Arturo Sánchez Jiménez and Emir Olivares
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, February 12, 2026, p. 11
54 percent of the population in Mexico trusts the federal government, a figure higher than the average of 39 percent registered in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Anti-Corruption Secretariat reported yesterday after the publication of the Corruption Perception Index 2025, by Transparency International, which awarded Mexico 27 points – one more than in 2024 – and placed it in 141st place out of 182 countries. evaluated.
In a statement, the agency stressed that the index “mainly collects the opinion of businessmen, financial risk analysts and experts,” based on sources such as the World Economic Forum, Standard & Poor’s Global and the magazine The Economistso he considered it necessary to contextualize his results. He pointed out that, compared to these specialized consultations, there are measurements with national representativeness that show different evolution in citizen perception.
The secretariat affirmed that in recent years the country has registered progress in the perception of the fight against corruption and in trust towards public institutions, particularly the federal government. He indicated that the surveys reflect a gradual reduction in the direct experience of improper acts and strengthening of institutional legitimacy, which, he assured, shows “growing disconnection” between the opinion of certain elites and the experience of the rest of the population.
As an example, he cited the National Survey of Government Quality and Impact 2023 of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. According to this instrument, the perception that corruption is frequent or very frequent reached 91.1 percent in 2017 and decreased to 83.1 percent in 2023. In addition, the prevalence rate fell from 15.7 thousand people per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2019 to 14 thousand in 2023, while the incidence decreased from 30.4 thousand to 25.4 thousand acts per 100 thousand inhabitants.
Although Mexico did not register significant progress in the ranking Globally, the agency highlighted that the downward trend was broken and described the additional point obtained this year as relevant, in an international context marked by the stagnation or regression of numerous countries.
