After the anti-drug Operation Trizo and the anti-leftist Dirty War ended in the second half of the 1970s, the number of murders in Mexico stabilized. A slight increase occurred in 1985, when DEA agent Enrique Camarena was murdered. His death led to the dissolution of the corrupt secret police known as DFS, which until then had largely controlled the drug trade. Following several years of ensuing chaos, the largest drug trafficking organizations once again came under the central control of the federal government, which partly contributed to a significant decline in violent deaths.

This relatively calm period ended in 2000, when the ruling PRI party lost the election after seventy years in power. Once the authoritarian regime ended, weakened institutions began to be replaced by drug cartels. Thanks to drug prohibition, these cartels could rely on an endless flow of money and the associated power—resources that individual Mexican states (and eventually not even Mexico City) were able to compete with.

However, the main wave of violence did not erupt with the arrival of President Felipe Calderón in 2006, but at the beginning of 2008, when the largest drug cartels launched brutal wars against one another. Meanwhile, Mexico’s judicial system had completely collapsed, which drug traffickers exploited to seize control over many parts of the country. Violence thus fell entirely beyond the control of both state and federal authorities.

The situation is, however, far more tragic. To the official statistics of those murdered, one must also add data on missing persons. Yet even that does not provide a complete picture, because due to pervasive corruption, the residents of Mexico often do not report crimes at all. Moreover, many Mexican authorities have manipulated statistics over the past two decades, which means that the official figures for murders and kidnappings are significantly understated.

When Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, was forced to step down because she refused to artificially lower the number of missing persons, she revealed that, for the reasons described above, the actual number of missing Mexicans is six times higher than what her former agency reports. Based on her testimony, the chart therefore includes an estimated number of disappeared (and likely murdered) residents of Mexico.

Although the Mexican government has for years claimed that the number of murders in the country has stagnated at around 35,000 victims per year, the reality is entirely different—and far more terrifying.