You're kidding right? For one thing, these statistical odds do nothing to change the tragedy of death or disappearance for the families of any of those people. Secondly, the numbers don't include unreported murders and disappearances.

Even if you still try to minimize these factors with dry presentation of statistical odds with these additional causes of death/disappearance included, remember that certain activities dramatically increase the odds of being a victim. These activities are far from strange things. They include things like frequent travel, driving or travelling alone, especially at night, walking certain areas at certain times and so forth. The dangers are very real and affect people's behavior in many unfortunate ways that don't easily show up in a trite statistical summary.

I'm not trying to be dramatic. over 120 million people in the country live their lives every day and millions of them still do lots of interesting recreational things, but there is a shadow across much of what in other places would be much safer.

Just saying "36000 die" by itself doesn't tell me very much about how dangerous it is - expressing that as a percentage gives much more information I think.

As another person points out 0.03% is 3 times the risk of dying in traffic which, before looking at the numbers, I would have guessed to be the most dangerous aspect of a trip like this.

You seem to think I am being trite and using a "dry presentation" of statistics to minimise the risks of being murdered by a cartel but I actually find this presentation brings the (large) risk of it home to me much more clearly than with a contextless number like 36,000.

E.g. for the UK the numbers are 0.001% murders and 0.003% for traffic

3 times the risk of death by traffic? This is the scariest thing I've ever read in my life; it is a staggering level of violence.

Now do the numbers per 100,000 population

As of 2018 (and it's gotten a notable bit worse since then if we look at absolute numbers per year), it stood at 29 per 100,000. This is four times higher than the U.S homicide rate by the way, and the U.S homicide rate is itself considered high by the standards of other developed nations.

In the other hand to be fair, Mexico isn't in the top ten of most violent countries by murder rate. Most of those top ten aren't war zones either, while Mexico technically is.