When you tell someone you're thinking of moving to Mexico, what's the first thing you hear coming out of their mouth?

Mexico? Are you crazy? Don't you know about all those cartels and the kidnappings and the shootings and the fentanyl and all the drugs? You must be crazy to want to move there. Why won't you stay in the United States, where it's safer?

Or something along those lines. Something to that effect. Why don't we break this down? How much of that fear is actually rooted in reality?

What the news media shows you about Mexico

Assorted news headlines of cartel violence

I went on Google News and put in a query for Mexico cartel violence, and the photo above is a collection of some top headlines.

These are really horrible headlines, and if you took these at face value, if all you did was scan these headlines without having any other context, without ever having been to Mexico before, you would not be interested in visiting.

It looks pretty bad, especially if you're a police officer, those are definitely at higher risk. Journalists are at higher risk of being killed because if you're reporting on the cartels, they don't like that kind of publicity. Cartel members fighting each against each other, fighting the police, fighting the military.

Those are the groups that are most at risk. Drug cartels very rarely target foreign tourists in Mexico.

U.S. gun violence

Now, I took a look at US headlines, in particular, United States gun violence. 2022 gun related deaths. Firearms are the remaining leading cause of death for children and teens and disproportionately affecting people of color. A 2024 headline as of September 5th, 2024, so eight months of that year. Nearly 12,000 people killed in gun violence in the US.

Another headline says, gun violence is down in our cities, but why not in our schools? That's a great question. US gun violence worse than any other wealthy nation, it costs this country billions of dollars. Suicides making the majority of gun deaths, but remained overlooked.

I've read that 60% of gun deaths are suicides and the remaining 40% are homicide. Our problem is so bad that the United States Surgeon General declared it a public health crisis.

So, while Mexico has a concern with cartels and drugs, the United States, it's got its issues with random gun violence. It could happen anywhere guns and people exist, which is in all 50 states.

Travel warnings

These are travel warnings that foreign countries issue to their citizens about the United States. Canada warns of firearm possession in public. It's legal to openly carry a firearm in some places in the US, and Canada further advises tourists to familiarize themselves with how to respond to an active shooter situation. Also mentioned are incidents at the US/Mexico border, which is inherently more dangerous.

Australia instructs its travelers to exercise standard precautions, and what to do if there's an impending terrorist attack. Venezuela — very funny how Venezuela is issuing a travel warning about the United States. They say proliferation of acts of violence and indiscriminate hate crimes is why Venezuela recommended citizens postpone travel to the United States.

The UK has a brief travel warning talking about mass shootings and terrorist attacks. Again, guidance on how to respond to an active shooter.

You're seeing a pattern here. France says the United States is one of the safest countries in the world, but they do point out urban areas could be dangerous at night, for carjackings, thefts and other crimes. And New Zealand rates the US a two out of four, meaning exercise increased caution and attributes this rating to the threat of terrorism, international terrorist groups, as well as domestic based extremist groups.

The United States mass shootings and terrorism is, seems to be the common thread here when foreign countries are advising their citizens how to prepare before coming to the United States. So what's the verdict? USA and Mexico both have a lot of gun crime.

Homicides in Mexico

As we're on the subject of crime comparing Mexico and the United States, here's a great website I discovered sometime in 2024. It's elcri.men/en. This is a map of homicide rates throughout Mexico in January 2025.

This is a crude map of Mexico broken down by state. If you hover your mouse pointer over Baja California (BC), it gives you the annualized rate of homicide. So in this case, Northern Baja California, 53.5 homicides per 100,000 people per year is what this works out to. The most dangerous state in Mexico is Colima.

Colima is a tiny state south of Jalisco, and has a very high homicide rate, an annualized rate of 85 in a hundred thousand. And some other more dangerous states could include Sinaloa State, home of the Sinaloa drug cartel, has a fairly high homicide rate, but not the highest. There's Guanajuato, which for what I understand is one of the most dangerous in the country. There are a lot of remote areas where cartels can operate.

Other useful features of this website are the crime map and cluster map. These allow you to zoom in to see individual cities and towns, instead of just providing crime rates by each individual state.

