Life Expectancy of Mexicans Affected by Violence in the Country: Study

The January issue of Health Affairs shows the shocking effect of violence on Mexico's life expectancy, Eurekalert reports. A study led by José Manuel Aburto, a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and two other authors, analyzed the life expectancy trends in Mexico from 2000 to 2010 and found that homicide rates increased from 9.5 per 100,000 in 2005 to over 22 in 2010. However, that statistic has been reduced to about 16 per 100,000 in 2014.

The Washington Post reports that according to the authors, "The unprecedented rise in homicides after 2005 led to a reversal in life expectancy increases among males and a slowdown among females in most states."

Researchers found that men lived an average of 71 years in 2010, which increased to 72 in 2014. Life expectancy back in 2000 was at an average of 70.9, as per Mexico’s National Statistics Institute. Researchers also discovered that in Mexico's most violence-plagued states—Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, Guerrero, and Nayarit, men's average life expectancy was decreased by a year between 2005 and 2010, while in Chihuahua, the decrease was at a high of three years.

"The mortality rate for males ages 20-39 in Chihuahua in the period 2005-10 reached unprecedented levels," the researchers wrote. "It was about 3.1 times higher than the mortality rate of US troops in Iraq between March 2003 and November 2006."

U.S. News & World Report reveals that according to the researchers' findings, the decrease in life expectancy happened in the period of 2000 to 2005, shortly before Mexico's offensive against drug cartels launched in 2006. Researchers discovered that men were ten times more at risk to be killed in violence than women. Such deaths were attributed to executions, shootouts, and turf battles conducted by Mexican drug cartels.

Huffington Post reports that according to epidemiologist Juan Eugenio Hernandez of Mexico's Center for Information on Public Health Decisions, this is the first time life expectancy declined in Mexico since the country's seven-year-long revolution that sparked in 1910.

Hernandez commented, "Indeed, violence has had a big impact on life expectancy...mainly in the male population in several northern Mexico states and in Michoacan."

On a global scale, however, Mexico's life expectancy is still at the relatively low rate compared to Latin American countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela. The study authors wrote, "It is likely that other Latin American countries have been experiencing even greater reductions in life expectancy from homicide."