Mexico’s Extortion Crisis Deepens Despite Tough New Law
Key Facts
— Key Points This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Mexico affairs and Latin American financial news.
— Mexico’s extortion rate jumped more than 50% between 2015 and 2025, rising from 4.91 to 7.84 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, according to official security data.
— A landmark anti-extortion law took effect in November 2025, imposing prison terms of up to 42 years and allowing the state to prosecute the crime without a formal victim complaint.
— An estimated 97% of extortion cases go unreported, making official figures a fraction of the actual scale of a crime the attorney general herself calls impossible to contain.
A shopkeeper in Mexico City receives a phone call demanding weekly payments. A lime grower in Michoacán finds armed men at his gate. The details differ, but the pattern is the same: extortion has become one of Mexico‘s most pervasive crimes, and a decade of data confirms the trend is accelerating.
Between 2015 and 2025, the extortion rate climbed from 4.91 to 7.84 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, a rise of more than 50%, according to figures from Mexico’s National Public Security System Secretariat (SESNSP). In absolute terms, the picture is starker. The employers’ confederation Coparmex calculates that registered victims rose from 6,223 to 11,081 over the same period, a 78% increase. In the first eleven months of 2025 alone, the SESNSP recorded 10,322 victims, the highest figure since tracking began.
Mexico’s extortion crisis persists
The climb was not linear. After a gradual rise through 2018, incidence spiked in 2019, dipped during the pandemic, then resumed its upward trajectory from 2021 onward. Organized crime groups have folded extortion into their revenue portfolios alongside drug trafficking. Territorial shakedowns known as cobro de piso now reach well beyond narcotics, targeting farmers, transport operators, and small retailers.
Recognizing the scale of the problem, President Claudia Sheinbaum launched the National Strategy Against Extortion in July 2025, followed by a landmark federal law that took effect on November 29. The legislation creates a unified crime of extortion, allows prosecution without a victim’s formal complaint, and imposes base sentences of 15 to 25 years, rising to 42 with aggravating factors.
Early government figures suggest progress: the SESNSP reported a 38% decline in daily extortion incidents between September 2024 and January 2026. But skeptics note that the attorney general, Ernestina Godoy, publicly acknowledged on February 10 that the crime remains impossible to contain. Independent analysts question the methodology behind the drop, and the national victimization survey (ENVIPE 2025) estimates that 97% of extortion cases are never reported, meaning official statistics capture only a sliver of reality. Until that dark figure narrows, the true cost of Mexico’s extortion epidemic, which Coparmex pegged at roughly $1.3 billion for businesses in 2023 alone, will remain largely invisible.
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