The World Cup celebrations reflect the decline in homicidal violence in Mexico — a scourge that has persistently plagued the country over the past 20 years and the tip of a gigantic iceberg: criminal governance, the source of the country’s major unresolved problem. The news is good and is shining brightly on the global stage. On the opening day of the tournament, June 11, Mexico recorded 30 homicides, according to preliminary figures from the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), a record low. This Tuesday, with the latest data added to the platform, the figure hit a new low of 27.

Taken out of context, the figures can appear shocking because of how high they are, but it is important to consider where the North American country is coming from: counts of above 70 murders a day at the start of Claudia Sheinbaum’s term, just a year and a half ago. It was even worse before that. In the year of the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Mexico recorded 33,287 murders, an average of more than 90 a day, and earlier, during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the number rose to 36,685 — the second-highest in the country’s history, according to the National Institute of Statistics. Pending the agency’s final figures, 2025, Sheinbaum’s first full year in office, could show a considerable decline at close to 20,000 fewer murders.

Wrapped in problems of all kinds — teachers’ protests, demonstrations by families of the disappeared, and constant threats from Washington over drug cartels — Sheinbaum’s executive branch is boasting about its major success, a claim often challenged with the argument that the figures hide a more complex reality in which organized crime still calls the shots, whether it is killing people or not. The numbers also raise eyebrows among activists and analysts, who note that the number of people missing in the country — a range from 40,000 to over 130,000 — is linked to the decline in homicides, a hypothesis that has not been proven.

The figures are what they are, and Sheinbaum and her team gleefully brandish spreadsheets and statistical tables. This Tuesday, in one of his two monthly press briefings alongside Sheinbaum, Security Cabinet spokesman Omar García Harfuch closed his remarks by citing the data. “There has been a 46% decrease in the national daily average of intentional homicides,” he said, using the start of the president’s term as a reference point. “This represents 39 fewer homicides each day. This May is the lowest since May 2015,” he added.

The road has been complicated and the future looks as challenging as the past few months. The blow against crime has been significant, but it remains large and powerful. When Andrés Manuel López Obrador left the presidency at the end of September 2024, the situation was dire. Mexico was recording more than 80 murders a day, with peaks over 90. Large criminal conglomerates reigned over different territories, notably the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), particularly in the country’s central-east. The word “reigned” is not used lightly: crime acted as a manager of both legal and illegal economies, poisoning public life and bending it to its methods.

Battles between criminal groups, part of the landscape in previous years, intensified. In Guerrero, Colima, Zacatecas, Baja California, and Guanajuato, among other states, criminal networks flexed their muscle in countless battles, blows that reached into the political establishment, which was linked to them by force, necessity, or ambition. This wasn’t a new phenomenon that emerged under López Obrador’s watch. Previous administrations had their share of responsibility, but the veteran politician from Tabasco — wary of the excesses committed by security forces in previous six-year terms — took a step back. With their eyes always on the playing field, the cartels advanced.

It is not that the situation has radically changed now. Criminal rule continues in many parts of the country, but Sheinbaum’s government, pushed strongly from the north with Donald Trump back in the White House, has stepped forward. Aware of the war between factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, a conflict that began in September 2024, the Security Cabinet practically dismantled the main faction, Los Chapitos, responsible for criminal governance in Sinaloa according to a U.S. indictment against politicians in the state — including the governor, of the ruling Morena party like Sheinbaum, and the former security secretary, a retired general.

The focus then turned to Jalisco, the CJNG stronghold — the group that had grown the most over the last 10 years. In barely two months, authorities killed its absolute leader, Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho,” who until then had seemed untouchable, and arrested its number three, Audias Flores, “El Jardinero.” The crisis of disappearances in that state and neighboring areas, and evidence that the group was forcibly recruiting young people, forced the authorities to act. The Security Cabinet has also tried to strike at networks of political-criminal complicity with Operation Enjambre in the State of Mexico, Jalisco, and Morelos, with dozens of local officials detained.