Merida, Yucatán has the lowest homicide rate in Mexico and Manzanillo, Colima has the highest murder rate in the country.

Culiacán, Sinaloa, is where the Sinaloa drug cartel is based. It's a city you want to avoid. There's been a lot of problems since September 2024. Violence has just up ticked there. So drive around it, fly over it just, I would avoid it.

12 most violent cities in Mexico.
Source: Howstuffworks.com

U.S. crime maps

The most dangerous state is not actually a state, it's the District of Columbia, and this is rated in terms of not only homicides, but violent crimes in general. So DC has the highest crime rate by far, followed by New Mexico and Louisiana pretty much tied for second place. Colorado is third or fourth place, which surprised me. I didn't think Colorado had that much crime. I wonder why. You’ve got South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Washington, Tennessee, and Oregon, which round up the top 10 highest crime rates states in the United States as of 2025.

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-by-state

Expat areas are much less dangerous

Drug cartel activity is not everywhere in Mexico. It's mostly in border regions and certain states such as:

Culiacán, Sinaloa
Matamoros, Tamaulipas
Tijuana, Baja California
rural parts of Guanajuato and Michoacán states
Chiapas State, near the Guatemalan border, and
the state of Colima

Where expats live is generally a lot safer.

Cities such as Puerto Vallarta, Lake Chapala, Merida, San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro, Mazatlán, Mexico City, and many other cities that Americans call home, are a lot safer. But regardless of where you go in Mexico, whether it's a rural destination, a major city, or somewhere in between, day or night, use your common sense.

Use the same principles that you would use in the states. Don't flash your wealth. Don't talk about your money in public. Stay away from areas that look sketchy, or that feel kind of sketchy to you. Stay informed. Avoid being drunk in public. This is a major one because if you're intoxicated in a public place, you'll be drawing attention to yourself, and you could lose cash, your wallet, your phone, or your sense of direction. So it's not a good idea. If it's something you wouldn't think of doing in the United States, then you probably shouldn't do it in Mexico.

The boots-on-the-ground truth about Mexico

In February 2024, I took a trip to Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.

Hermosillo is the capital of the state of Sonora, which is directly south of Arizona. I drove from Tucson, Arizona to Nogales, Arizona, which was about an hour. Parked my car, went across the street, exchanged my dollars for pesos, and then I walked across the border on foot, and asked around to find the immigration office.

It took a while, but I was able to find immigration, and I was able to get a tourist visa issued to me. It's called an FMM, Forma Migratoria Multiple, something like that. It's just a standard tourist visa where they give you up to 180 days. And I told them I was going to Hermosillo, and they asked me, are you going to go there to work?

And I said, no, just tourism. So they had no problem giving it to me. And then I got the tourist visa signed. I continued on foot, walked about two and a half, three miles south through Nogales, on foot, eventually got to the bus depot, bought a ticket.

I don't remember if it was a one-way or a round trip ticket. The trip was about three and a half to four hours. It was a very pleasant, uneventful, enjoyable ride. It was a well-equipped bus. It's more comfortable than being on an airliner. Not only that, but it has reclinable seats, overhead storage, and lots more legroom.

I made it down to Hermosillo without incident. And I spent, I think it was a three-day weekend. Got there on a Friday and all day Saturday, all day Sunday. Then Monday morning at the crack of dawn, I remember leaving the hotel and heading back to Tucson. Walking back to the bus terminal, watching scores of people boarding buses, walking to work, driving to work just like in the States. And I got to the bus terminal, and got on my return trip.

Four hours later, I was back in Nogales, Sonora, then crossed the border back into the US. Made it home without incident. No police encounters. No problems with civilians in Mexico. My biggest danger was crossing the streets because in foreign countries you can't assume that traffic lights will work the same.

People drive differently. Traffic lights work differently. You can't assume anything. When in Rome, do what the Romans do. And that's what I did in Mexico. I just watched the locals to see how they're crossing the street and just do what they do.

