“Spy Law or Blind State?” Criminal Intelligence and Mexico’s New Security Framework
Mexico’s criminal problem is, to put it bluntly, a different kind of beast than anywhere else in the world. Repeating this is necessary. Its specificity does not stem solely from the size of criminal groups or the level of violence they generate, but from a transnational context that fuels and perpetuates it.
Mexico sits astride a border of more than three thousand kilometers with the United States, which functions simultaneously as a conduit of high-powered firearms flowing south and a constant artery of drugs flowing north. Along this corridor also move people, capital, and goods that together sustain a globalized illicit economy deeply embedded in Mexican territory.
The asymmetry is staggering while criminal groups reinvent themselves daily, adapting their strategies to shifting market dynamics and state responses, the Mexican state operates through slow, fragmented bureaucratic structures that are often incapable of coordination. The gap between crime and state is neither new nor exclusive to Mexico, but here it has reached a devastating scale. With each passing year, that distance grows, further eroding the state’s capacity to impose order, generate citizen trust, and provide security.
Against this backdrop, debating both the deficits and opportunities in the field of criminal intelligence is central. For decades, the Mexican state has lacked a robust system of criminal analysis: databases are dispersed, prosecutors’ offices communicate little if at all, and information is accumulated without being transformed into strategic knowledge. This deficit has left the state practically blind to the complexity of the criminal phenomenon.[1]
For decades as well, information was obtained through illegitimate or openly illegal means.[2] Torture as a tool of investigation was not the exception but the rule: police forces and public prosecutors turned physical and psychological coercion into the preferred method for extracting confessions and building case files. Rather than generating intelligence or criminal analysis, the justice system became accustomed to fabricating culpability out of coerced testimony. This pattern degraded institutional legitimacy and obstructed the development of genuine investigative capacities, reinforcing a vicious circle of impunity and violence. From that circle the Mexican state has only barely begun to emerge.
It is here that the recent approval of the Law on the National System of Investigation and Intelligence in Public Security (Ley del Sistema Nacional de Investigación e Inteligencia en Materia de Seguridad Pública) gains relevance.[3] It represents the most ambitious effort thus far to articulate an institutional framework capable of organizing information, generating intelligence, and, ultimately, reducing the gap that separates Mexican institutions from criminal groups.
In what follows, I will examine, first, the background of Mexico’s criminal problem; second, the structural deficiencies in the field of intelligence; and finally, the potential and risks posed by this new law.
A Growing Gap: Crime and the State in Mexico
Since the 1980s, drug cartels began consolidating as economic and political actors with the capacity to challenge the Mexican state.[4]]They did so in part thanks to a constant flow of resources from international illicit markets, but also because of chronic institutional weakness in the realms of security and justice.[5]
Today, more than forty years later, the equation is even more imbalanced. Mexican criminal groups have become transnational organizations engaged in a diversified portfolio of activities: drug and arms trafficking, illegal mining, clandestine logging, human smuggling, extortion, and territorial control. Their ability to adapt and reinvent themselves is remarkable: when one route closes, they open another; when one market loses profitability, they seek alternatives. Never before has organized crime in Mexico achieved such breadth of diversification.
The Mexican state, by contrast, carries the weight of bureaucratic inertia that renders it slow and ineffective. Its bureaucratic structures are rigid, police forces remain fragmented across levels of government, and prosecutors’ offices typically operate with limited capacities. Coordination is often absent. It is a state that responds in reactive and fragmented ways to phenomena that demand anticipation and proactivity.
This gap between criminal and state capacities manifests across multiple dimensions. While criminal groups deploy encrypted communications, flexible mobility, and agile financing, public institutions depend on cumbersome procedures, scarce resources, and organizational architectures that barely communicate with each other. It is an unequal struggle: a slow-moving state against criminal groups operating at high speed. Or, put differently, a state designed for nineteenth-century governance that is attempting to confront twenty-first-century challenges.
Although the disparity between crime and state is not unique to Mexico—other countries face similar, albeit smaller-scale, dynamics—what distinguishes the Mexican case is that the gap has become structural. This is not a matter of temporary, technological, or administrative lag. It is a structural condition that claims lives and prevents any halt to the spiral of violence.
Criminal Intelligence: The Structural Deficit
One of the gravest aspects of this gap is the lack of criminal intelligence. Whereas in other contexts criminal investigation is grounded in integrated data analysis, in Mexico fragmentation prevails. Multiple databases exist, but they remain disconnected.
Each state prosecutor’s office produces information but rarely shares it. Federal institutions maintain their own platforms, which likewise do not interact with local ones. Criminal intelligence in Mexico resembles Swiss cheese—full of holes.
The result is a disorderly mosaic that prevents the construction of solid investigative lines. The absence of interoperability translates into everyday impunity. If a prosecutor’s office cannot access financial information in real time, or if a state police force lacks visibility over criminal patterns in other jurisdictions, offenders find almost limitless room for maneuver.
There have been attempts to overcome this fragmentation. National registries were created, cooperation agreements were promoted, unified systems were promised. The most developed of these efforts was Plataforma México, a project that never succeeded in consolidating itself. The absence of political will to transcend initiatives associated with previous administrations, institutional rivalries, and bureaucratic sclerosis all eroded those efforts. The result is that, in 2025—nearly twenty years after the so-called “war on drugs” began—Mexico has still failed to build a functional system of criminal intelligence.
