Welcome to The Mexpatriate.
Before I get into the weeds on crime statistics in today’s free newsletter, here are a few highlights from the last week:
The PAN (National Action Party) is rebranding. On Oct. 18, the conservative party presented an updated spin on their blue and white logo and doubled down on their “Country, Family and Freedom” slogan. The tweaks to their visual identity seem to be a distraction from the party’s confused political identity. The slogan could be seen as a nod to the populist far-right, but leading party members have been clear to distance themselves from the likes of Milei or Bolsonaro. In addition to the cosmetic changes, the PAN announced it would end alliances with other political parties and open up the candidate selection process. Today, the party is the best-positioned in the weak opposition to Morena, governing in four states (Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Querétaro and Chihuahua) and as the second-largest power in federal Congress. While neither of the PAN’s two ex-presidents made an appearance at the relaunch party on Paseo de la Reforma—Vicente Fox for “medical” reasons and Felipe Calderón for “geographical” ones—Calderón did express interest and cautious approval of the party’s new direction from Madrid.
Zhi Dong Zhang, a Chinese capo accused of money laundering and fentanyl trafficking, was caught in Cuba last week and sent back to Mexico for extradition to the United States. Zhi Dong had been in U.S. sights for years, and was arrested in Mexico City in July; however, he fled house arrest shortly after new federal charges were filed against him in the U.S. and in the midst of Sheinbaum’s security agreement negotiations with the Trump administration. Sheinbaum blamed the embarrassing escape on the federal judge who had allowed Zhi Dong to be moved from a maximum security prison to house arrest.
On Oct. 20, the second U.S. Treasury deadline extension for Intercam, CIBanco and Vector Casa de Bolsa expired and sanctions went info effect; since the U.S. government accused the three financial institutions of money laundering in June, they have been in their death throes. Fintech Kapital Bank purchased most of Intercam’s operations, CIBanco has been liquidated and Vector Casa de Bolsa’s clients have been transferred to Finamex. While these institutions represented a small portion of the Mexican banking system, their collapse has had a ripple effect (and a disproportionate impact on U.S. expat clientele).
Bernardo Bravo, the leader of an association of lime growers, was found shot execution-style in his car in Apatzingán, Michoacán on Oct. 20. Bravo was a vocal advocate for farmers who have suffered years of extortion and violence. Two arrests have been made, including of a leader of the Blancos de Troya cartel. Just six days before his body was found, Bravo had asked the federal government for help: “We strongly, firmly and respectfully ask the president to recognize that the agricultural sector is in crisis, and…we need funds to continue working.”
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Death on a live-stream
On a sunny October morning, José Guadalupe Casas Rodríguez live-streams a video standing on the side of a rural road in Guanajuato. Casas (known as “Don Nico”) points out a pothole in the road and how the local government has failed to fix it as two men on a motorcycle approach.
As they drive past him, the passenger opens fire at Don Nico, who falls to the ground howling in pain. “They’ve killed me, corazón,” he says as the recording continues, and he tells his wife he loves her. He died in a Celaya hospital four days later on Oct. 11; he was 39 years old.
Don Nico was a local entrepreneur with a chain of ice cream stores in Salvatierra, and was known for calling out government incompetence on his business Facebook page. He had said he was worried about his safety.
The motive for Don Nico’s murder is unknown—was it his complaints about the municipal government? Had he gotten on the wrong side of a local gang? Or was he “involved in something” as homicide victims in Mexico are so often assumed to be?
No one has been arrested for the murder though of course, the mayor promised “there will be no impunity.” For seven consecutive years, the state of Guanajuato has been the leader in number of homicides nationwide.
The 20-year war
The “guerra contra el narco” will turn 20 years old next year; in the three sexenios since Felipe Calderón launched an offensive against the cartels, over 477,000 murders have been recorded in Mexico.
President Claudia Sheinbaum and her administration report a 32% drop in homicides since she took office, bringing the daily average to its lowest level since 2015. While Guanajuato is still in the lead for homicides so far this year, state officials claim a 60% decline in the last few months. The state had its first day without a homicide in at least five years in May; the state security chief told El País they have achieved “what was thought to be impossible.”
Is Sheinbaum delivering what her predecessors could not?
While Andrés Manuel López Obrador enjoyed high approval ratings throughout his presidency, public opinion surveys also consistently showed disappointment with his security policy. AMLO’s term (2018-2024) concluded with the highest number of murders on record, despite the fact that they began to gradually decline in 2021.
When Sheinbaum took office, she and her security chief, Omar García Harfuch—previously police chief when she was mayor of Mexico City, where he earned the nickname “Batman” for overseeing crime reduction in the metropolis—announced a new strategy. In fact, this is where Sheinbaum has most notably pivoted from AMLO, and even skeptics acknowledge she is reaping rewards.
“The Sheinbaum strategy appears to distance itself from the improvisation and indiscriminate militarization that characterized previous administrations,” writes Armando Vargas of the México Evalúa think tank. “The emphasis on inter-agency coordination and centralization of information could be bearing fruit, and to deny this would be unfair.”
Sheinbaum’s approach so far has been less passive than AMLO’s, and in a departure from previous terms, has widened the focus from arresting kingpins. Last December, one of García Harfuch’s first major operations (“Enjambre”) took down dozens of public officials in Estado de México for their involvement in organized crime. Last month, a series of arrests exposed a shockingly lucrative fuel smuggling network involving the Mexican navy. The number of arrests for “high-impact” crimes like murder, extortion and kidnapping has also risen significantly—35,817 arrests through Sept. 30, which comes out to roughly double the number per day compared to AMLO’s term.
