The El Paso Times recently reported that Ciudad Juárez has experienced a significant decline in homicides.
As noted in the article, Juárez registered 29 homicides with Chihuahua City registering a total of 30 homicides as “the state of Chihuahua saw murders drop in September to the lowest monthly statewide total in 10 years[.]”
During a press conference held on October 5, Luis Aguirre, the Chihuahua state police Chief of Staff, acknowledged that, in the past, “it was not uncommon” for Juárez to record 170 to 180 homicides per month.
To cite another reflection of this trend referenced in the article, during 2025, Juárez recorded a total 927 homicides. This was the first time since 2017 that homicides dropped below 1,000 in the city.
In early September, Bloomberg similarly reported that Mexico, as a whole, had experienced a remarkable decline in the murder rate during the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The article characterized the decline as “a striking turnaround for a country known for gruesome cartel violence, with homicides now roughly half their 2020 peak.”
According to data cited in the article, at the height of the country’s homicide crisis in 2020, during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico was recording approximately 100 intentional homicides per day.
Although Mexico’s murder rate had started to gradually decline during the presidency of López Obrador, this downward trend appears to have accelerated dramatically during Sheinbaum’s presidential term.
In September of 2024, during the interval immediately prior to Sheinbaum taking office, Mexico averaged 86.9 homicides per day. By July 2026, that figure had fallen to 42.5 per day—which Bloomberg identified as a 51% decline, or roughly 44 fewer homicides per day.
The July 2026 murder rate was also the lowest for any July during the period from 2015 through 2026.
As Bloomberg’s recent analysis demonstrates, Mexico is currently recording fewer than half as many daily homicides as it did during the 2020 peak.
Marcela Figueroa Franco was appointed by Sheinbaum in October of 2024 to head Mexico’s Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System or SESNSP, the federal agency responsible for monitoring Mexico’s monthly crime statistics. Figueroa attributes the decline to “an intelligence-led strategy that increases the focus on the leaders and financiers behind organized crime rather than just the gunmen who carry out their orders.”
Although some analysts have questioned the reliability of the government’s homicide statistics, the Bloomberg analysis confirmed that the underlying decline in lethal violence appears to be genuine. As noted in the analysis, both the SESNSP figures and the separate homicide data compiled by Mexico’s national statistics agency, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography or INEGI, show a substantial reduction in killings, even though the two sources differ over the precise magnitude of the decline.
While the decline is impressive and appears to provide tangible and compelling evidence of the efficacy of Mexico’s new security strategy, it should not, in any way, be interpreted to mean that the country has definitively subdued the powerful cartels that continue to terrorize Mexico. Various powerful criminal organizations remain active in numerous regions of Mexico, where they continue to engage in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, and a range of other illicit activities.
Sinaloa perhaps provides the starkest illustration of the seemingly intractable nature of the struggle against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. In mid-September, the Mexican government was forced to deploy approximately 3,400 security and military agents including Special Forces personnel to Culiacán, Mazatlán, and key highway corridors throughout the state an effort to contain the wave of violence that has persisted for two years due to the ongoing civil war between factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. Although there are reports that the security situation in Sinaloa has improved slightly as a result of the deployment, the underlying conflict between rival factions of the Sinaloa Cartel to date remains largely unresolved.
