Mexico’s government said homicides fell sharply in 2025, presenting the figures as evidence that its security strategy is working. During President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily news conference, officials said Mexico recorded 17.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025, the lowest rate since 2016.
Officials said the pace of change was also steep: Sheinbaum said homicides dropped 40% between September 2024—the month before she took office—and December 2025. “This means 34 fewer homicides every day, and it is the lowest figure since 2016,” Sheinbaum said.
Sheinbaum attributed the decline to a strategy based on coordination among security forces, justice institutions, prosecutors’ offices and state governors. The government’s announcement, however, came as some data sources still had not released complete 2025 homicide figures.
The AP report said Mexico’s public security secretariat had not yet published the full 2025 homicide figures, and neither had the Statistics Institute. The Statistics Institute’s annual data is considered more reliable because it is based on death certificates, though it is published after a months-long delay, the report said.
Mexico’s homicide trajectory has been closely tied to shifts in national security policy, according to the report’s background. It said Mexico’s homicide rate began rising sharply in 2006 after a military-led campaign against drug cartels under then-President Felipe Calderón, and killings kept rising through the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who governed from 2018 to 2024 and whose period the report said saw the peak.
After taking office on Oct. 1, 2024, Sheinbaum hardened the government’s security approach amid pressure from the United States, the report said. It said the new approach moved away from López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy and prioritized intelligence work and interagency coordination.
Analysts said the reported decline should be approached cautiously until the missing and homicide figures can be compared with consistent methods. Lisa Sánchez, director of the nongovernmental organization Mexico United Against Crime, said homicides are down but that not all of the necessary data is available for meaningful comparisons. “We don’t know how they’re compiled and handled,” Sánchez said.
Sánchez also pointed to the ongoing rise in missing-person figures, which the report said had reached more than 133,000. She said some killings may be undercounted because some missing people may be dead or because some violent deaths are recorded under other categories, such as accidents, instead of homicides.
Security analyst David Saucedo said alternative explanations for the trend are widely discussed by researchers. He said one possibility is that violence may be decreasing in some areas because criminal groups have consolidated control, reducing open conflict after eliminating rivals.
Even with the reported decline, the AP report said violence linked to organized crime remains a reality in several states, including Sinaloa, Michoacan, Jalisco and Guanajuato, where multiple drug cartels operate.