Do arrests reduce violence?
One of the reasons for the increase in arrests of alleged criminals is that President Sheinbaum’s government changed its security strategy: it went from López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” to a frontal attack, which involved more security.
Miguel Garza, executive director of the Institute for Security and Democracy (INSYDE), explains that although several arrests may be the product of intelligence work, they do not necessarily have an impact on reducing violence.
“A significant number of generators of violence cease to be in circulation, so violence could temporarily decrease, but it may also happen that, as leaders in criminal gangs are replaced, they are replaced in increasingly violent ways,” he points out.
“So, it could be an adverse effect, that more cases of violence or homicides with more violence, that is, with more violent features, would begin to be noticed,” says the security expert.
Garza maintains that beyond the number of arrests, the government should report how many of these people are still in prison and what their legal status is, otherwise, everything remains in striking numbers.
“It would be necessary to complement with information about each of those arrests. What happened? Because there could have been almost 35,000 arrests, but what happened at the time of being made available at the ministerial headquarters,” he questions.
“That is, of those, how many showed up for detention control. And in how many of those the Prosecutor’s Office formulated an accusation, the judge decreed it legally and the accusation was formed, and how many of those are in the stage of expanding the investigation and remained in informal preventive detention.”
In her first government report, the president reported a 32% decrease in intentional homicides, going from 87 daily cases in September 2024 to 59 in the same month of 2025.
Armando Vargassecurity coordinator of the organization México Evalúa, suggests that the acceleration in arrests is due to the pressures that Donald Trump’s government has imposed on Mexico since January.
“All these seizures, arrests and everything that has to do with this operational weakening of organized crime, understood as the dismantling of its assets for the production and trafficking of drugs and other illicit markets, is a strategy that seeks to mitigate the pressures from the United States,” he considers.