“In order to reduce crimes, we must arrest those who commit them,” said Harfuch in his first annual report to the Senate on Oct. 22. “Our work is measurable.”
However, some have questioned the Sheinbaum-García Harfuch success and hypothesized other explanations for statistics that look too good to be true. Are these numbers accurate? And if they are, can Sheinbaum’s administration take the credit? Do Mexicans feel safer than they did a year ago?
Parsing the data
Homicides may be an imperfect metric to fully understand the panorama of crime in Mexico, but they are a good weathervane. The 32% decline touted by the government compares homicides in September 2024 with preliminary numbers for August 2025, and comes out to 27 fewer murders per day. If we zoom out and look at the first nine months of 2025, there has been a 19% reduction in murders compared to 2024.
While crimes like extortion and rape are known to have a very high level of unreported cases, the under or mis-reporting of homicides is less likely. Some have pointed to an increase in the number of negligent homicides (homicidio culposo), particularly in some states, as suspicious.
In order to adjust for what could be “manipulations or shortcomings in the records,” México Evalúa combines official statistics on murder, negligent homicide, femicide and disappearances to create a proxy metric they term “lethal violence.” According to their latest report, lethal violence fell nationwide by 6.3% between 2024 and 2025 (January-August). This is a much less impressive (and far more ambiguous) statistic than the raw homicide data presented at the mañaneras, but still trending in the same direction.
Another statistic pointed to by skeptics is the rise in disappearances. During Sheinbaum’s first year in office there were 14,765 reported, 16% more than the previous year. However, this isn’t sufficient to account for the decline in recorded homicides.
AMLO’s administration was roundly criticized for starting a “census” of the missing persons database, accused of trying to disappear the disappeared. While political airbrushing may have been the motive, it’s also important to acknowledge that this is a slippery dataset: since the census began in late 2023, authorities claim 247,690 people have been located (and of these, 8% were dead, though the cause isn’t specified). The government database lists a total of 124,542 missing people today, but this is most likely an underestimate. Particularly in states like Sinaloa where a brutal turf war is playing out, families are afraid to draw any attention by reporting missing loved ones.
Meanwhile, over 72,000 corpses recovered since 2006 await identification in morgues around the country.
Is this a “pax CJNG”?
“There are various theories about the security advances in Juárez that can be divided into two groups: things are getting better thanks to the government or things are getting better due to changes in organized crime.”
This is from a 2013 InSight Crime report on Ciudad Juárez, where violence had finally calmed after years of bloodshed. Twelve years later, analysts are trying to answer the same questions.
AMLO notoriously credited the victory of strong cartels over smaller rivals for outbreaks of peace (“pax narca”) in certain regions, which aligned with his harm-reduction approach to fighting organized crime: avoid confrontation to reduce bloodshed, and hope that smaller rivals lose in the turf wars.
Since the vicious Sinaloa Cartel civil war began in September 2024, homicides have increased 250% in the state, but the conflict could also be responsible for declining violence in other regions as the national balance of cartel power shifts. Security analyst Eduardo Guerrero credits both more effective law enforcement and the “consolidation of the CJNG as the dominant cartel” as contributors to Sheinbaum’s better murder metrics.
How safe do Mexicans feel?
A “pax narca” may bring homicide numbers down, but still leave citizens beleaguered by extortion, forced recruitment and other violent crimes. There were a record number of extortion cases reported in the first six months of 2025, and in July, the government announced new measures to combat the crime (which has gone up 77% since 2018 according to official data).
The data published in the annual national victimization (ENVIPE) and quarterly urban security (ENSU) surveys conducted by INEGI show an overall upward trend in perceptions of insecurity.
The most recently published surveys show the number of crime victims per 100,000 people increased 3.5% between 2023 and 2024 and that the “cifra oculta” of unreported and un-investigated crimes was 93%. The percentage of people who say they feel unsafe in their city has been on the rise this year, reaching 63% in September 2025—versus 58% in September 2024, but below the peak of 76.8% in 2018. The worst-ranked cities were Culiacán, Irapuato, Chilpancingo and Ecatepec. Nationwide, only 24.9% say they expect the security situation in their city to improve in the next 12 months.
Manuel Cantú or “El Potro” is a muscular, cowboy hat-wearing influencer from Monterrey whose videos of filling potholes on Nuevo León roadways get millions of views. On Oct. 15, El Potro uploaded a silent video that shows him filling in the pothole Don Nico was talking about moments before he was shot. One commenter says El Potro should run for office, another that “in this movie called Mexico, the good guys die.”
From filling in potholes to digging up unmarked grave sites searching for lost loved ones, Mexicans have long found themselves burdened with tasks that should fall to their government. While Morena has won broad popular support and delivered results (particularly economically), this deep undercurrent of frustration could still bubble up into a potent opposing force.
“Let it stand as a legacy for the people…que el pinche gobierno es una basura,” said Don Nico as he lay bleeding out on the roadside.
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What an excellent report on what is happening w/ homicides, statistics on them et al. Really good reporting. So sad about B. Bravo, Don Nico and all the unnamed persons who have been killed. Hopefully Sheinbaum can continue to influence the system.