It was a devil’s year. Twelve months marked by criminal acts without any charity and behavior that exudes the sulfur of corruption. And by tragedies where the precariousness of the poorest is punished by what some call accident, bad luck or natural disaster.
There is a personal selection, as arbitrary as it is questionable, of the events that shook Mexico in 2025. A dozen events that dampened the mood. Each can have antecedents and lasting repercussions. Almost all of them are far from irreplaceable or unique.
I begin with the most singular, because sometimes what seems trivial reveals itself, in a fanciful way, as a perfect portrait and synthesis of many other problems. Who was going to tell us that a beauty contest, as popular as it is old-fashioned, would strip us naked?
First bell. In November, the young woman from Tabasco, Fátima Bosch, became internationally famous for not allowing herself to be mistreated during one of the Miss Universe rehearsals. These were his five minutes of fame, because after winning first place, his scepter would be eclipsed. By whom? By Raúl Rocha, co-owner of Miss Universe and businessman who saw his casino, the Royale de Monterrey, burn in 2011, where 52 people burned to death. Even before Bosch won the tiara, there was suspicion of pressure from Rocha in favor of his compatriot. The scandal intensified: few people knew that Rocha had negotiated impunity with the prosecution for serious crimes. The year ended as a bad story where no one asked the princess about her dreams, but rather about the alleged criminal ties of the parade sponsor, who was later spotted in Paris. More representative, impossible.
If this was the high point, January saw the first citizen protests for the innocent victims in Sinaloa of the drug war between former partners, a struggle that shakes the last hours of the year despite more than 2,300 assassinations since 2024. Another end of the year without peace in this state.
On political-economic issues, nothing marked the year like Trump’s punch. His return to the White House is a threat of tariffs, a sword of Damocles in every way: this one designates the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations that threaten to intervene.
Spring brought no better weather. In March, the Guerreros Buscadores collective discovered the Izaguirre ranch, in Teuchitlán, Jalisco. The piles of shoes and clothes have generated holocaust nightmares for relatives of the missing. Extermination camp or training camp, the Byzantine discussion became. The reality? That in Jalisco and throughout Mexico, the pain of those kidnapped was just big news on this Jalisco property. This agenda is buried.
In May, an influencer was murdered while streaming on TikTok. A new door to horror. And even if they should not be approved, because they could have different explanations, it must be said that this year, several characters from social networks have been executed.
Few images more heartbreaking than that of the Cuauhtémoc training ship which crashed in May on the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in New York, killing two people. And the explanation? National sadness for the deceased and for the honor of the Navy deserves that responsibility not be suppressed.
Religious holidays have been the scene of massacres in Guanajuato, a new type of incessant killings in this state. If an entity seems to resist changing its anti-crime strategy, it is the cradle of independence.
But if we talk about “high-impact” executions, Mexico City has been rocked by too many things, but none have compared to the assassination of two key collaborators of the head of government, Clara Brugada, in the middle of the town of Tlalpan. The fact is as harsh as the silence of the cell phone until today.
In Michoacán, soldiers die from bombs, mayors die from clusters, several producers and a car bomb explodes. Extortion in the lemon and avocado regions is an incurable cancer, six years after six years.
The month of June was shaken by the scandal at the Ciudad Juárez crematorium where 381 corpses were discovered piled up. Any story that talks about unburied bodies is far from being up to the tragedy of families who, after receiving the remains, today do not know if they have buried their loved one or another person.
In September, in Mexico, a country of tragedies, a gas pipeline exploded, killing 32 people. This case once again shows the vulnerability of poor residents of the capital. And in October, torrential rains in five states, including Veracruz, flooded thousands of homeless people. I insist: I hope that we will stop talking about an accident or a natural disaster. It’s structural.
The devisadero fashion arrived: the United States revoked the visas of the then-husband of the governor of Baja California and, at the end of the year, of a high-ranking customs official who had previously been accused of arrogance and flaunting jewelry. They know something there that they don’t know here.
The dozen items examined ignore aspects of the political conflict and official decisions. They are all of such a nature that they could occur whether who is in power…or not. The point is that excluding gossip from the grid can help us see how atrocious or revealing the pure facts are.
Because if we added the story of the summer of the Morenoist denunciation in which the aspiration to live outside of luxury and extravagance, the promise to stick to a life of honest mediocrity, became a joke; if we included suspicions that Adán Augusto López never knew he had appointed an alleged drug trafficker to head the Tabasco police force; If we were talking about well-being nepobabies… we’re not done.
Better to end it with one note welllines on current events which contrasted in their brightness:
2025 brought us the Princess of Asturias prize for photographer Graciela Iturbide, the European cycling prowess of Isaac del Toro, the diabolical double championship: that of Toluca in Mexican football, that of Mexico in the Mexican baseball league… What good would you add? Surely there’s more to it than just demonic things.
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