The question now is whether Sheinbaum and her team will continue to untangle the criminal web — the knot tightly bound by decades of impunity and laissez-faire, the basic condition that allowed crime and violence to advance. With the mafias contained — or at least warned that murder and extortion will not be tolerated — the Security Cabinet knows the only path forward is to deepen Operation Enjambre and disentangle the exercise of public service from cartel ambition once and for all. Otherwise, any reduction in homicide rates could become anecdotal, reversible at the first sign of official hesitation.

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At the helm of the pressure strategy on Mexico designed in Washington, on the hard-line side, there are two individuals: Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka. They are two well-known figures from Donald Trump’s circle of loyalists, both allies of his during his first presidency and whom the president recruited as soon as he secured a second term.

Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, is the better-known of the two, and is noted for his aggressive style and for serving between 2017 and 2021 as the architect of Trump’s most xenophobic policies.

Gorka worked for only seven months during Trump’s first term — enough time to advocate for the controversial ban on seven majority-Muslim countries that marked Trump’s debut in the White House. He also helped introduce into the MAGA movement an idea that has since become central to its rhetoric: that Islam is an existential threat to Western civilization.

After years as a MAGA media commentator, Gorka has returned to frontline politics as senior director for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council. In that role he has helped craft a newly successful strategy: making the fight against “narco-terrorism” a priority in Latin America, while framing criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking as an imminent threat to national security.

Part of that plan has involved adding some of those cartels to the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. It has also led to a campaign of extrajudicial military operations that has already claimed the lives of more than 200 crew members of alleged drug-running speedboats in Caribbean and Pacific waters.

Since the arrest on January 3 of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who is awaiting trial in New York on drug-related charges, and with the machinery to strangle Cuba running at full speed to force change on the island, Mexico — long present in U.S. calculations — appears to have gained prominence in the priorities of the White House’s new Monroe Doctrine of interventionism, with moves such as the Department of Justice charging the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha, and nine other senior state officials of links to a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Faced with rising tension in bilateral relations and with Trump’s strategy — the U.S. president has not concealed his wish for a military deployment and is pressing for cooperation against the cartels with neighbors such as Honduras and Guatemala — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum asked at a mass event last Sunday: “Is this really a legitimate interest in fighting organized crime, or are they trying to influence the 2027 election in our country?” Sheinbaum was also alluding to the increasingly evident alliances between the MAGA movement and Mexico’s far right.

“All of Miller’s obsessions converge on Mexico,” says a Washington source familiar with the bilateral relationship, listing the administration’s black marks and priorities that include irregular immigration, drug trafficking, and reaffirming U.S. national identity. “And to strengthen his hard-line stance the success of the narco-terrorism concept is essential, the reconceptualization of the so-called war on drugs that allows them to direct intelligence and military resources at it,” the source adds.

Fundamentalism in the background

After years in which Islamist terrorism was the primary U.S. concern — and as the country approaches the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — narcotrafficking moved to the top with the May publication of the U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, which also takes aim at (and equates jihadism with drug mafias) a supposed domestic enemy: “Violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

After the document was published, Gorka — who was born in London to Hungarian parents and has been a U.S. citizen since 2012 — told Reuters that the strategy “prioritizes, above all, neutralizing terrorist threats in the hemisphere [the Americas] by disabling cartel operations until these groups are incapable of bringing their drugs, members, and trafficking victims into the United States.”

In March, Gorka spoke at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and offered a more theoretically elaborate justification for the pressure on Mexico than usual. “Trump believes in the Westphalian system of national sovereignty,” he said, attributing surprising subtlety to the president’s political analysis. “Imagine if Mexico operated as a fully Westphalian nation-state that exercised sovereignty in all its departments and municipalities,” the White House adviser continued. “Also, what is the other requirement of a nation-state? Not only sovereignty, but also the monopoly on the use of force. If cartels are driving heavily armored vehicles — often better armed than some units of the national armed forces — then you do not possess the monopoly on the use of force nor do you exercise sovereignty. Therefore, whether it is the United States, our allies or our partners, we cannot be safe in the field of counter-terrorism nor protect against terrorist threats if we do not understand the importance of exercising real sovereignty.”

