Killing on the Basis of Sex: Do Gender Violence Alerts Actually Reduce Feminicides in Mexico?

Feminicide as a distinct type of crime is a relatively new phenomenon. Mexico's Gender Violence Alerts Against Women are among the country's most visible institutional response to tackle this type of crime. Using municipal-level administrative data for 2015-2025 and a staggered difference-in-differences/event-study design, this article estimates whether alert declarations are associated with changes in officially recorded feminicides. The annual full-sample estimate indicates a reduction of approximately 0.17 recorded feminicides per municipality-year, small in absolute terms but as large as 50% relative to baseline mean. To account for variation in officially recorded feminicides, we restrict our sample to municipalities with at least one recorded case and find a consistent and robust relationship between the alert declaration and the reduction of feminicides. We argue that alerts should be evaluated as emergency accountability mechanisms whose observed effects may reflect prevention, institutional coordination, reporting, classification, and public scrutiny.