I actually had planned out several years in advance, but Covid and other things made me put it on the back burner, but I finally got around to it. This is a little over a year ago now. What really bugged me, though, was the messages I was getting at random on Facebook, like,

“Are you crazy?”

“You're going to the most dangerous part of one of the most dangerous parts of Mexico on your own. Are you out of your mind? Don't you worry about cartels and kidnappings? I saw this movie, or I was reading this book” or something like that, it's not firsthand knowledge. No, I'm here to tell you that if I can do this, someone else can. I'm not special, just well-prepared.

In the summer of 2024, I was in Guadalajara for eight weeks. Five of those weeks were as a student going to school to become certified as an English teacher. After we graduated, my classmates and I were at a bar outside the park celebrating, enjoying ourselves, and it started to rain.

And then all of a sudden a fight broke out between, I'd say, a half-dozen guys. They were probably in their twenties, thirties, maybe 40, in an old-fashioned fist fight. They're duking it out, brawling in the rain outside a park, one of the guys even fell in the rain, and they were all piling on each other.

There were no knives, no guns, nor any weapons involved. The police were never called. It was over in less than five minutes. Worst thing that happened, a guy got a nosebleed or something, but that was it. And none of us felt threatened or unsafe at any point. It was more amusing than anything else.

Now contrast this with the United States, where you have house parties that sometimes end in gunfights. You have festivals where a gunfight could break out, road rage shootings, parking lot dispute shootings, school shootings. American citizens — we shoot each other everywhere and anywhere for any reason or no reason, it seems.

In all my times in Mexico, I've visited the country going back to 2016. I've never seen any road rage. I've never seen any gunfights between ordinary civilians. I've never seen any violence other than that fist fight I mentioned. Of course, yeah, there is cartel violence, but it's not everywhere. It's not as widespread as the media might want you to think it is. Violence happens locally in certain pocketed areas, as I've mentioned, where in the United States, gun violence, random gun violence, can literally be anywhere somebody has a gun is all it takes. Mexican citizens, they don't generally have guns or weapons or anything like that.

And also if you want to buy a gun, you have that right in Mexico, but there is only one place that sells firearms, and it's in Mexico City. It's run by the Mexican military, so you have to go through some lengths, through some hoops to get a firearm in Mexico, legally.

The places I've been like downtown Guadalajara, the tourist parts of Puerto Vallarta, the malecon in Mazatlán. All those areas, since they're frequented by tourists, they tend to have more police and military presence, which helps a lot.

Bottom line is, in all the times I've been in Mexico, I've always felt safer there than in the United States. Yeah, in the US I have to worry about random gun violence or being accosted by loose dogs that are vicious. That's happened once or twice. But in Mexico, the dogs are a lot more chill, and I noticed, I can tell very quickly if a dog is friendly or not friendly. Here in the US, they're more foe than friendly.

The question, which is more dangerous, the United States or Mexico? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do a direct apples-to-apples comparison using raw data with the websites I showed you. But going off of personal experience, comparing downtown Guadalajara, downtown Mazatlan, with Phoenix and Tucson, which are the cities I have most experience with in the United States, I've always felt safer in PV, Mazatlan, and Guadalajara by far. And Hermosillo as well. People in general are more chill in Mexico, and I don't have to worry about random gun violence. The cartel violence, like I've said, happens in border areas and certain states, not where I am, and not where I plan on going.

In the United States, it seems like crime is pretty random. And there's a saying in Mexico, you're not gonna find trouble unless you go looking for it. Where in the US, victims of random gun violence, a guy pumping gas at a gas station has been shot. We've seen that in the news.

As with anything else, no matter where you are or where you go, use your common sense and the five principles I described earlier in this video, don't flash your cash or talk about your money in public. Stay away from sketchy areas. Don't walk by yourself at night if, especially if you're a woman.

Don't bring anything with you on vacation if you're not willing to part with it, is another saying.

If you are a US citizen living in Mexico as a permanent immigrant or a temporary part-time expat, I'm interested in your experiences. Please comment below on what it's like for you, and how it differs from your old life in the United States.

Is MEXICO as VIOLENT as the U.S. News Media Portrays?