Beyond the fight against drug trafficking — which often ignores that so much supply also responds to demand originating in the United States — the pressure on the southern neighbor is manifold. There are also tariffs, with the USMCA free trade agreement under renegotiation, and border control, a point Miller flagged from the start of Trump’s second presidency, which he likes to boast has seen “zero crossings” since he took office.

On that agenda, with different priorities acting simultaneously, “what matters on one of those fronts does not always matter in the others,” the Washington source explains. Hence the sometimes contradictory messages coming from the center of power in Washington, such as the one delivered this week by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin. Speaking to the House of Representatives, he said he had traveled to Mexico City to “talk with Sheinbaum and her cabinet about cooperation” and was “impressed that they have been very cooperative, much more cooperative than the previous administration.”

It is the old carrot-and-stick strategy, in which Sheinbaum appears to handle herself well with an administration in Washington where concessions work but where limits also exist. An administration in which two of its hard men, Miller and Gorka, belong to the group that administers the sticks.

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Only 24 hours remain before the World Cup kicks off in Mexico and the country is going though its final dress rehearsals. Preventing demonstrations on opening day is already a pipe dream: negotiations with teachers have stalled and search groups will march to make their missing relatives visible. With everyone in position and the cards on the table, attention is focused on avoiding the worst-case scenario for the government of Claudia Sheinbaum — an image of a police officer striking a teacher circling the globe on the day the country is playing for its international image. The concern is not unfounded: on the first day of protests a teacher lost an eye in clashes with police. The past two weeks have tested containment measures, and Wednesday will be the last chance to fine-tune the public staging. To ease the pressure, authorities have canceled classes for Thursday and ordered remote work for public servants.

The opening match will be the first of five games played in Mexico City. There are 13 matches in total across the country, which is expected to receive more than five million fans, according to official forecasts. The government is banking on World Cup fever to dilute the complaints. The tournament — the third to be hosted at Estadio Azteca — has acted as a catalyst in a country riven by social crises. Thousands of teachers — 10,000 according to the union, 3,000 according to the government — have camped in the historic downtown for two weeks with the same demand they made 18 months ago: a return to public pensions, a request the government considers unworkable. After 50 working tables, neither Rosa Icela Rodríguez nor Mario Delgado, the Interior and Education secretaries leading negotiations, have managed to stop the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) from returning to the streets, despite warnings given a year ago. So far, the massive police deployment has prevented them from reaching Estadio Azteca and the Zócalo, where the president had planned to attend the opening match — now uncertain and pending the protest’s evolution.

Collectives that search for the disappeared have also announced marches for this Wednesday and for Thursday morning. It was the last recourse they had left. Mothers have already put their children’s faces on national team shirts, in a sticker album, on banners along avenues — they have done everything to force people to look into the eyes of the roughly 133,000 people who remain unaccounted for in the country. The opening date is their last spotlight. At the last minute, a protest for judicial independence in the city’s south and a contingent of Ayotzinapa students — who arrived on Monday with explosives that were confiscated — also joined them. The government has managed, however, to halt the powerful farmers’ front, which told EL PAÍS that it has given the executive this week’s breathing room because talks with the new head of the Agriculture Secretariat are on track.

With the Colossus of Santa Úrsula sealed off for a one-kilometer radius, Sheinbaum’s government will focus on keeping all elevated roads leading directly to the stadium open. Authorities will allow entry to this last protected stretch from 6.00 a.m., that is, seven hours before kick-off. “Fans’ access is guaranteed. We only ask that they arrive early. If someone wants to arrive at the last minute, they may face more complications. Be more prepared — that’s what we ask,” Mexico City’s secretary of government, César Craviotto, said on Tuesday. With the planned marches and tourists in the capital, authorities are now relying only on peaceful coexistence. The aim is to contain, not confront. The president has repeatedly said during her morning briefings that the right to protest is guaranteed and that her government will never punish public demonstrations. Sheinbaum is less concerned about Tlalpan Avenue being closed than about Mexico projecting an image of repression before Shakira takes the stage.

