‘Mexico is nobody’s pinata’On the evening of November 1, 2025, Carlos Manzo was out celebrating the Day of the Dead and carrying his infant son, who was dressed in a skeleton costume for the candlelit festival. The popular, cowboy hat-wearing mayor of Uruapan in Michoacan was outspoken against the gangsters terrorising his community and called on the federal government to intervene. Manzo put his son down to speak to his constituents, and moments later, a hooded teenage gunman walked up and shot him seven times.Protests and riots erupted, the result of years of frustration with a seemingly endless crime wave. The protesters accused Sheinbaum of heading a “narco-government”.Sheinbaum responded with a more proactive approach than her predecessor’s. Under her leadership, security forces have raided drug labs and taken out leaders such as Mencho. This has had some success. But, according to Amnesty International, while the overall murder rate fell by 27 percent last year, disappearances rose by 10.5 percent, leading some to question the statistics.“I think [the drop] has to do with a lot of factors – with the rise of the disappearances in Mexico, but also with the changed methodologies that the government uses to measure homicides,” explained MUCD’s Reyes.“When they find human remains, they categorise those remains not as a homicide, but as an unidentified cause of death … homicides committed by security forces, they are categorised as abuse of power instead of homicide.”Since 2006, more than 130,000 people have gone missing in Mexi …
