Politics: Insecurity persists, but the criminal landscape is shifting
Mexico's insecurity problem has not eased; it has changed shape. INEGI's 2026 victimization survey (ENVIPE) shows that while traditional street crimes—robbery, home burglary, vehicle theft—have fallen sharply since 2018 (down 44% as a group), fraud, extortion, and threats have surged and now account for 57.7% of all crimes, up from 40.2% in 2018, with fraud alone becoming the single most common offense in the country. Only 9% of crimes are ever reported, and the survey recorded 34.4 million crimes in 2025 against just 3.1 million formal complaints, underscoring how little official crime statistics capture. This contrasts with President Sheinbaum's claim, based on narrower government data, that high-impact crimes such as kidnapping and violent robbery have fallen -54% since 2018.
The shift in crime types mirrors a deeper transformation of organized crime itself. Where six or seven large drug cartels once dominated, the criminal landscape now includes two major groups (Sinaloa, split into "Los Chapitos" and "La Mayiza," and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel), four or five regional organizations, and 200 to 250 smaller gangs that have diversified well beyond drug trafficking into fuel theft, extortion of legal businesses (from avocado and lime production to beer distribution and cattle exports), highway cargo theft, cybercrime, and control over public contracting and social programs at the municipal level. Much of this diversification—especially cybercrime—still escapes official surveys, meaning the true scope of criminal activity is likely understated.
Despite some real gains against major cartels, perceived insecurity remains stubbornly high, with three in four adults saying they feel unsafe, and with sharp state-level disparities (from over 90% feeling unsafe in the State of Mexico to under 30% in Coahuila). The underlying constraint is institutional: limited federal police capacity, an undertrained National Guard, and weak, underfunded state and municipal forces mean that even a partially effective strategy against top cartel leadership cannot meaningfully reduce victimization nationwide—especially as neither federal nor most state governments treat security and justice investment as a genuine priority for allocating resources.
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