Mexico's national crime register recorded 549 attempted femicides in the first seven months of 2026, more than the 363 completed femicides filed beside them. The federal government's flagship monthly account of the same subject, the Informe de violencia contra las mujeres published on Tuesday by the Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública, covers the same 32 states and carries the same cut-off, “Corte al 31 de julio de 2026”. Across its 98 pages the word “tentativa” does not appear once — not in a section heading, not in a chart title, not in the prologue. Both documents are produced by the same office from the same case files, reported month by month by the same 32 state prosecutors' offices. A category that now outnumbers femicide itself is missing from the report the ministry writes about violence against women.
The report is not a thin document. It has been published on the 25th of every month since February 2018 — its prologue says so: “A partir de febrero de 2018, este reporte se publica los días 25 de cada mes” — and its sections run from femicide through intentional and negligent homicide, intentional and negligent injury, kidnapping, child trafficking, extortion, corruption of minors, human trafficking, family violence, gender violence and rape, before a second half devoted to 911 emergency calls. Femicide is charted nationally, by state and by age group; the register's 382 femicide victims for the period include 380 women and two men. The report's prologue also advertises the new statistical methodology, saying it “permite generar estadísticos con perspectiva de género” and giving as its first reason the “desagregación de nuevos delitos relacionados con violencia contra la mujer, como Violación a la intimidad sexual”. That is a different new category, and the report never returns to it either; the word “intimidad” appears exactly once in the file, in that bullet. Chart headings survive text extraction from the deck — more than thirty “Víctimas mujeres de …” titles come out cleanly — so the absences are absences, not an artefact of reading a slide deck.
Nothing was deleted. The report exists to discharge Acuerdo 04/XLII/2017 of the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad Pública, named in its opening paragraph, and that 2017 accord fixed the list of things it counts. The attempted-femicide line is nine years younger: SESNSP's own nota metodológica opens by recording that “en febrero de 2026” the secretariat first published data under the new Registro Nacional de Incidencia Delictiva, “relativa a los delitos registrados en enero de 2026”. The July edition is the seventh monthly re-cut of the same deck since then, its internal file name still “20260811 Reporte de género - JUL2026.pptx”. An agreement written in 2017 is holding the shape of the ministry's monthly account of violence against women while the register underneath it changed.
The counting rules make the gap easy to miss. In the register, “Tentativa de feminicidio” sits inside the crime type “Feminicidio”, so anyone summing at type level gets 912 rather than 363 — which is why the nota metodológica instructs that for comparison with the historic femicide series the subtype “deberá excluirse”, and that it “deberá incorporarse” instead to “Otros delitos que atentan contra la vida y la integridad corporal”, the catch-all where attempts used to sit. The register's own manual, published alongside it, shows where the new line comes from: field 14 of every record is “Grado de consumación”, with three permitted values — “Tentativa, Consumado o No identificado”. A prosecutor's office fills that field, and a third option exists for declining to say.
What comes out the other side is not a map of violence but a map of 32 filing practices. Nuevo León alone accounts for 207 of the 549, 37.7 per cent of the national total, against 11 femicides and zero attempted intentional homicides; its monthly figures run 30, 21, 35, 25, 25, 39 and 32. That is not a discovery so much as a benchmark: the state fiscalía was publishing this category before the national line existed, and Milenio's municipal breakdown of 28 April, sourced to the fiscalía, carried 30 for January, 21 for February and 35 for March — identical to the register's national file.
At the other end, four states filed not a single attempted femicide in any of the seven months while recording 86 femicides between them. Sinaloa leads the country with 49, up from 24 in the same months of 2025 while the national total fell from 404 to 363, and filed none. The State of México filed 27 femicides, 548 intentional homicides, zero attempted homicides and 24,233 counts of lesiones dolosas, and no attempted femicide. Durango recorded 6 femicides, Baja California Sur 4, both with none. Those 86 are 23.7 per cent of every femicide in the register. Tlaxcala also filed zero, against 2 femicides, which takes the group to 88 and 24.2 per cent — but at the national ratio of 1.51 attempts per femicide Tlaxcala would be expected to file about three, and a zero there is ordinary chance. The others are not: the same ratio implies roughly 74 for Sinaloa and 41 for the State of México.
These are filed zeros, not gaps in the file. The state-level offences table is an identical block of 114 subtype-and-modality combinations for each of the 32 states, 3,648 rows in all, with no combination missing anywhere; a state that files nothing under a heading is affirmatively reporting nothing. The companion category behaves the same way. Seven states — Durango, Hidalgo, the State of México, Nuevo León, Sinaloa, Tlaxcala and Yucatán — filed zero attempted intentional homicides while recording 1,649 of Mexico's 8,994 intentional homicides, 18.3 per cent of the national count, against a national attempted-homicide total of 1,432.
The bookkeeping trail confirms it is practice rather than an absence of violence. Hidalgo filed zero for six consecutive months and exactly one in July, its first. Sinaloa's old catch-all bucket — the one the nota says attempts used to live in — collapsed by 91 per cent, from 383 offences in January to July 2025 to 36 in the same months of 2026, without a single case surfacing under either new attempt subtype. The State of México's went the other way, from 926 to 1,017. Two states, one national instruction, opposite responses. The numbers also move after publication: El Economista reported 371 attempted-femicide victims and 267 femicide victims for January to May on 30 June, and the July cut now puts those same five months at 385 and 274.
The register's newest category is missing from the outside audits too. Causa en Común published a state-by-state anomaly review of this very data cut on 17 August, with “zero reports” as one of its five alert categories, and flagged Nayarit on trafficking victims, several states on kidnapping and violent robbery, and Puebla on femicide undercounting. Attempted femicide is not among the categories it examined. Seven months into the new register, the line that outnumbers femicide is being counted by everyone and read by no one.