Security duties in the most dangerous municipalities have increasingly fallen to federal forces, whose clashes with organized crime groups have risen in recent years; meanwhile, local police forces have reduced their involvement in these confrontations, and when they did intervene, they frequently did so alongside state or federal agencies.
A lack of resources to strengthen municipal police forces—coupled with their vulnerability to criminal organizations—has led to a retrenchment in their operational scope.
Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that their clashes with armed civilians dropped by 24 percent, falling from 338 incidents in 2022 to 257 in 2024, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
Furthermore, in half of those cases, municipal police required support from other security institutions—including the Army and Navy, the National Guard, the Attorney General’s Office, state-level agencies, and even officers from neighboring jurisdictions—to confront armed individuals.
This retrenchment also coincided with a 58 percent increase in the number of hostile incidents handled by the Army during the same period. According to the agency’s response to an information request, military personnel were involved in 260 clashes in 2022—a figure that rose to 411 in 2024.
Number of Murdered Municipal Police Officers Rises
According to Rodolfo Basurto, Secretary General of the National Police Union, the reduction in the number of confrontations involving municipal police forces is primarily due to the fact that political actors have neglected these security bodies—leaving them trapped in the past—while organized crime has advanced by leaps and bounds.
“These are the most abandoned police forces, and the ones with the fewest resources to upgrade their equipment and undergo continuous training,” Basurto lamented. “Their operational strength has been dwindling in a worrying manner—and not just at the municipal level, but at the state level as well. However, it is obviously more noticeable in the municipalities because their numbers are already low to begin with, and officers are increasingly being dismissed for the slightest reasons.”
The police union representative explains that while the frequency of confrontations has decreased, the number of murdered municipal police officers is steadily rising.
“Municipal officers typically patrol alone—or with just two officers per patrol car—and in many instances, organized crime takes advantage of this situation to catch them off guard and kill them.”
Statistics from INEGI (Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography) show that in 2024, confrontations involving municipal police were concentrated in nine states across the country:
Nuevo León: 35
Sonora: 33
Michoacán: 25
Puebla: 25
Zacatecas: 21
Baja California: 19
State of Mexico: 19
Guanajuato: 14
Querétaro: 11
Collectively, these states account for nearly 80 percent of all cases nationwide.
At the municipal level, this concentration was even more pronounced in cases such as that of Santa Ana, Sonora, where local police were involved in 30 confrontations—making it the most extreme case in the country. It is worth noting that in at least 20 of those clashes, the police received support from the National Guard and the Ministry of National Defense. In San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León, the Municipal Police and the military—acting in coordination—repelled 17 attacks by criminal groups operating in the area, resulting in a total of 25 arrested criminals and a clean slate regarding deaths or injuries on either side.
Other municipalities recording a significant number of local-level clashes included:
Tijuana, Baja California, with 12 incidents.
Pinos, Zacatecas, with eight.
A list of locations with seven confrontations comprises Celaya, Guanajuato; Morelia, Michoacán; and Mazapiltepec de Juárez, Puebla.Mexicali, Baja California; the city of Puebla; and Querétaro each recorded six cases.
A statistic highlighting the diminishing capacity of municipal police forces in the face of criminal gangs emerges in states such as Sinaloa and Tamaulipas; these states closed out 2024 with zero recorded municipal-level clashes in INEGI’s registry—despite both remaining key hotspots for organized crime disputes. Moreover, this absence of local clashes coincided with an increase in military-led confrontations.
Culiacán: Epicenter of Clashes and Repelled Attacks
On the military front, Tamaulipas led the country with 71 clashes, followed by Sinaloa with 63, Sonora with six, and Michoacán with 47.
Further down the list were Chiapas with 27, Guerrero with 25, Jalisco with 19, and Zacatecas with 16. Thus, it is evident that confrontations involving federal forces were concentrated in states critical to drug trafficking and other high-impact crimes.
The SEDENA report indicates that the primary epicenter for clashes and repelled attacks is located in Culiacán, Sinaloa, with 40 recorded incidents. This positions the municipality—the birthplace of the Sinaloa Cartel—as the most dangerous territory for security forces.
The agency details that, in this municipality alone during 2024, six Army personnel lost their lives, while 50 criminals were killed in action; notably, no collateral casualties were recorded. Furthermore, Culiacán also recorded a high number of alleged criminals detained during these hostilities, with 32 cases.
Other municipalities where military forces were compelled to respond to criminal attacks included Nuevo Laredo and Miguel Alemán in Tamaulipas, with 17 and 15 incidents respectively. These were followed by Caborca, Sonora, with 14 clashes; Río Blanco, Tamaulipas, with 11; and the Sonoran municipalities of Sáric and Plutarco Elías Calles, with 10 confrontations each.
Source: Milenio
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