According to the Mexican government, the Mexican murder rate went down in 2025. Is that correct?
Peter Davies of Mexico News Daily dealt with this issue in his January 26th article entitled Is security in Mexico improving or are the numbers being manipulated?
From the Mexico News Daily article: “On Jan. 8, the federal government presented preliminary statistics that showed that homicides declined 30% in 2025 compared to the previous year. At face value, it certainly appears to be good news, even though homicide numbers in Mexico remain high, with more than 23,000 victims reported last year. Standing next to a bar graph, Sheinbaum frequently lauds the sustained reduction in murders as a testament to the effectiveness of her government’s security strategy; on Jan. 8, she highlighted that the murder rate in 2025 was the lowest since 2016.”
So why is there skepticism about those figures?
“However, there is a growing skepticism about the accuracy of the government’s numbers. On one hand, there are concerns that authorities in Mexico’s 32 federal entities are not accurately reporting homicides because they are incorrectly classifying some murders as less serious crimes. On the other hand, there are claims that the decline in homicides during Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency is related to an increase in disappearances. It’s not the first time that homicide numbers touted by a government led by Sheinbaum have been called into question. That also happened when the current president was mayor of Mexico City, from 2018-2024.”
What is the source of the Mexican federal government’s statistics?
“The homicide data the federal government presents on a monthly basis is derived from reports it receives from the Attorney General’s Offices in Mexico’s 31 states and Mexico City.”
And…
“The reliability of the statistics the state-based Attorney General’s Offices provide to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System is considered by many to be questionable. ‘State Attorney General’s Offices don’t work in a vacuum,’ Alberto Guerrero Baena, a public security consultant and academic, wrote in a column published by the news outlet Expansión on Jan. 9. ‘They operate under budgetary, political and media pressures. When a homicide is difficult to prove or requires lengthy investigation, there is an incentive to reclassify it as injury, accidental death or a lesser crime,’ he wrote. ‘… An unresolved homicide looks bad in the statistics. A [fatal] injury unrelated to homicide looks better,’ Guerrero wrote.”
Guerrero gives examples of a couple of states.
“He [Guerrero] said that ‘in states such as Jalisco, where multiple cartels operate, and Chihuahua, where violence is structural, these practices of reclassification are systematically documented by independent organizations.’ “
There are other sources.
“ ‘The official statistics show declines [in homicides] while defense lawyers, forensic doctors and journalists document that violent deaths continue,’ Guerrero wrote.”
As for Sinaloa state:
“Sinaloa, one of Mexico’s most violent states and the epicenter of a battle between rival factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, is an example of another state where the incorrect classification of homicides appears to be taking place.”
The article quotes the NGO Causa en Común:
“In a report published last November under the title ‘La Transformación de los Asesinatos en Propaganda‘ (The Transformation of Murders into Propaganda), the non-governmental organization Causa en Común also wrote about the ‘possible/probable reclassification’ of homicides as other crimes. ‘Adjacent to the category of intentional homicide, there are two other categories whose behavior has been peculiar in recent years: culpable homicide (accidents) and “other crimes against life and integrity,” states the report. ‘… In the past six years, the number of victims recorded in the category of intentional homicide has supposedly declined 11%. In contrast, the number of victims of culpable homicide and ‘other crimes against life and integrity’ has increased 11% and 103%, respectively,’ the NGO said.”
There’s another report.
“A June 2025 report by Ibero University similarly flags the ‘reclassification of crimes’ as a possible ‘common strategy to reduce the visibility of high-impact crimes.’ ”
According to the Ibero report, “the apparent reduction in homicide numbers doesn’t necessarily imply a real decrease in violence, but [could indicate] a sophisticated concealment of [intentional homicide] victims through [their classification in] other categories such as disappearances, atypical culpable homicides, unidentified deceased persons or bodies hidden in clandestine graves.”
Then there’s this:
“In an interview with the EFE news agency last November, Armando Vargas, the coordinator of the security program at the think tank México Evaluá, said that to speak of a significant decline in homicides ‘is politically very profitable.’ However, he too noted that other ‘forms of violence’ have increased, ‘amplifying suspicions’ that criminal data is being manipulated. ‘The expert,’ EFE reported, highlighted that ‘some entities record more deaths from accidents (homicidio culposo) than from homicidio doloso [intentional homicide], without there being public reports of mass accidents that justify this anomaly.’ ”
Then there are the disappearances.
“A total of 34,554 people were reported as missing in 2025, according to data on Mexico’s national missing persons register. In Sheinbaum’s first 12 months in office — Oct. 1, 2024 to Sept. 30, 2025 — 14,765 of the people reported as missing in the period remained unaccounted for when the president completed the first year of her term. That figure represents an increase of 16% compared to the final year of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency, and an increase of 54% compared to the annual average during AMLO’s six-year term. Is this increase in disappearances related to the decrease in homicides? According to many observers, the answer is yes. Reuters reported on Jan. 8 that government critics claim that the increase in ‘forced disappearances’ is ‘masking the violence in the country.’ ”
“In an opinion article published by The New York Times in December, Ioan Grillo, a Mexico-based journalist with extensive experience reporting on organized crime, wrote that ‘opposition figures’ assert that the reduction in homicides is ‘just because cartels are now disappearing more people, rather than leaving corpses to be counted.’ ”
But if you add up the figures…
“If the number of homicide victims in the first year of Sheinbaum’s presidency is added to the number of disappearances in that period, the total is 40,265.”
And…
“That figure represents a decline of just 5% compared to the average annual combined total of homicides and disappearances during López Obrador’s six-year term. It represents a significant increase compared to the average number of homicides and disappearances annually in the sexenios (six-year terms) of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-18) and Felipe Calderón (2006-12).”
Definitely, there are things about these stats that bear looking into.
Alberto Guerrero Baena, public security consultant and academic has four suggestions to improve the federal government’s statistics:
- “The carrying out of independent audits of State Attorney General’s Offices’ crime data.”
- “Reform the SESNSP [Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública] to give it ‘independent verification’ powers.”
- “Create a ‘national observatory of anomalous mortality’ that cross-checks Civil Registry data on deaths with information from prosecutors, medical examiners and forensic medicine institutes.”
- “Conduct ‘methodologically rigorous’ victimization surveys every three months in order to gauge the ‘lived experience’ of Mexicans with regard to violence.”
According to Guerrero, these four steps “are just the beginning of a necessary transformation.”