only makes the situation more chaotic. The Sinaloa Cartel, El Chapo’s old buddies, are one. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, are another, renowned for their extreme levels of violence and coordination using things like drones.

The last is Los Zetas, who are known the world over for their brutality, torture, assassinations, extortions, kidnappings, beheadings and just about every awful video you’ve ever seen on the internet. At present the CJNG hold Colima and Manzanillo, and so are the ones benefitting from the inflow and outflow of narcotics and cash.

But Manzanillo and Colima aren’t new places, these supply chains have existed for a long time, as have the massive financial incentives. It’s not like the cartels just realised how important a global drug supply network was last week, so what can explain the recent rise in Colima’s murder rate?

Well fentanyl, is a relatively new phenomenon and with the level of its production more than doubling since 2016, there’s more money to be made than ever, and this no doubt has contributed to the violence. Similarly, the Sinaloa Cartel used to hold large parts of Colima, but after El Chapo became a permanent guest of Uncle Sam in the late 2010s, it prompted a turf war for control that the CJNG at present is winning. But that’s not all.

We need to understand how the Mexican state’s policies have escalated the conditions for the cartels to thrive, which has further fuelled the cycle of brutality in Colima. And to do that, we need to travel back to 2006.

Cartel Policy – A Mexican Standoff

Mexico has had a drug and cartel problem for a very long time. So, it makes sense that a lot of different strategies have been tried to attempt to solve it once and for all. In 2006, the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, declared war on the cartels, bringing out a coalition of countries backing the military to try and tackle the cartel problem with an unbelievable show of force.

Drug lords were detained, and it appeared to be successful on the surface, but it actually didn’t lower the murder rate at all. This policy was continued all the way through to 2018 and the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, where the new president would bring a controversial “strategy for peace”, which included giving amnesty to drug traffickers and producers. The idea was to stop lower-income individuals like farmers from turning to the drug game. The administration even started turning a blind eye to cartel activity to bring the level of violence down, all but abandoning some areas so much that the cartels themselves actually started to set up social services and run things.

In 2019, Obrador would declare the war “over” with as much confidence as George W. Bush that one time when proclaiming “mission accomplished” in Iraq. But the murder rate still did not decrease. By 2022, Obrador’s last year in office, defence spending was through the roof; and despite wanting the military back in the barracks, more armed soldiers were on the streets than ever enforcing this “non-aggression pact”.

It just didn’t work. And now in 2024 under President Claudia Sheinbaum, the idea that the war was ever really over has been cast aside, and a new approach is taking shape.

The key issue was that there was seemingly little understanding of how the policies of multiple administrations would lead into each other and affect the cartels. On the face of it, a fully militarised response from the Mexican armed forces and other nations is a good policy to tackle an endemic and enormous cartel problem. Cut the head off the snake, and the body will die. After all, the majority of cartel leaders in 2006 that the Mexican government sought out have since been incarcerated.

But this wasn’t a snake, it was a hydra. And for every head you cut off, three more popped up to replace them. Once fragmented, new groups rose out of the old ones to take over, because the root cause hadn’t been addressed, the poverty that turned everyday people towards a life of crime. In fact, the fragmentation of the cartels into smaller groups vying for local control hurt local governments and across the nation, the murder rate actually went up.

Remember in 2006 when the war started, Colima’s murder rate was just five per 100,000 people.

And on the face of it, a “hugs, not bullets” strategy to address the root issues leading to the rise of the cartels in the first place was also a smart strategy to pull the weed out by the roots. But the Mexican government had just spent over a decade fighting the cartels, who were now battle-hardened, organised, fragmented and fiercely protective over their local areas. So, when the Mexican government took their foot off the cartel’s necks, what did they expect to happen? It gave already entrenched criminal elements de facto control over territories, whilst completely failing to meaningfully quell any illicit activity.

Both of these strategies in isolation might have worked. It’s well known that outreach programs over extended periods do decrease the conditions that turn people towards gangs. And look at somewhere like El Salvador and their response to rapidly crackdown on gangs following the election of President Bukele, their murder rate plummeted with the militaristic approach. But together, and in the order that they were done, first turned the cartels even more violent and brutal through the war, and then just left them to it.

And that’s become a fatal mistake for the people across Mexico.

But why am I telling you this? What has this got to do with Colima?

Well Colima is at the heart of the problem. The drugs. They provide the wealth that people push for when they turn to the gang lifestyle to get out of poverty. And these issues have come home to roost in Colima, where the violence and murder rate is now the highest in the entire world.

It represents the very pinnacle of the issues that the Mexican government has failed to solve. A set of fragmented new generation cartels that are more organised, more brutal, have more control, and greater capabilities than ever, all fighting over a territory that would be their most lucrative by a landslide. All the while, the people are poor and have limited opportunities to drag themselves out of poverty.

And in Colima itself, this strategy of a brutal fragmenting campaign, followed by standing off, has predictably led to more violence. Colima has been home to a series of assassinations of at least a dozen high-profile public figures. On 16th June 2020, hitmen killed Uriel Villegas Ortiz, a Colima federal judge, and his wife, Verónica Barajas, in the state’s capital city. They were both shot more than 20 times.

