Ecatepec de Morelos

Greater Mexico City's most populous suburb sits alongside Acapulco, Tijuana, and Juárez in national murder statistics — yet its violence has no author. Ecatepec de Morelos, pressed against the capital's northern edge in the State of Mexico, is one of the country's most dangerous places, but its killings are not organised around the trafficking corridors and cartel territories that define Tijuana or Juárez — they are fragmented, locally generated, and emergent. What it has instead is 1.6 million people living on infrastructure built for a fraction of that number.

Ecatepec was a largely rural municipality of roughly 40,000 in 1960. By 1980, when it was officially declared a city, the population had surged past 700,000. By 2010, it had become the most populated municipality in the country. Rural migration to the Valley of Mexico drove the explosion — cheap land north of the capital drew families who commuted south to work. The municipality absorbed the people; it never absorbed the investment needed to support them. This is r-selection at urban scale: maximise the quantity of housing units, minimise the per-capita investment in services, transit, policing, or drainage.

Like water hyacinth choking a lake, Ecatepec's growth became self-reinforcing and self-destructive. The plant does not poison the water; it simply grows faster than the ecosystem can process, blocking light and depleting oxygen until the lake collapses into a dead zone.

The positive feedback loop runs the same way. Cheap land attracts migrants, more migrants strain infrastructure, strained infrastructure depresses land values and services, depressed conditions attract migration from still-poorer origins. Once established, the cycle is as hard to reverse as a hyacinth bloom.

The numbers tell the source-sink story. Ecatepec exports $1.46 billion in goods annually — industrial chemicals, pumps, valves — and hosts Multiplaza Aragón, one of Mexico's busiest shopping malls. Jumex, the country's largest juice company, is headquartered here. Yet more than 40 per cent of residents live below the poverty line. Economic activity flows through the municipality but does not settle in it. Most residents commute to Mexico City; consistently more than 85 per cent report feeling unsafe where they live.

The municipality operates under a gender violence alert, and more than 600 women were murdered in Ecatepec between 2012 and 2016 alone. The violence is not strategic. It is the emergent consequence of decades of growth that prioritised quantity of housing over quality of life, and a fiscal base that cannot close the gap.