Recorded Mexican Military Confrontation (Jan. 2007-Dec.2022)

The data are from the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) from 2007 through 2022. We requested and collected the data from SEDENA under the rights of Access, Rectification, Cancellation, Opposition, and Portability of personal data. The Mexican government's general access number we received for this case is 330026423002511 (Plataforma Nacional de Transparencia, 2023). We coded all municipalities as 0 for 2000-2006 to represent no treatment. The army database uses the term “aggression” rather than “confrontation,” but prior research considers these concepts interchangeable (Programa de Seguridad Ciudadana, Universidad Iberoamericana CDMX, 2023). Confrontations are defined as violent encounters between the army and alleged criminal groups, typically involving firearms. According to SEDENA, these events result from the legitimate use of force in response to attacks by civilians and involve soldiers using their weapons in self-defense. The database records the number of confrontations with alleged criminal groups from January 2007 to December 2022 and includes counts of soldiers and alleged aggressors killed, wounded, or detained (Programa de Seguridad Ciudadana, Universidad Iberoamericana CDMX, 2023). Following prior studies, we coded military confrontation as a binary treatment variable (Espinosa & Rubin, 2015; Flores-Marcías, 2018). This variable reflects ever-treatment: once a municipality experiences a confrontation, it is coded as treated (1) for the remainder of the study period.