Reality could not be starker: without intelligence, there is no strategy. The state requires a constant flow of criminalistic data (fingerprints, ballistics, DNA), financial data (bank transfers, cash flows), geographic data (crime incidence maps, transport routes), biometric data (fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scans), patrimonial data (properties, vehicles, companies), mobility data (airport entries and exits, highways, customs), and telecommunications data. Without this integrated base of information, it is impossible to identify patterns, anticipate dynamics, or design strategic responses. It condemns the state to a reactive rather than preventive role.
The absence of intelligence has had devastating consequences. It has allowed criminal groups to maintain enduring advantages over institutions. It has obstructed the prosecution of criminal leaders and, more importantly, prevented the dismantling of the financial and logistical structures that sustain criminal organizations.
The New Law: A Potential Turning Point
In this context, the approval of the Law on the National System of Investigation and Intelligence in Public Security represents a significant development. It constitutes the first comprehensive effort to construct a system of criminal intelligence in Mexico.[6]
The law, approved in an extraordinary legislative session, envisions the creation of an interoperable architecture that connects databases and platforms across all three levels of government. This means that municipal, state, and federal police forces, along with their corresponding prosecutors’ offices, would finally gain access to shared information under standardized criteria. The law also contemplates integrating information from private actors, such as telecommunications or financial companies, always under security and legal protocols.
Furthermore, the law establishes the creation of specific platforms, including a Single Identity Platform (Plataforma unica de Identidad) and a Central Intelligence Platform (Plataforma Central de Inteligencia). The goal is to equip the state with modern tools to construct profiles, detect patterns, and anticipate criminal dynamics.
The significance of this reform cannot be overstated. If properly implemented, it could overcome decades of dispersion and provide the state with a fundamental instrument to close the gap with organized crime. For the first time, information might cease to remain siloed and instead be transformed into strategic intelligence.
Criticism and Resistance
The initiative, however, has not been free of controversy. Since its introduction, opposition sectors—particularly the National Action Party (PAN)—have denounced it as a “spy law” According to this narrative, the Mexican state is constructing a digital panopticon to monitor citizens and exercise political control.
In my assessment, these criticisms lack both evidence and substance. The law does not introduce mechanisms of mass surveillance, nor does it authorize indiscriminate monitoring practices. Rather, it seeks to integrate information that already exists in disparate platforms, under conditions of legality and security. In effect, it aims to impose order on chaos that has long benefited criminal actors.This does not mean, of course, that the law —or any such law— is free of risks. Interoperability, the use of robust technological infrastructure, and the integration of private databases all pose significant challenges for the protection of sensitive data.[7] Here lies the real debate: how to ensure that criminal intelligence is used to pursue crime, not to undermine rights.
Instead of focusing on Orwellian phantoms, the political opposition should be concentrating on the construction of clear access protocols, robust accountability mechanisms, and effective citizen oversight. The law itself does not guarantee these elements, but their development through secondary legislation could. Yet, rather than engaging in these terms, opposition actors have opted for political polarization and mischaracterization.
Security and Democracy
The dilemma facing Mexico is clear: without criminal intelligence, the state will remain blind in the face of a phenomenon that reinvents itself daily. The gap between criminal and state capacities will only widen until it becomes insurmountable. But the construction of a robust intelligence system cannot take place outside the framework of democracy.
The challenge is to balance two equally pressing demands: effectiveness in prosecuting crime and the protection of citizens’ rights.[2] It is not a matter of choosing between security and liberty, but of designing institutions capable of safeguarding both.
The Law on the National System of Investigation and Intelligence in Public Security opens a historic window of opportunity. If implemented seriously, it could mark a turning point in the struggle against organized crime. Its success, however, will depend not only on technology or interoperability, but also on the political will to construct an institutional framework that ensures transparency, accountability, and democratic legitimacy.
Ultimately, the discussion should not revolve around whether the law turns the state into a spy, but rather on how it can transform a blind state into one capable of seeing, analyzing, and acting intelligently in the face of criminal phenomena.
That is the debate Mexico must face—now, before the gap becomes unbridgeable.
Endnotes
[1] Ría Cristina Rosas and Juan Guillermo Mendoza Bazán, Eds., Inteligencia para la seguridad: mitos y realidades. La experiencia de México. Mexico City: Centro de Análisis e Investigación sobre Paz, Seguridad y Desarrollo Olof Palme A.C., 2015.
[2] Sergio Aguayo and John Bailey, Servicios de inteligencia y transición a la democracia en México. Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1993.
[3] Ley del Sistema Nacional de Investigación e Inteligencia en Materia de Seguridad Pública, Official Gazette of the Federation (Diario Oficial de la Federación), Chamber of Deputies, Mexico, last amended 2025, https://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LSNIIMSP.pdf.
[4] John Bailey, The Politics of Crime in Mexico: Democratic Governance in a Security Trap. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014.
[5] Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley, Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
[6] Thomas Favennec and Luis Amador, “Más datos, más poder: potencialidades y desafíos de la nueva ley de inteligencia en México,” Nexos. Seguridad, justicia y democracia, 4 July 2025, https://seguridad.nexos.com.mx/mas-datos-mas-poder-potencialidades-y-desafios-de-la-nueva-ley-de-inteligencia-en-mexico/
