Sheinbaum

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government says intentional homicides have fallen 46% since she took office, a dramatic decline her administration is holding up as proof that its aggressive campaign against cartel operators is working — even as independent researchers warn that other forms of criminal violence are quietly rising in the shadow of the falling murder count. According to figures presented by Sheinbaum’s government, the daily average of intentional homicides dropped from 86.9 in September 2024, when she took office, to 47.3 by May 2026, making that May the lowest for the month in twelve years. Officials say 28 of Mexico’s 32 states recorded year-over-year reductions in homicides, with some of the improvements especially dramatic: San Luis Potosí saw an 81% decline, while Zacatecas, long one of the country’s most violence-plagued states amid competition between rival cartel factions, posted a 63% drop. High-impact crimes more broadly — a category that includes homicide, kidnapping and extortion — fell 31% from October 2024 through May 2026, according to the government’s figures. The security gains, if they hold up, would represent one of the most significant declines in criminal violence in Mexico’s recent history, a country that has struggled for nearly two decades with cartel-driven violence that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since the government’s military confrontation with drug trafficking organizations began in earnest in the mid-2000s. Sheinbaum’s administration has pointed to a substantial law enforcement push behind the numbers: officials report more than 56,000 detentions tied to high-impact crimes, nearly 30,000 firearms seized, and approximately 420 tons of drugs confiscated, including a naval operation that alone secured more than 71 tons of cocaine. The government has paired that enforcement push with social investment it argues addresses violence at its root, enrolling more than 385,000 young people in job-training and education programs such as Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro, alongside plans to create 200,000 new high school spaces aimed at keeping at-risk youth out of cartel recruitment pipelines. The approach marks a notable shift from the “hugs, not bullets” strategy associated with Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government favored addressing the social roots of cartel violence over direct military confrontation. Sheinbaum has instead leaned into more assertive, at times militarized operations against cartel leadership structures, including a major operation in Jalisco earlier this year targeting the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the country’s most powerful and violent criminal organizations. Her government has also drawn a harder line than some anticipated on U.S. relations, at one point refusing to extradite certain Mexican officials wanted on drug trafficking charges in the United States even while separately transferring dozens of cartel suspects to American custody in what her administration described as a “sovereign decision” rather than a concession to U.S. pressure. Violence remains heavily concentrated in a handful of states even as the national numbers improve. Officials say eight states now account for 54% of all homicides nationwide, led by Guanajuato, which alone represents 8.8% of the national total, followed by Baja California, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Morelos, the State of Mexico, Guerrero and Veracruz — a list that reads as a rough map of where major cartel factions continue to compete most fiercely for territory and trafficking routes. Independent researchers and security analysts, however, have urged considerable caution about reading the declining homicide figures as evidence that Mexico’s underlying violence problem is actually improving. The 2026 Peace Index, a widely cited annual assessment of security conditions across the country, found homicides fell 22.7% over the year it examined — a smaller but still substantial decline that nonetheless came paired with concerning increases in disappearances across multiple regions and the expansion of extortion networks tied to increasingly fragmented criminal groups. Researchers behind the index cautioned that these trends reflect “the persistence of criminal structures” and continuing gaps in Mexico’s investigative and judicial capacity, warning that “structural risks threatening the sustainability of these advances persist” even as the topline homicide numbers move in the right direction. Some analysts have gone further, suggesting that at least part of the decline in reported homicides may reflect a shift in how criminal violence manifests rather than a genuine reduction in its overall scale — with disappearances, in particular, sometimes serving as a way for both criminal organizations and, in some documented cases, state actors to obscure killings that might otherwise be counted as homicides. The Peace Index report noted that domestic violence has become Mexico’s most commonly reported offense even as firearm use in street crime has risen, and pointed to Mexico’s prison population reaching a record 256,000 inmates alongside what it described as a severe deficit in the investigative and judicial capacity needed to actually process that volume of cases and hold perpetrators accountable. For the Trump administration, which has made pressuring Mexico on both cartel violence and fentanyl trafficking a signature element of its broader Western Hemisphere policy, Sheinbaum’s numbers present a complicated diplomatic dynamic. A genuine, sustained decline in cartel violence would support continued cooperation between the two governments on security matters, while persistent skepticism from independent monitors gives U.S. officials who favor a harder line on Mexico ample grounds to argue that the underlying crisis remains far from resolved regardless of which statistics get emphasized on either side of the border. U.S. law enforcement agencies have continued to report large fentanyl seizures tied to Mexican trafficking networks even as Sheinbaum’s government touts its own record hauls, underscoring that whatever progress has been made against cartel violence domestically within Mexico has not yet translated into a comparable slowdown in the flow of drugs across the border. That disconnect has fueled ongoing friction between Washington and Mexico City over how much credit Sheinbaum’s security strategy actually deserves, with American officials in border states frequently pointing to seizure statistics on their own side of the border as a more reliable gauge of cartel activity than homicide figures reported by a foreign government with an obvious political incentive to showcase improvement. Whether…