The share of adults in eight urban municipalities of the State of Mexico who felt unsafe in their city fell from 74.2% in March to 67.0% in June 2026, according to the National Urban Public Security Survey published by the national statistics institute INEGI. The steepest decline was in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, where the figure dropped 14.2 points to 41.3%, followed by Atizapán de Zaragoza (down 10.8 points to 45.5%) and Naucalpan (down 9.8 points to 71.0%). Even so, in Ecatepec nearly eight in ten residents still considered their city unsafe.

The improved perception coexists with persistent violence against small businesses. A separate survey of more than 3,500 corner shops conducted by the National Alliance of Small Merchants (ANPEC) found that in the preceding six months, 20.1% had been victims of extortion by criminal groups, 16.5% reported acts of corruption, and 13% suffered a violent robbery. Half of those surveyed said supply chains had been disrupted by thefts and arson attacks on delivery trucks. ANPEC’s president, Cuauhtémoc Rivera, said that in some regions criminal organisations now control the distribution of goods and decide which products may be sold.

The shopkeepers’ sense of vulnerability is reflected in their ranking of national problems: 37% named insecurity as the top concern, ahead of inflation (22%) and corruption (26%). Rivera noted that the presence of organised crime in commercial activity had grown by an estimated 8% to 10% compared with the previous measurement, with the practice of controlling distribution particularly visible in states such as Zacatecas, Guerrero, Chiapas, and Sinaloa.

Meanwhile, preliminary data from INEGI showed that Mexico recorded 27,989 homicides in 2025, a rate of 21.4 per 100,000 inhabitants—the lowest since 2016 and a 26.4% decline from the peak of 29.1 in 2018–2020. Firearms were used in 70.8% of killings. However, security analyst Carlos Matienzo cautioned that INEGI’s count was roughly 4,000 higher than the figure reported by the government’s own Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, a gap he attributed to methodological differences and, possibly, to deaths during confrontations with security forces that are not always recorded as homicides. He estimated the real year-on-year reduction at 16% to 20%, not the 40% sometimes cited by officials.

The ENSU survey notes that perception does not always align with recorded crime: Ecatepec, for instance, had the highest number of criminal case files in June (8,540) despite a drop in fear. All data for 2025 and 2026 remain provisional, and analysts continue to examine the discrepancies between official homicide counts.