Red Alert: Tijuana, Mexico's femicide capital by 2025

A gender-based violence crisis is ravaging Tijuana, making it the municipality with the highest number of femicides in Mexico by 2025. The extreme brutality of the cases and their links to organized crime paint a bleak picture on the border.

Tijuana, BC—A dark and persistent shadow hangs over Tijuana. Beyond its vibrant border city and economic dynamism, the city faces a humanitarian crisis that has placed it at the epicenter of gender-based violence in the country. Official figures and the harsh reality of its streets confirm an alarming truth: Tijuana leads the femicide statistics in Mexico in 2025.

Reports from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) and data from the Baja California State Attorney General's Office (FGEBC) consistently show Tijuana at the top of the list for this crime. A SESNSP report from earlier this year already placed the municipality as one of the national hot spots.

The most recent data from the FGEBC, corresponding to the period from January to May 2025, records four alleged femicides and 1,044 cases of domestic violence in Tijuana alone, figures that likely underestimate the reality due to the high rate of non-reporting due to fear.

What makes the situation in Tijuana particularly terrifying is not only the number of victims, but the level of brutality employed. Many of the women's bodies found show signs of torture, dismemberment, and a cruelty that goes beyond interpersonal violence, resembling the terror tactics of organized crime.

This connection is no coincidence. Security analysts and activists point out that Tijuana's femicide crisis is a direct consequence of its geopolitics. As the most important corridor for drug and human trafficking to the United States, the city is a perpetual battleground between transnational cartels.

In this context of relentless war, violence against women becomes a strategic tool:

• Intergroup messaging: Killing rivals' partners or family members is a form of attack.
• Territorial control: The terror inflicted on the community through femicidal violence is a demonstration of power.
• Human trafficking: Women are viewed as disposable commodities by criminal networks.
• Culture of impunity: Widespread violence creates an environment where misogyny and attacks against women flourish without consequences.

"In Tijuana, 14 [femicides] were committed in 2023… The dismembered bodies of two women and a man were abandoned on a Tijuana road." – News reports on violence in the city.

Civil society organizations and feminist groups have tirelessly raised their voices, demanding that an effective gender alert be declared and that crimes be investigated from a gender perspective, recognizing the context of organized crime that fuels them.

The crisis in Tijuana is an extreme reflection of a national problem. The femicide violence on the border cannot be understood without understanding the dynamics of the cartel war, which uses it as one of its cruelest weapons. For the women of Tijuana, living has become an act of resistance in the most dangerous city for them in all of Mexico.