The dynamics that will deepen in 2026
The most realistic projection for next year is not encouraging. In Michoacán, the internal fractures of organized crime that characterized 2025—disputes over territory between regional cartels and their competition with local groups—tend to intensify violence before generating balance. This historical pattern suggests that 2026 will see more aggressive confrontations, not appeasement. In Sinaloa, the capture of big bosses has generated a power vacuum that multiple actors are trying to fill, multiplying the points of conflict. Guerrero maintains a devastating peculiarity: the convergence between drug trafficking, illegal mining and extortion has created an economy of violence that is difficult to dismantle because it operates on several levels simultaneously.
Guanajuato and Tamaulipas face a different but equally complex challenge. They are transit territories that have been intensely disputed. During 2025, the fragmentation of large national structures has generated competition between smaller but more agile actors. In 2026, we expect a persistence of this dispersed violence, perhaps less visible in the media, but more destructive locally because it occurs in multiple points without centralized command.
The structural thing that unites these scenarios is that none of these states have seen significant advances in criminal investigation capabilities, police intelligence or effective prosecution of criminals. Without that, the supply and demand dynamics of crime remain intact. Fentanyl remains profitable. Extortion is still viable. Money laundering continues without relevant obstacles. The conditions that generated violence in 2025 will still be present in 2026.
Do these states have a real solution?
The honest answer is: they don’t have it under current conditions.
But this requires specificity. Michoacán, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Tamaulipas and Guanajuato are territories where insecurity is a characteristic of the system, not a defect. Organized crime is a consolidated economic and political actor. Saying that “they have a solution” implies assuming that it is possible to remove structures that have been taking root for 15 years through conventional police operations or short-term plans.
What these states need is a strategy of genuine institutional disruption: radical police reforms with massive purges, rebuilding justice systems from scratch, economic investment in legal alternatives sustained for decades, not years. This is politically almost impossible because it requires admitting the complete failure of existing structures and financing solutions whose results will not be seen during a six-year presidential term.
Within this difficult reality there is an important nuance: these states have a solution if it is understood as a generational process of institutional change accompanied by economic strategies of real inclusion. But solutions in two, three or five years under current political schemes. No. What there is are possibilities of containment, reduction of extreme violence and slow construction of capacities that could eventually change dynamics.
The Michoacán Plan, model or makeup?
The Michoacán Plan has functioned as a communicative response, not as an operational solution. Its real usefulness lies in the fact that it concentrated resources on an entity that urgently needed them. Its limitation is that its design responds to the dynamics of 2020-2021, not to the current reality where criminal actors have adapted, multiplied and geographically specified.
As a replicable model, it is insufficient because each state has different criminal structures that require unique diagnoses. Using the same plan in Tamaulipas or Sinaloa is applying an umbrella designed for one rain event to a different storm. What can be replicated is the methodology: in-depth diagnosis, sustained investment, combination of security and economy, construction of institutional capacities.
As a palliative measure, it has had some effect in reducing spikes in violence, but it is seriously palliative: it treats symptoms while the disease persists. In 2026, Michoacán will continue to be a laboratory where this will be evident.
