At least 17 of the country’s 32 entities maintain a “negative or very negative” balance of lethal violence, according to a report released this Thursday by the organization México Evalúa.
“The pacification process has not been consolidated territorially. So much so that 17 states show worrying figures of lethal violence: high rates, increasing rates or both,” states the document ‘Violence and pacification at the local level’.
According to the report, the nationwide reduction in intentional homicides, which according to the government has been 32% less in the first year of President Claudia Sheinbaum, “hides state realities of persistent conflict.”
“In many of these states, the increases coincide with operational weakening tactics against organized crime: arrests, seizures and federal deployments,” the report highlights.
It also states that these actions, when they do not have local institutional support, seem to “cause violent rearrangements and disputes over the control of illicit markets.”
Therefore, the document refers to the fact that the evidence points to a dynamic of criminal fragmentation, on the one hand, and to an insufficiency of the security policy based exclusively on the operational weakening of organized crime.
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The organization points out that the official figures on intentional homicide “are not completely reliable, since, on the one hand, police and prosecutors lack the technical tools and institutional capacities to carry out an exhaustive and homogeneous count of the murders.
On the other hand, he points out, the political context usually discourages transparency in the registry, affecting the quality of official data.
“It is also not ruled out that some criminal organizations resort to the disappearance of people as a mechanism to cover up lethal violence and reduce their statistical visibility,” he points out.
The document states that from 2018 to 2025, victims of intentional homicide registered a reduction of 27.2% at the country level; however, in the same period, victims of other crimes against life and bodily integrity increased by 118.2% and missing and unlocated persons increased by 112.9%.
Likewise, it specifies that the entities with the highest rate of violence per 100,000 inhabitants are Sinaloa (59.2%), Hidalgo (47%), Baja California Sur (31.2%), Mexico City (25.4%) and Nayarit (22.6%).
“The persistence of high levels in entities of the northwest and the Bajío suggests that the policies of operational weakening of organized crime have not been accompanied by local strategies of institutional strengthening or interregional coordination,” he highlights.
With information from EFE.
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