The six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) not only saw the highest number of homicides in modern Mexican history, but also the highest incidence of crimes associated with lethal violence, which increased by 15.3%, according to a study released Monday by México Evalúa.
The study, which analyzes the trends in lethal violence in Mexico between 2015 and 2025, indicates that, according to official figures, during López Obrador’s administration, “crimes against life” increased by 102%, and the number of missing and disappeared persons rose by 89%, constituting an “anomalous trend” in these data.
México Evalúa believes that measuring lethal violence in Mexico requires a multidimensional approach, not just focusing on intentional homicides. Therefore, this think tank uses four additional indicators: manslaughter, femicides, missing and disappeared persons, and other crimes that threaten life.
Thus, in a table based on official data, México Evalúa indicates that in 2018, when López Obrador assumed the presidency, 68,904 acts of lethal violence were recorded in the country, while in 2014, the last year of his administration, the figure rose to 79,479, for an average of nine every hour.
The director of México Evalúa, Mariana Campos, said while presenting the study that in 2025 more than 72,000 events associated with lethal violence were recorded in the country, representing a 73% increase compared to 2015. This reveals that the 8.6% reduction in these crimes recorded last year compared to 2014 is temporary “and requires us to look at long-term trends.”
She pointed out that the phenomenon of violence in Mexico cannot be analyzed with a single metric, such as intentional homicides, nor based on national averages.
Violence, she indicated, is territorial, dynamic, and changes form over time. “One indicator may decrease, but shift to another,” she said.
And that is what happened between 2018 and 2024, during López Obrador’s administration, when, according to official figures, intentional homicides decreased by 10.8% during that period, but manslaughter increased by 11.2%, and disappearances and “other crimes against life” increased exponentially.
The study, Campos argued, proposes a broader interpretation and a set of indicators to measure lethal violence, which is fundamental because if there is an incomplete diagnosis of crime in Mexico, public policy will also be incomplete.
Víctor Manuel Sánchez Valdés, professor and researcher at the Faculty of Law of the Autonomous University of Coahuila, stated that the crime reductions touted by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government should be viewed “with a critical eye” because the México Evalúa study contains figures that raise concerns.
He said that, for example, in Tamaulipas, “other crimes against life” increased by 36,000 percent in the last decade, while in Quintana Roo the increase was 27,000 percent and in Sonora 24,000 percent, which necessitates a thorough review of how crime data is compiled and reported in the country.
This is because, while official figures indicate a decrease in violence in Mexico, the public perception of insecurity has increased.
According to the National Urban Public Security Survey (ENURSE) conducted by INEGI, last December 63% of the population considered it unsafe to live in their city, more than two percentage points higher than in December 2024.
President Sheinbaum boasts that intentional homicides have decreased by 40% under her administration since September 2024, when she took office. However, according to a study by México Evalúa, lethal violence decreased by 8.6% in 2025 compared to the previous year.
The coordinator of the Security Program at México Evalúa, Armando Vargas, stated that it is necessary to ask questions that lead to sound hypotheses. For example, whether the decreases in crime reported by the president are due to the effectiveness of public policy, the control exerted by organized crime in certain areas, or poor practices in classifying crime data.
Source: proceso