Teachers explode, countryside concedes

Over the past year Sheinbaum has faced two major domestic challenges: the organizing power of the CNTE and the farmers’ pressure on the highways. The government has chaired one negotiation table after another for months to prevent unrest from getting out of control, but the results have been mixed. While teachers press in the streets to unblock their main demand — the return to public pensions — the countryside says it is tentatively satisfied with the course of talks. “We don’t feel completely attended to, but we do feel we will make progress,” says Eraclio Rodríguez, one of the leaders of the National Front for the Defense of the Countryside, which has granted the government the enjoyment of the opening match, though it does not rule out mobilizations afterward.

Interlocutors play a different role in each case. While teachers point to dissatisfaction with the proposed measures — the latest being to strengthen the only public pension fund and create a public insurer — the farmers’ representative speaks of a change “like night and day” at the Agriculture Secretariat, previously headed by Julio Berdegué and now by his former undersecretary, Columba López. “We are doing better, things are going well,” Rodríguez says, contrasting that with the difficulties they face with the economy minister, Marcelo Ebrard. The picture changes on the teachers’ side. “This is not a personality issue. She [Rosa Icela Rodríguez] has the disposition. They are decent people, they have treated us well; the problem is substantive: they are not proposing to repeal the ISSSTE law (which governs public-sector retirement),” summarizes Pedro Hernández, CNTE’s general secretary in Mexico City.

The head of the public body, Martí Batres, and Sheinbaum herself once mobilized in the streets in the same way they are now. They know each other, they are the same people on both sides, and, broadly speaking, they respect one another. That adds a layer of complexity to negotiations, but it does not resolve them. “They have a history of fighting for rights. Sometimes power makes you forget that. We would think that sympathy should favor negotiation frameworks,” the union leader laments.

Disappointment has spread through the most radical sector of the teaching ranks while the government bets on fatigue and a deterrent police presence in mobilizations that always manage to secure some additional measure, but never the one they want. According to the government, a return to public pensions would require a disbursement equal to 20% of national GDP — an interpretation teachers reject and one that has driven them to escalate tensions on the eve of the tournament’s opening. It is unclear which side time will favor once the collective euphoria takes hold of the national mood.

The disappeared, a perpetual crisis

Among all of Mexico’s crises there is an old lament: a country where, government after government, thousands go missing and no authority halts the tragedy. International bodies have described it as a humanitarian emergency, but inside the country it is so common that it sometimes goes unnoticed. Every World Cup venue has its square, its memorial to the disappeared, a space where families insist on leaving that reminder: many are still missing. So far Sheinbaum’s government has presented a package of laws and a reinterpretation of the missing persons registry, both heavily criticized by collectives. With the World Cup’s imminent arrival, the president stepped up the pace. “In recent months we have had meetings to build some improvements to the investigation protocol and the law,” says Jacky Palmeros, who founded the collective Una luz en el camino after the disappearance of her daughter, Monserrat Uribe, in 2020 in Iztapalapa, east of the capital: “But there is a lack of willingness and commitment.”

These meetings, however, have been accompanied by what the collectives define as “a new way of repressing and violating families”: removing the photos and banners of the disappeared as soon as families put them up. Faced with that scenario, they decided to march. “Our intent is never to sabotage the World Cup; it is not to prevent people from going, watching and enjoying themselves, only to make visible what you have so strenuously tried to hide. In that context, we ask that upcoming actions be respected,” Palmeros told Secretary of Government César Craviotto this week. “They told us we will not be able to approach, to make ourselves visible and to protest freely because they will close access to free movement,” the activist adds, saying there “is a feeling of hostility in the air”: “There is fear, I think, on both sides. No one knows what will happen. All that remains is to wait. Neither they nor we will change our minds.”

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