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The Mexican government on Thursday boasted of a sharp drop in homicide rates and cited the figures as evidence that its security strategy is working, even as analysts warned that the numbers may not fully reflect the violence in the country.
during his term as president Claudia Sheinbaumofficials said at a daily news conference Mexico By 2025, there will be 17.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest level since 2016.
By comparison, 29 people were killed per 100,000 people in 2018, with homicides reaching their highest level in two decades.
Scheinbaum of the left-wing Morena party said homicides dropped 40% from September 2024, the month before she took office, to December 2025.
“This represents a decrease of 34 homicides per day, which is the lowest number since 2016,” Sheinbaum said.
She attributed the decline to a strategy based on coordination between security forces, the judiciary, the prosecutor’s office and the governor.
However, Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Security has not yet released all homicide data for 2025, nor has the Institute of Statistics, which publishes the data annually, which is considered more reliable because it is based on death certificates, but only after a month’s delay.
Mexico’s homicide rate began rising sharply in 2006 after then-President Felipe Calderón of the conservative PAN party launched a military crackdown on drug cartels.
Since then, the number of killings has continued to rise, reaching a peak during his administration. Andres Manuel Lopez ObradorGoverned from 2018 to 2024 and supported Sheinbaum’s candidacy.
After taking office on October 1, 2024, Sheinbaum bowed to pressure from the government and strengthened the government’s security measures. USAmoving away from López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy and prioritizing intelligence work and inter-agency coordination.
Lisa Sanchez, director of the NGO United Against Crime in Mexico, said homicides were down but warned that not all the necessary data was available to make meaningful comparisons. “We don’t know how they are compiled and processed,” she said.
The official number of missing people continues to rise and has exceeded 133,000. New secret tombs are constantly being discovered in different parts of the country.
Sanchez said some killings may be underreported because some missing people may have died or because some violent deaths are recorded under other categories, such as accidents, rather than homicides.
Security analyst David Saucedo said other alternative explanations have been widely discussed by researchers. Violence Conflicts may decline in some areas as criminal groups consolidate control and reduce open conflict after eliminating rivals, he said.
Despite reported declines, violence linked to organized crime persists in some states, including Sinaloa, Michoacán, Jalisco and Guanajuato, which are home to multiple drug cartels.
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Associated Press writer Martin Silva Rey contributed to this report.