Murder is down, disappearances are up. Some smell a rat

Do these contrasting stats tell us if Mexico is getting more or less safe?

The phrase “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” is often attributed to Stalin, and in that sense, Mexico is well into Soviet-territory when it comes to the amount of death and suffering triggered by the so-called War on Drugs.

Mexico went from the lowest recorded number of homicides in the mid-2000’s to become one of the bloodiest countries not officially at war—from 8.09 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007 to 29.12 at its height in 2020.

Nowadays, though the violence is still eye-watering, something striking is happening. Since Claudia Sheinbaum came to power a year ago, her administration has reduced murder rates significantly—down by 25% from last year. However, critics have spotted a simultaneous trend: Disappearances have shot up by 16% in the same period.

“It is completely lacking in ethics to celebrate the decline in murders without talking about disappearances,” Santiago Corcuera, who most recently served as Chairman of the Committee for Enforced Disappearances of the United Nations from 2016 to 2017, told The Mexico Political Economist.

“Dissappearences” refer to someone whose whereabouts are unknown and whose absence is presumed to be due to criminal activity. (This is different from a “forced disappearance” where the suspected perpetrator is the State itself). It is an unhelpfully broad categorisation, leading critics like Corcuera to worry that behind the government’s celebrations hides a sinister obfuscation of the facts.

Could it be that the government is hiding the real murder rate behind the rising number of disappearances?

Net positive?

The short answer is “no.” At least not if we take government data at face value:

From September 2024 to August 2025, homicides went from 98 to 68 murders per day. Over the same period, daily disappearances went from 34–6 to 40–45. That means that, roughly, there are 30 fewer violent deaths per day now compared to an average of 5–10 more disappearances.

Even if we took most disappearances to imply death, which sadly may be true—“it is common for people to be deprived of life soon after they are deprived of their freedom,” said Corcuera—the decline in the murder rate still outstrips the increase in disappearances.

The obvious next question is whether one should take government data at face value.

Mexican statistical agencies are famously world class. Moreover, there is redundancy between separate and autonomous agencies, alongside a number of independent watchdog organisations that exist to keep the government honest. Yet, when it comes to criminal statistics, things aren’t as clearcut.

Failed Stat

Eagle-eyed readers will have detected that, while the number for homicides was rather precise, the number for disappearances was more of an estimated range.

“Our criminal stats are mostly useless because of all the unreported crime,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a research professor at CIDE, a university in Mexico City, and formerly a member of the Mexican Truth Commission in charge of investigating human rights violations between 1965 and 1990. He still however celebrates the clear decline in homicides, because it constitutes the country’s most reliable criminal measure.

“Reports measuring disappearances, however,” he told The Mexico Political Economist, “are the worst. When there is a homicide there is a body to speak of. When we’re talking about disappearances, what we’re really talking about is about reports of disappeared people. It could actually refer to someone who migrated, someone who’s been in an accident… A common reason is when a woman abandons the home with her children unannounced, because she doesn’t want her husband to know where they are, she will be reported as disappeared.”

This statistical black hole allows critics and supporters of the government to find reasons to stick to their guns:

Critics will say that because disappearance stats are so untrustworthy, there is good reason to believe they are being undercounted or misinterpreted. “We have at least 72,000 unidentified but accounted for dead bodies in official mass graves which are not classified as homicides because we don’t know who they are. They will forever remain catalogued as ‘disappeared,’” said Corcuera.

There are also sinister incentives to meddle with the data.

A recent report found that the government of the state of Baja California was deliberately mislabeling disappearance reports so they wouldn’t show in the stats. Pérez Ricart says that this is why redundancy is important in these sort of measuring exercises: If a local prosecutor mislabels too many homicides or disappearances, then their numbers will stick out when compared to, say, those of the National Statistical Institute (INEGI). Therefore, deliberate alteration can’t exceed a margin of about 5–6%.

Even if numbers aren’t being overtly tampered with, there are other considerations. Perhaps simplified bureaucratic procedures have made submitting disappearance reports easier—thus increasing the number of disappeared. Equally, distrust in the authorities may stave off people from submitting a report—resulting in the number of disappearances being undercounted.

The ostrich flies blind

“The homicide rate doesn’t tell us how violent or how safe a country is but it is the best measure we have,” said Pérez Ricart.

Disappearance reports, he said by way of contrast, “should not be used as statistical measures but rather as a form of record keeping. It’s great that they exist because they help us find people, and they also allow us to understand the scale of the crisis. They allow us to keep it in the front pages. What we never had was a pedagogy on how to interpret this data.”

Pérez Ricart lamented that critics lent into this uncertainty and therefore “called everything into question.” Nevertheless, he admitted that Andrés Manuel López Obrador—Sheinbaum’s predecessor from 2018–2024—reacted in the other extreme, rejecting that disappearances were even an issue. “There’s been very little empathy on all sides,” he said.

This is still Corcuera’s chief criticism of the current government. “In [Sheinbaum’s] first annual State of the Union report she didn’t even mention disappearances.” There is still a “denialist narrative” from the government, he said, which sees those who insist on talking about the rise in disappearances as political adversaries rather than citizens with a legitimate grievance.

The number of disappeared in Mexico may be unknowable, but dismissing the families of the disappeared as statistical irrelevances is positively Stalinist.