[REPORT] Hugs No More, Bullets Galore? Mexico’s Security Policy One Year Into Sheinbaum’s Presidency

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Fabiano G. M. Belloube

Content Writer, Latin American Affairs at The New Global Order

Fabiano holds a master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford, where he researched interbranch tensions surrounding Brazil’s Supreme Court, and a second master’s in Religious Studies, concentrating on the intersection of religion and politics. A high school dropout, he has hitchhiked across Brazil, crossed the Atlantic on a cargo ship, competed in mixed martial arts, and worked in Egypt making carpets. He is terrible at table tennis.

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• [REPORT] Hugs No More, Bullets Galore? Mexico’s Security Policy One Year Into Sheinbaum’s Presidency - 22 October, 2025
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Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO; 2019–2024) entered office under the banner of abrazos, no balazos (“hugs, not bullets”), pledging to promote demilitarisation and welfare redistribution as lenses of public security policy. In practice, he left a militarised, federal-centred security apparatus. One year into Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration (2024–), efforts have focused on improving performance within the inherited system without overtly disrupting its structure, with early indicators showing measurable gains.

The Security Legacy of López Obrador

During López Obrador’s term substantive resources were directed to programmes intended to address structural drivers of violence. Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro registered over 2.3 million beneficiaries between 2019 and 2021 but saw a 40% budget reduction from its launch year to FY2021 (Justice in Mexico 2021). The Sembrando Vida programme, targeted at rural employment, received a 15.1% budget increase from 2020 to 2021. The Benito Juárez scholarship’s budget grew by 65.3 billion pesos across the same period (Ibid.). Across these programmes, which were administered on a national scale, direct correlation to violence reduction in high-risk municipalities was neither formally verified nor publicised through disaggregated assessments. As opposed to earlier models of community co-participation, AMLO’s framework shifted toward a top-down provisioning model, in which the federal government remained the sole provider of security without formally integrating civil society into violence prevention design (Marchand 2024).

Security structures underwent a reorganisation which substantively contrasted with the official pro-demilitarisation discourse. In 2019, the Federal Police was dissolved and replaced by the National Guard. This new force was formed through the integration of military police units from the Secretariat of National Defence (SEDENA) and the Secretariat of the Navy (SEMAR), alongside personnel from the disbanded Federal Police. Although nominally under civilian control through the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), effective operational command resided with military oversight. In May 2020, AMLO issued a presidential order authorising military forces to perform public security tasks alongside the National Guard until 2024 (Ibid.). In 2022, executive oversight was formally transferred from SSPC to the SEDENA, consolidating the National Guard’s subordination to the military chain of command.

By the end of the administration, over 115,000 personnel were deployed under the National Guard structure. According to deployment data compiled by Mexico’s Public Security Secretariat, more than two-thirds of operational units were assigned to tasks unrelated to direct crime suppression, including infrastructure protection (especially PEMEX pipelines) and presence-based patrols in high-transit corridors. This operational alignment mirrored U.S. security priorities under the Mérida Initiative (2008–2021) and its successor, the Bicentennial Framework (2021–). Coordination on fentanyl interdiction and migrant containment intensified in 2023 and 2024 under bilateral pressures. Mexican forces were increasingly tasked with pre-emptive detentions and buffer-zone control in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

A Setback for Security?

Public security outcomes remained broadly static. According to SESNSP data, annual intentional homicide counts stood at 33,742 in 2018 and peaked at 34,588 in 2019. From 2020 through 2023, the figure stabilised near 34,000 annually, with no significant downward inflection. Aggregate homicide total across AMLO’s six-year term exceeded 190,000. Extortion, kidnapping, and robbery rates also remained elevated. Clearance rates for homicide, according to INEGI estimates, fluctuated between 1.3% and 2.7%, with wide state-level variance. Rule of law metrics deteriorated: Mexico fell from 99th to 104th place in the World Justice Project index between 2019 and 2021. Public perception of insecurity, as measured by INEGI’s ENSU survey, remained above 75% nationwide during the entire administration.

In the final nationwide survey prior to AMLO’s departure, conducted by Buendía&Márquez from 15–20 August 2024, López Obrador held an overall approval rating of 73%, up from 69% in May of that year. However, sectoral breakdown of the same data showed a remarkable discrepancy between overall support and public perception of security outcomes: 47% of respondents stated that drug-related violence had increased during AMLO’s term; 11% cited public security as his greatest failure, the most frequently named policy domain among negatives; and 37% of voters identified security as the number-one priority for Sheinbaum’s upcoming administration, ahead of the economy (31%) and corruption (26%).

