Three weeks after the Michoacán killings highlighted the state’s failed fight against organized crime, President Claudia Sheinbaum defended a record reduction in homicides since taking office. The national security strategy has managed to reduce the number of intentional killings by 37% since September 2024, according to data presented at the National Palace on Tuesday. At the same time, the Security Cabinet presented the results obtained since the beginning of the Michoacán Plan in the municipalities affected by the extortion of organized crime. Since last week, five arrests have been made in Buenavista, Cotija and Huetamo, as well as seizures of weapons, drugs and explosives.
Sheinbaum assured that since he entered the government in October last year he has managed to reduce homicides by 28%, well above the 9% achieved by Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his six years in office. “There are 32 fewer murders per day,” he declared in the morning press conference and cited as sources of the data the prosecutors of the 32 states that send their data every day. The president, proud of these results despite the security crisis experienced in Michoacán and Sinaloa, explained that this reduction was achieved thanks to “the attention to the causes” that her government considers priorities to prevent the ranks of organized crime from swelling (education and poverty, above all), in addition to the strengthening of the National Guard. “There have been 37,000 perpetrators of violence arrested in these 13 months throughout the republic,” he boasted. Furthermore, it has ensured an overall reduction in other crimes plaguing the country. Specifically, there was a decrease in kidnappings by 59%, in company robberies by 56.8% and in violent robberies by 48.6%.
The data on the murders contrast with the social perception of insecurity and with the brutal crimes that have occurred in recent weeks against Bernardo Bravo, a peasant leader who had denounced the extortion, and the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, who had raised his voice against the crime rampant in the area. Their murders served as a spark to urgently address the state security crisis, where local mafias and cartels compete for territory and control of trade. The Government has assured that it is a “national priority” to attempt once again to pacify the State and to do so it has launched an offensive called the “Michoacán Plan for Peace and Justice”. The first results of the operations last Thursday and Sunday managed to capture several suspects and seize shipments of weapons and drugs in the municipalities that had reported the suffocating pressure of taxes to be paid to organized crime.
In the operations carried out in Buenavista, Cotija and Huetamo, the Army and the National Guard managed to secure 20 firearms, 3 grenades, a grenade launcher, 129 magazines, 5,918 cartridges, 330 kg of synthetic drugs, 52 kilos of explosive material, as well as vehicles and tactical equipment.
