The mean number of per-day killings per month in the country has fallen by thirty-seven percent since Head of State Claudia Sheinbaum took office, per fresh administrative data. However, public safety experts have cautioned that homicide data may not point to improved countrywide stability.
There was an mean of almost 55 homicides a day in last November versus roughly 87 when Sheinbaum assumed the presidential office in September of last year. This data was provided by the director of the country’s national public security agency, Marcela Figueroa Franco, during the president’s regular press briefing on Tuesday.
“The outcome in homicides that have been recorded over these past months is extremely significant,” the President stated, adding that the previous month the least amount of homicides were registered for any single November in the past 10 years.
Violent organized crime internal conflicts, alongside the government’s heavily military operations to confront the drug gangs, have caused Mexico’s homicide rate soar in the past few years. The figure hit a peak of 36,773 homicides in 2020, as reported by the nation's official data agency.
That gave Mexico a murder figure more than 4x higher than the US. From that point, murders have been on the downward trend, dropping to 33,550 last year. Claudia Sheinbaum has attributed her public safety approach for an seemingly sharper drop in killings in the current year.
At a press conference in August, the head of state said: “There is a plan, there is tracking of the strategy, and we have specific monitoring locality by locality in certain cases. The approach works. And we have to keep working at it every day.”
The main elements of Sheinbaum’s safety strategy encompass:
Nevertheless, public safety researchers cautioned that using murder numbers to paint a picture of pacification was flawed. This is especially true given the increase in different criminal activities such as people going missing.
“That would be positive information if this was a decrease, but I think we must not just look at the murder data and conclude: ‘Alright, great,’” commented Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an authority on Mexico's cartels. “I would be cautiously hopeful.”
As reported by the public policy research organization Mexico Evalúa, murders overall declined by more than 20% in the initial 10 months of the current year versus the same timeframe last year. Yet, disappearances have gone up by 15% and in certain regions have surged by up to 200%.
“Numbers on murders is not reliable for assessing the context of insecurity,” said Armando Vargas, a security analyst at Mexico Evalúa. “First, we have police and prosecutors who lack the ability or the desire to accurately recognize and classify remains. Secondly, organised [criminals] … have the ability to mask violence through abductions.”
Vargas noted that using monthly averages of everyday killings was similarly problematic because it could obscure days when there were notably high numbers of murders.
“Relying on the daily mean renders spikes of violent crime less visible,” he stated.
An area where the administration can cite the success of its safety plan is on detentions and seizures. Almost 40,000 individuals were arrested between October 2024 and November 2025 for high-impact crimes, per government figures. Over 20,000 weapons were taken and 311 tons of drugs intercepted.
“Trump can't accuse President Sheinbaum of doing nothing, because in reality she is accomplishing a lot with these thousands of detentions, thousands of seizures, and all the tactical weakening of criminal groups. It’s highly politically profitable,” said Vargas.
However notwithstanding these efforts, Mexico is still grappling with severe bloodshed, with a number of regions in the midst of cartel-fueled bloodshed. Recently there was a prominent killing of a popular mayor in the state of Michoacan, one of 10 local leaders murdered in the past 12 months.
A short time later, thousands of young people protested in the capital and across the nation to show their outrage at corruption and drug violence.
“The government presents [data] in a manner to create a narrative of safety. From a political standpoint it’s extremely potent, socially it’s very debatable,” Vargas concluded.
A geospatial analyst with over a decade of experience in terrain modeling and environmental data visualization.
