Oaxaca Safety Map and Index

How these ratings are made

There is no official, neighbourhood-level crime data for Oaxaca — Mexican crime figures are published only for whole municipalities, never for individual barrios. So this map is not official data. It is one local guide’s read.

Each rating is built by reading the local Oaxaca press — the daily crime and policing pages across the newspapers of the city — over a full quarter, outside the big festival periods when coverage skews toward the centre. Reports are counted as incidents, not articles: repeat write-ups of the same case are collapsed into one, incidents are weighted by how serious they are, and anything that cannot be tied to a specific area is set aside. That reading is combined with decades of first-hand experience of the city to set each number by hand.

Zone shapes are approximate. Each coloured area shows roughly which barrio you are nearest — they are not surveyed boundaries.

Greener means more relaxed, redder means keep your guard up — a relative sense of how much street-awareness to carry, not a precise or guaranteed measure of risk. Your own judgement on the ground always comes first.