President Claudia Sheinbaum opened her morning press conference on Wednesday with a statistic her government has been building toward for several months: intentional homicides nationwide were down forty-nine per cent compared with the same point in October 2024, when she took office. The figure was drawn from a fresh data release by the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System and is the largest absolute decline in any single year of Mexican homicide statistics since the series began in 1997.
Sheinbaum framed the decline as the cumulative outcome of three policy strands: the federal pact with state governors signed in February that pooled command of the National Guard with state police in seven priority states; Operation Swarm, a federal task-force model launched in November targeting fentanyl precursors and cartel financial networks; and a major reorganisation of the Sinaloa federation that has weakened its capacity for inter-faction warfare.
A total of 54,297 people have been arrested in connection with Operation Swarm since its launch, the president said, including the former mayor of Tequila in Jalisco and a number of officials from the state of Mexico and Morelos. Federal prosecutors have so far filed charges in 18,400 cases, the rest are still under investigation, and 1,940 have already been convicted. Security secretary Omar García Harfuch said separately that financial intelligence units had frozen roughly 9.4 billion pesos in cartel-linked accounts since October.
The decline has not been even across the country. Homicides in Guanajuato are down sixty-two per cent and in Zacatecas fifty-seven per cent, but Chihuahua remains roughly flat and Sinaloa is up nineteen per cent year-on-year, reflecting the continuing internal war between the Chapitos faction and the Mayos. The Sinaloa increase has been concentrated in Culiacán and Mazatlán, where federal forces have established forward command posts.
The US-Mexico security file remains tense. Sheinbaum used part of her press conference to push back, again, against US Senate accusations that Sinaloa governor Rubén Rocha Moya has cartel ties, calling the claim "evidence-free political theatre." Her foreign secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente said Mexico would not accept any unilateral US designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organisations and warned that such a step would "complicate the cooperation that has produced these very results."
The Mexican peso, which has rallied roughly 3.6 per cent against the dollar this month on the back of the security data and the broader Latin American risk-on trade, briefly broke below 17.20 per dollar in Wednesday's session. Sheinbaum's formal accountability report, scheduled for May 31 at the Monumento a la Revolución rather than the Zócalo, will use the homicide data as the centerpiece of her first eight months in office.