AMLO consolidated security policy under a bivalent militarised and welfare-oriented structure, while rhetorically favouring the latter valence. Budget was shifted to universalised social transfer schemes with no disaggregated targeting of high-violence zones and no evidence of effect on local rates. The National Guard replaced civilian policing as the principal deployment body, formally under SSPC but operationally directed by SEDENA. Homicide rates were the highest since 2006 and clearance rates remained structurally low (viz. McCormick & Sandin 2019). Public opinion on security was the most negative across policy fields.

Sheinbaum Administration (2024–): Optimisation Within Inherited Constraints 

Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, the National Guard remained under SEDENA operational command, and no timetable was issued for its civilianisation. Secretary Omar García Harfuch reaffirmed the Guard’s role as territorial stabiliser in high-fragmentation zones and maintained that, in the absence of functional subnational institutions, military-led security provision would remain in place; Sheinbaum, on her end, described the Guard’s status under SEDENA as a “virtue” (Gobierno de México 2024), citing access to the army’s social security services and training. Federal deployment levels were preserved across the first six months, with no major rotations or redistributions. In a May 2025 press note, SSPC confirmed continued use of the Guard for infrastructure protection and migrant containment, including permanent presence in the Interoceanic Corridor. Parallel reinforcement was authorised in Tapachula and Acayucan under joint SSPC-INM command, with a mandate to maintain pre-emptive control of irregular migrant flows at key transit bottlenecks.

Reorganisation measures within SSPC began in January. The Secretariat was internally divided into three coordination zones: federal operations, intelligence and technological systems, and regional anchoring. Personnel changes were limited to directorships and high-level support staff. In February, SSPC presented a draft national framework for public security intelligence, designed to link data environments from SEDENA, the Fiscalía General, SAT, CNBV, and CNI under a single access protocol. The Ley del Sistema Nacional de Investigación e Inteligencia was formally adopted on 1 July 2025, granting SSPC access to fiscal, biometric, and telecom records for investigative purposes, subject to prosecutorial approval. A new Subsecretaría de Inteligencia was established with coordination authority over technical operations. Integration with state-level C4 and C5 systems was defined as opt-in. Although five states signed initial pilot agreements for interconnection, most limited participation to non-binding information-sharing protocols.

Concurrently, SESNSP reinitiated consultations on the long-stalled homologation of subnational police careers. The federal proposal included a unified service record system and standardised certification scheme for municipal and state agents. A separate reform package assigned supervisory authority to SSPC for fiscal tracking of local police payrolls, citing evidence of parallel financing channels in five states. In June, the new Ley General del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública was enacted, mandating the creation of a National Public Security Academy with a centralised training model for operational agents and command-level staff. The first cohort of 1,000 officers began a nine-month programme in Q2, following a selection process.

The voluntary disarmament programme was relaunched in March in coordination with SEDENA. Between March and June, 1,847 firearms were surrendered across 33 collection points in Baja California, Michoacán, Zacatecas, Guerrero, and Chiapas. The weapons destruction protocol followed the 2018 model and was executed without press access. SSPC stated that prioritisation of these states reflected clustering of non-attributable homicides and gun-linked extortion in small commercial corridors (Gobierno de México. 2025a; Gobierno de la Ciudad de México 2025).

Between October 2024 and mid-July 2025, federal operations resulted in 26,692 detentions, seizure of over 14,000 firearms, and dismantlement of 1,193 clandestine laboratories. In the two weeks preceding the Q3 security briefing, SSPC reported 784 arrests and 28 additional lab neutralisations. Arrests of regional CJNG figures were confirmed in connection with joint-force actions along Route 110 and the Sierra-Costa corridor.

In summary, field posture under Sheinbaum retained AMLO-era form but shifted moderately in function. Intelligence structures were prioritised and formalised into inter-agency protocols with SSPC positioned as gatekeeper. Operations favoured targeted interdiction; seizures and arrests rose quarter-on-quarter, with tactical pressure coordinated across Guard, Army, and state police units. Surveillance and financial tracking expanded as active enforcement tools. The academy and career homologation scheme marked the start of a long-cycle institutional build, with leverage decisively held at federal level.

First-Year Indicators on Crime and Safety

According to official data from SESNSP and SSPC, between September 2024 and April 2025, intentional homicides declined by 24.9%, with 21 fewer deaths per day compared to September 2024; the lowest rate since April 2016. From October 2024 to early May 2025, over 10,000 firearms and nearly 1.5 tonnes of fentanyl were seized. The Northern Border Operation (from 5 February 2025) led to more than 3,000 arrests, 2,627 firearms, over 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 13,000 magazines, and 30 tonnes of drugs, including 163 kg and more than 1.13 million fentanyl pills. Authorities dismantled 896 clandestine methamphetamine labs across 19 states.

