Politics: Homicides declined in 2025, but the real numbers and the effectiveness of the government's strategy remain in question

MEXICO - Report 17 Aug 2026 by Guillermo Valdés and Francisco González

INEGI's preliminary 2025 homicide figures (27,989, a rate of 21.4 per 100,000 inhabitants) confirm a genuine decline in intentional homicides, but one considerably smaller than the government claims. A gap of over 4,300 cases separates INEGI's count from the SNSP's. The gap is rooted in divergent methodologies: INEGI relies on medically verified death certificates, while the SNSP depends on state prosecutors' investigation files, which are subject to under-reporting that worsened from an average of 9% (2015-2024) to 16% in 2025, through reclassification, non-registration, or, in a few states, the cross-state transfer of bodies to inflate neighboring jurisdictions' counts. Even INEGI's more rigorous figures likely understate reality, since they exclude bodies recovered from clandestine graves and unidentified remains held in state morgues — a gap illustrated by independent tracking in Sinaloa, where a local newspaper's count exceeded both the prosecutor's office and INEGI's tallies.

Historically, homicide trends have moved through distinct cycles since 1990, including sharp increases under Calderón and again after 2015, without any rigorous, comparable evaluation linking specific security strategies to these shifts. Applied to 2025, territorial data on government operations, arrests, and homicide trends by state show no consistent pattern: Sinaloa absorbed the largest share of operations yet saw violence rise 75%, Michoacán and Tabasco saw operations with little effect, while Jalisco and Guanajuato posted meaningful declines that may — but cannot conclusively — be linked to enforcement efforts.

What is very clear is that the president's claim of a 51% reduction lacks statistical grounding, and that a lower homicide count does not necessarily signal a weakened criminal landscape. Cartels can sustain territorial and institutional power through reduced open confrontation rather than a genuine loss of control, and this distinction is underscored by persistently high public perceptions of insecurity.

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