Have Murders Really Gone Down Under Sheinbaum? Likely Answer: Yes, But By Less Than The Government Claims

I dig into the spaghetti of Mexico's homicide stats

A forensic doctor working in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, described to me how when he writes death certificates he looks at various factors. What type of wounds does the victim have? What weapon or object caused them? Were they self-inflicted or caused by an assailant?

However, he also has another element to consider. What do the crime bosses he has to answer to want on the piece of paper? For five years, he has liaised with a cartel that dominates his city, which gets him to send photos of corpses and crime-scene reports and can order him to file certain conclusions. They pay him, but he is under intimidation to work for them. Now he is in his sixties and wants to retire and they tell him not to.

“I’d like to get out of this and move away. But they know me and want to keep me in place,” says the doctor, who I meet up with in Mexico City where he is originally from.

The doctor’s testimony chimes with abundant evidence about cartel control in chunks of Mexico, such as cellphone records from a plaza boss, which I analyze here. Those messages confirm cartels have a range of officials on payroll and obtain police reports, including witness statements. The U.S. indictment of Sinaloa governor Rubén Rocha Moya alleges widespread criminal control of the police apparatus there.

Cartel infiltration of Mexico’s justice system makes it more difficult to find the truth about the level of violence and death. Yet there are other questions that are tough to answer. How often do cartels disappear victims so their bodies are never found? How frequently do cartel paramilitary squads haul away corpses of their fallen hit men? And centrally, how much is the government itself manipulating figures - or as they say in The Wire, “juking the stats”?

This is important to consider as President Claudia Sheinbaum announced what would seem to be resoundingly good news: that murders in Mexico have gone down 46 percent since she took office in October 2024. “The actions implemented as part of the National Strategy of Public Security are having an impact in all the country,” Sheinbaum, of the Morena party, said at her morning press conference on Tuesday.

Some journalists and opposition politicians were quick to raise doubts about Sheinbaum’s claim. As Senator Mayuli Martínez, of the opposition PAN said: “Morena doesn’t fight violence, it covers it up,” using the Spanish verb “maquillar,” the equivalent of “juking.” Academics and reporters have written various pieces pointing out flaws in the government methodology of counting murders and underlined a major rise of disappearances.

However, diving deep into the data, I don’t think it’s all bad news. Evidence indicates there is a real reduction in the body count, although less than Sheinbaum says.

Manipulating murder numbers is not new; it certainly happened under President Enrique Peña Nieto and likely goes way back. It’s also not exclusive to Mexico. The Wire is set in Baltimore, Maryland, where show creator David Simon saw as a journalist how U.S. cops cook the books.

But while some murders can be hidden, not all can. Mexico has the asset of hardened reporters who race to murder scenes (la nota roja), making it tougher for police to cover up crimes. Bereaved families hold funerals for their loved ones.

Ernesto López Portillo, who heads the public security program at the Ibero university, tells me murder figures can be seen as an “approximation,” of the number of killings, and one of various factors to consider. While López Portillo raises questions about the official tally he thinks that overall there has been a reduction in murder.

“Everything indicates that homicides have gone down for multiple reasons,” López Portillo says. (But) “we can’t audit the system of information of the fiscalias [state prosecutor offices] so we haven’t got a possibility to validate and evaluate the statistical error there could be.”

Each murder is a human life gone, a family who lost a loved one, not just a number on an excel sheet. But we need to get into hard numbers and here I dig into the spaghetti of stats to make an assessment of where we are at. I look at holes in government figures; consider realistic estimates of a drop in murders; and examine how the Sheinbaum government (and Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch) are managing to reduce the pile of corpses.

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