How Mexico Sweeps Murders Under The Rug

A quiet bureaucratic trick is reshaping the country’s homicide data

Mexico’s struggle with violence is often reduced to familiar imagery: cartel showdowns, military deployments, and headlines that flatten a complex reality into a single storyline.

But one of the country’s most pervasive security problems is far quieter, more bureaucratic, and profoundly consequential: the manipulation of homicide statistics by state prosecutors.