MEXICO CITY (CN) - Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took to her podium this week during her daily morning press conference to present the country's decreasing homicide rates.

"The reduction in homicides, from September 2024 to February 2026, is 44%. This is a continuous reduction month after month, and February is the lowest month in at least 10 years. That's 38 fewer homicides per day than in September 2024. This is the result of the security cabinet's work, and as we will present, the most important thing is to continue working to reduce all high-impact crimes," she said Tuesday as she unveiled a visual representation of the data.

Sheinbaum credited the Investigation and Intelligence Law, passed by Congress in June, which created the Central Intelligence Platform - a database of public and private information shared between federal, state and municipal authorities to combat crime.

While the government's data seems a triumph - especially in the wake of praise heaped on Mexico's head of security, Omar Garcia Harfuch, for his historic takedown of drug lord, El Mencho - some experts say the methodology doesn't capture the full picture.

"I want to clarify that we're not claiming there's manipulation or reclassification. We don't have evidence to confirm that. What Mexico Evala is putting on the table is an alternative way to measure violence," said Armando Vargas, security program coordinator at Mexico Evala, an independent data analysis group.

Vargas said that the official homicide figures used by the government are no longer valid for estimating the context of public insecurity in general, much less lethal violence.

"While intentional homicide decreases, manslaughter increases very disproportionately, as well as femicides and victims of other crimes against life not classified as homicides, a classification used by the executive secretariat that, in principle, are assumed to be low frequency events - such as suicides and missing and unlocated people - anomalies that are exacerbated especially at the local level," Vargas said.

The recent Mexico Evala report shows that in the last decade, missing and unaccounted-for people increased by almost 213% nationally and crimes against physical integrity rose 368%.

"So, that's why we look at the whole set of data, to get a more precise approximation. And within that framework at the national level, once we put all the data together, we see a relevant finding: And that is that in the last year, at the national level, lethal violence did indeed decrease, but in the last decade it has practically increased by 70%. And at the local level, there are different variations, but it has increased in all 32 federal entities," he said.

Although the National Registry of Missing Persons, which Mexico Evala used for its missing people data, has its shortcomings, Vargas said, as it was designed for the search of people and not for statistical analysis, it can be a valuable tool.

"The system isn't perfect, yes, but we also think that when the data is taken together and reveals patterns, then this suggests that a significant proportion of missing persons are indeed linked to murder, and therefore it's worthwhile to compile the data and begin including these statistics within homicides or lethal violence," Vargas said. "So, what we're saying is that it's no longer enough to observe the context of violence in Mexico by only looking at intentional homicide."

Government transparency

In a recent report by Causa en Comn, the Mexican civil organization dedicated to defending human rights points to the possibility that the Sheinbaum administration's reclassified intentional homicides as involuntary manslaughter, reclassified homicides as "other crimes against life," and reclassified homicides as disappearances.

"There are two types of homicides: intentional homicide or murder and manslaughter. What we've found in the crime records that's striking and hasn't been explained by the federal government is the increase in manslaughter, that is, for example, accidents, and a very strange increase in homicides," Causa en Comn investigator Asael Nuche said.

Nuche cited 2025 data from the report: the state of Quintana Roo recorded 291 cases of intentional homicide and 1,098 cases of manslaughter. The state of Chiapas recorded 370 intentional homicides versus 856 manslaughter cases. Coahuila recorded 76 intentional homicides and 262 manslaughters.

"I mean, it seems to us a very, very extreme, very high number of manslaughter cases and a very low number of intentional homicides," Nuche said. "There are states where there are up to three times more manslaughters, which forces us to review how these deaths are being classified."

Nuche said that this doesn't automatically mean there is manipulation on the part of the federal government, but there needs to be more transparency in how Mexico's Federal Public Prosecutor's Office investigates cases and a better system for classifying violent crimes.

"There's an increase there that doesn't seem to have an explanation. It's not clear," he said.

Nuche also claimed that low homicide numbers are used to cover disappeared people data, which would otherwise be classified as homicides if proper protocols were in place.

"We've seen Jalisco, which has been the epicenter of violence, especially with the recent operations against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. There are hundreds of clandestine graves with human remains. What do the figures show? Well, in Jalisco, disappearances increased by more than 200% in the last year, while simultaneously, homicides decreased. What we're saying is, you can't just talk about a decrease in homicides if at the same time there's a figure that's growing in the country - which is the disappearance of people - accompanied by other figures that have to do with the appearance of human remains in clandestine graves," Nuche said.

The missing and the disappeared

As recently as January 2026, Sheinbaum vowed to update the National Registry of Missing Persons by requiring a formal investigation file in order to classify a disappearance.

Nuche said prosecutorial offices often discourage people from filing reports because they're overwhelmed and can't process any more reports. They don't want the number of missing persons reports to increase, and often, people are told that maybe the person they're reporting as missing ran away or left home.

"It's a very complex problem that will hardly be solved simply with this government decision to align the disappearance records with the case files, because for that to happen, there needs to be an increase in the resources allocated to the prosecutor's offices and the resources allocated to the national search system and forensics teams so that there are sufficient institutional capacities," Nuche said.

Meanwhile, he said victims of intentional homicide go unrecorded while their families travel across the country searching for their remains.

Esaul Reyes, a resident of forensic medicine at the Mexico City Institute of Forensic Sciences, says there are currently 500 to 600 unidentified bodies in the morgue.

The Institute of Forensic Sciences is part of the Mexico City judicial branch, and its forensic experts are responsible for body identification and determining the cause of death for people who have died in unnatural circumstances, including victims of crimes.

Every body that enters the institute has an investigation file attached.

"We ended up receiving 8,000 cadavers last year," said Reyes. "The number of unidentified or unclaimed bodies has been increasing. Those are the bodies that cause us problems because there are so many unclaimed bodies. They are the remains of missing persons or unidentified individuals. So, we can't, so to speak, just get rid of those bodies. We have to safeguard them for at least one to three months here at INCIFO, and then we have to take them to the mass grave if they're not claimed. But in the mass grave, we have to separate them and number them because we have to exhume them again later."

Reyes said that when a record at the institute matches the disappearance file, they bring the body back to the morgue. Reyes said the law itself doesn't favor bodies to be identified and that there's no standardized platform to identify bodies at the national or local level.

"For example, someone comes in and says their child disappeared a month ago. We don't have standardized forensic services at the national level, every state has their own forensic registries. But the problem is also the quantity, the lack of budget and the lack of staff; there aren't enough people to handle the number of bodies. So the problem stems from the economic structure of the proposed budgets and the insecurity, the number of corpses processed annually at INCIFO," said Reyes.

Reyes estimated that about half the bodies that come through INCIFO are missing people.

"For someone to be classified as missing or disappeared, you have to file a report. If there's no report, they're not missing," said Reyes.

Source: Courthouse News Service