And Colima was also one of the five states that accounted for more than 50 percent of clandestine mass graves exhumed during Obrador’s presidency. The state’s 2015 murder rate was a full one third of what it was by 2020. And it’s remained top of Mexico’s murder rate ranking since 2016. Mexico’s policies have failed Colima.

And the police are not meaningfully helping matters. Mexican police in certain areas are often completely outnumbered by cartel members. In some cases, they’re also outgunned. Some are paid to look the other way, and those who aren’t corrupt are still underpaid and afraid of the immense power and resources the cartels have.

How else could such important figures like federal judges, who prosecute cartel members, be disappeared in broad daylight only to be found in a shallow countryside grave a month later? It’s why the military has been called in so often to do the police’s job.

As you can see this whole thing is messy, it’s embedded, and there is no easy answer. So, what can be done? Just how can Colima return to the beautiful and relatively peaceful place it used to be?

Colima’s Future – A new Approach?

Under a new president, Mexico is trying once again. Except this time, there could be reason to believe things might be different.

And that reason is that the US and Mexico are at least talking about the problem more openly. Sheinbaum is engaging directly with President Trump on the cartels, and whilst they push back on each other a lot, and threaten each other with tariffs and more, both sides want the same thing. Trump wants the flow of fentanyl over the border squashed. Sheinbaum wants to take the cartel’s power away.

Doing the latter will help the former, and so with any luck, the Mexican troops recently deployed to the US border will encourage the US to help with Mexico’s problem. Despite the media being told to expect more of the same “hugs, not bullets” approach, Sheinbaum has overseen the most substantial military deployment in over six years. Is this something new? Or is it just Calderon’s old policy dressed up for 2025?

We will have to wait and see.

But we have to remember that this whole mess is not just Mexico and the US’s problem. This is a global problem. The ingredients come from China and India, other drugs like Cocaine come from Colombia and other areas of South America, whilst Europe also has a big drug supply problem.

So, the only way to quell Mexico’s massive cartel problem will be in a coordinated international effort, and Colima, as well as the port at Manzanillo, is at the heart of it all. More needs to be done to make sure ingredients for drugs are not coming onto Mexico’s shores, if the Mexican government can take back control over what enters through Manzanillo, it will go a long way to eliminating the cartels.

But that means a lot of things. It means tackling the cartels head on, it means confronting China, India and any other nation pouring fuel the fire. It means a coordinated international approach across South America to stop drugs getting up into Mexico in the first place, as well as the weapons cartels use that come from the US side of the border. It means local outreach, and addressing poverty in Mexico for young people, and ensuring citizens don’t feel like they have to fall into crime to make something of their lives.

And that’s a lot easier said than done. But it’s not impossible. Perhaps radical new ideas, or old ideas presented in new radical ways, will one day lead to a solution that will free Colima from the clutches of the cartels once and for all.

One thing’s for sure, if one day, Colima is no longer number one on that list, something has been done right. But until then, this Mexican standoff will only get worse. And the only ones who win are the sicarios.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the murder rate in Colima?

Colima has a murder rate of 140.32 per 100,000 people in 2024.

What makes Colima the most dangerous city in the world?

Colima is the most dangerous city due to its high levels of violence, including murders, fraud, robberies, drug dealing, and other crimes, driven by cartel activity and the strategic importance of the nearby port of Manzanillo.

What is the historical context of violence in Colima?

Colima has a history of violence dating back to pre-colonial times, with conflicts between indigenous tribes and later with Spanish conquistadors. The region’s strategic importance for trade and drug trafficking has exacerbated modern violence.

What role does the port of Manzanillo play in Colima’s violence?

The port of Manzanillo is crucial for the inflow and outflow of drugs and their ingredients, making it a highly contested area. Control over Manzanillo and Colima gives cartels access to the global drug market, fueling violence and murder rates.

What are the main cartels operating in Colima?

The main cartels operating in Colima are the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), and Los Zetas. These groups are fighting for control over the lucrative drug trade routes.

How have Mexican government policies affected the violence in Colima?

Mexican government policies, including militarized responses and amnesty programs, have failed to reduce violence. The fragmentation of cartels and the lack of addressing root causes like poverty have led to increased brutality and murder rates.

What is the significance of fentanyl in Colima’s drug trade?

Fentanyl and its ingredients enter Manzanillo from countries like China and India, and are synthesized into drugs within Mexico. The high profitability and demand for fentanyl have significantly increased violence and murder rates in Colima.

What is the current approach of the Mexican government towards the cartels?

Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico is attempting a new approach that includes increased military deployment and international cooperation. The goal is to disrupt the drug supply chains and reduce cartel influence.

What are the challenges faced by the police in Colima?

The police in Colima are often outnumbered, outgunned, and sometimes corrupt. They face immense pressure from powerful cartels, making it difficult to maintain law and order.

What is the future outlook for Colima?

The future of Colima depends on coordinated international efforts to disrupt drug supply chains, address poverty, and implement effective policies to reduce cartel influence. Success will be measured by a decrease in the murder rate and improved safety for residents.

Sources

• Original Places video: The Most Dangerous City in the World…
• Hero image source by EneasMx / openverse, by.