Targeted arrests included José Francisco “N” (“Alfa 1”) in Guanajuato, after which the state’s daily homicide average reportedly dropped from 12.7 to 6.5 between February and April. Other operations in Baja California Sur, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Jalisco and Nuevo León captured individuals linked to major drug trafficking and violent incidents, including María del Rosario “N”, wanted in the United States. Conversely, 26 members of groups including Sinaloa, Jalisco, Familia Michoacana, Zetas and Los Rojos were released between October 2024 and April 2025. According to SSPC data, 193 judicial rulings favoured accused individuals, resulting in 163 conditional releases and 2 definitive discharges. The extraditions of “Z-40” and “Z-42” were delayed 79 and 54 times, respectively.

According to SSPC, between October 2024 and April 2025, high-impact crimes nationwide declined by 19.25%. Comparing April 2025 to April 2024: femicide fell 26.6%, firearm injuries by 9.2%, kidnapping by 38.7%, extortion by 10.4%, and street robbery by 21.4%.

Despite the overall positive indicators, the Encuesta Nacional de Seguridad Urbana (ENSU) reports a persistent public sentiment of insecurity. As of June 2025, 63.2% of urban residents aged 18 and above reported feeling unsafe in their city, up from 61.9% in March 2025 and 59.4% in June 2024. Gender breakdown shows 68.5% of women and 56.7% of men felt unsafe (INEGI, ENSU 2025:3).

Perceptions of future security also remain negative. In June 2025, 57.9% of respondents expected conditions to remain bad or worsen over the next 12 months (32.5% igual de mal, 25.4% empeorará), compared to 54.5% in March 2025 and 51.8% in September 2024 (INEGI, ENSU 2025:10). Compared with previous years, however, these averages show no statistically significant deviation. Between September 2021 and October 2024, the arithmetic mean of perceived insecurity was 64.52%, geometric mean 64.46%, and harmonic mean 64.39%. From October 2024 to June 2025, these means remained slightly lower at 62.55%, 62.55%, and 62.54%, respectively. Averages of perceived future insecurity also track pre-Sheinbaum years; e.g., 59.4% in September 2021.

A separate survey by the Social Studies and Public Opinion Centre (CESOP) found that two-thirds of respondents believed police were largely controlled by organised crime; 36% believed authorities actively participated in criminal operations; 25% would not report a crime due to lack of trust. Corruption was seen as the main issue affecting police by 56% of respondents, and 66% believed it was unlikely to be eliminated. Asked about ways to restore confidence, 29% supported military deployment, 28% favoured vetting procedures, and just over 20% preferred full institutional overhaul. Over half of respondents approved of self-defence groups, though fewer believed they were effective at ensuring safety compared to official forces.

Conclusion

Early tentative indicators from Sheinbaum’s administration suggest improvements in public security outcomes relative to the previous term, whereas the overall perception of insecurity remains unaffected. Official data demonstrate fewer incidents across types of crime, particularly homicide, but these have not thus far translated into demonstrable shifts in public sentiment.

Several factors may account for this discrepancy. Given the decades-long entrenchment of crime as a major concern in Mexico, positive changes may require an extended active period before it ‘persuades’ public opinion. Moreover, insofar as security was identified as the top priority issue by the outgoing administration’s final surveys, the expectations placed on Sheinbaum’s government may be higher regarding security affairs, as compared to other policy domains wherein AMLO’s approval set a lower baseline.

One plausible caveat is the reliability of official data, as there is a lack of complementary independent metrics to corroborate or contest government reports. Nonetheless, given that official sources have been consistently applied across administrations, analysis permits current gains to be cautiously attributed to Sheinbaum’s specific outputs; particularly the formalisation of an inter-agency intelligence system and optimisation within the existing institutional framework, which her predecessor underutilised.

Sheinbaum inherits from her predecessor a militarised, federal-centred configuration of security apparati. Her initial success lies less in abandoning said configuration than in optimising delivery within its own constraints; a parametric rather than paradigmatic shift. With a heavy focus on intelligence, the administration operationalises an inter-agency bandwidth derivative of AMLO’s centralisation pathway, which Sheinbaum publicly supports and uses with greater effectiveness. Her neutrality in rhetoric, particularly the technical, non-ideological framing of enforcement, mitigates the optics of return to an enforcement-heavy paradigm; this differs from AMLO, whose strategy involved rhetorically prioritising moral and social framings, while avoiding to address enforcement altogether in his discourse.

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