Enrique Méndez and Fernando Camacho
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, October 29, 2025, p. 3
Last night the Chamber of Deputies approved the general law against extortion, which provides for a basic criminal offense to punish the crime with imprisonment of 6 to 15 years, which will increase according to a list of 34 aggravating circumstances, but in four states where the penalty is greater it could allow the immediate release of at least 600 convicted of that crime, according to PT and PRI calculations.
The law, as well as the reforms to the Federal Penal Code so that extortion merits informal preventive detention and is prosecuted ex officio, was generally voted unanimously, but later a reservation from Morena, PT, PVEM and MC to mitigate the sanctions against police officers, agents of the Public Ministry and prison directors who fail to report the crime divided the votes.
Thus, in particular, it was approved with 339 votes in favor, 100 against – one from the Moreno member Rocío Barrera Puc and nine PT members – and four abstentions from PT and Morena, and it will be sent to the Senate for review.
In the presidential initiative, as well as in the opinion, a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison was proposed for police officers, agents of the Public Ministry, judges and directors of complicit prisons, but with the approved reservation it was reduced from 5 to 12 years.
Morena argued that it is a principle of proportionality. “The seriousness of the omission is not equal to the commission of the crime,” the bench’s coordinator, Ricardo Monreal, argued on the stand.
He insisted that “a greater penalty cannot be applied to the official who omits the extortionist. It is a logical, proportional reason.”
In contrast, and in a position joined by the PT, the PAN coordinator, Elías Lixa, proposed an inverse solution; that is, increase the basic criminal offense from 10 to 20 years, to harmonize it with that of omission. Faced with the rejection, the PAN member slipped that he would be facing a Bermudez lawin reference to the former Secretary of Security of Tabasco, under trial precisely for extortion and kidnapping.
Based on the insistence of PAN and PT to increase the basic criminal rate to avoid the release of hundreds of extortionists in the entities, Monreal said that an internal debate took place and with the PT, in which this effect of the law was analyzed.
“Yes, it is an issue that arises in four states; in fact, in Chihuahua the sentence is up to 30 years and if one is serving a sentence and has spent 20 years, this law can generate a conflict of retroactivity. We have already studied it and debated it,” he explained.
In turn, PT member Ricardo Mejía Berdeja proposed opening the reserve of his party to increase the basic criminal offense, but he specified that the omission of the complaint by a public official is a different criminal offense than extortion.
“It is a linked crime,” he said. He added that if the extortion is committed by an official, the specific aggravating circumstance will be applied, which will increase the penalty to 25 years in prison, in addition to lacking the benefits of early release, commutation of the sentence or house arrest.
At the start of a debate that lasted 10 and a half hours, the president of the Justice Commission, the Moreno member Julio César Moreno Rivera explained that, by having a general law and defining a single type of crime, there will be “a single force of persecution so that the State acts as a united front.”
ex officio investigation
He explained that the investigation will begin ex officio, anonymous complaints will be received to number 089, telephone blocking in prisons will be imposed and among the aggravating factors are the “floor charge” or the “shock riders.”
Likewise, it is expected that the assets confiscated from the extortionists will finance the comprehensive repair of the damage, but it was noted that the forfeiture of ownership will not proceed in assets that have already been transferred to the federal government or the states.
