On average, of every 100 investigations initiated, fewer than six reached the hands of a judge, and only three became a criminal proceeding. In addition, there were 13 prosecutors’ offices (40%) that did not obtain a single sentence.
According to the Report of the Citizen Anti-Corruption Observatory 2023-2024, in the first half of this year, the organizations opened 7,258 investigations, but only managed to bring 523 before a judge. Of that number, only 27 ended with a conviction, that is, 0.4% of the open files.
In addition, there are five prosecutor’s offices that did not achieve any judicial investigation in that period: Campeche, Chiapas, Colima, Guerrero and Sinaloa. While 19 did not report any conviction.
Insufficient budget
The results of these organizations are limited because most lack sufficient budget, personnel and materials to respond to workloads and fulfill their mandate optimally.
In 2023, the national average of the budget assigned to these agencies was 28 million pesos. However, some prosecutor’s offices have extremely low spending, such as that of Guerrero, which received 3.6 million pesos last year. This is equivalent to 11 times less money than that allocated to the Durango Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, whose budget was 46 million.
