Extortion in Mexico: what the General Law changes, and what it does not change for companies

The size of the problem, measured

INEGI's National Business Victimisation Survey (ENVE) 2024, conducted between May and June 2024 on events in 2023, offers the most complete picture available. That year, 1.3 million establishments — 27.2% of the country's economic units — were victims of some crime, and 2.9 million crimes were committed against them. In 18 of the 32 states, extortion was the most frequent crime against businesses.

The more uncomfortable figure is another one: in 90.3% of crimes there was no report, or no investigation file was opened. In extortion, that silence has its own logic. The victim fears reprisal, distrusts the local authority or assumes the report will produce nothing. And each individual silence feeds the collective problem: without reports there are no patterns, without patterns there is no investigation, and the group that collects on one street learns it can collect on the next.

What the new law does

The General Law to Prevent, Investigate and Punish Extortion Offences was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on 28 October 2025, amended by the Senate and approved in its final form on 25 November. The decree was published and the law came into force on 29 November 2025. Three changes are substantive.

• A single offence for the whole country. Until now each state code defined and punished extortion in its own way; the general law standardises the conduct and the penalties, which can reach 42 years in prison with aggravating factors.
• Ex officio prosecution. The authority must investigate as soon as it learns of the offence, without the victim having to sustain a complaint. It is the direct answer to the dark figure: it removes from the victim the burden of being the one who confronts the extortionist in the proceedings.
• Comprehensive protection for victims and families, with identity kept confidential and reparation of harm, and harsher penalties for public officials who take part or cover up.

It is a change of architecture, not of immediate results. Standardising the offence makes it easier to link cases across states and to prosecute someone calling from a prison in another state; ex officio prosecution lowers the cost of reporting. But the prosecutors' offices are the same ones, with the same capacity, and the real effect will show in two or three years of ENVE data, not next quarter.

What the law does not solve

For a company, extortion is not a legal problem but an operational one. The call reaches reception, the driver, the branch manager, and what happens in the next ten minutes is decided by staff preparation, not the Criminal Code. Three distinctions remain the organisation's responsibility.

• Telling telephone extortion with no real capability — still the majority of calls — from protection rackets with a physical presence, which require a different response coordinated with the authorities.
• Preventing an employee from paying on their own. A first payment confirms the company gives in and, in a protection racket, becomes a fee that grows.
• Logging every contact — time, number, content, tone — and channelling it to a crisis committee defined in advance, with legal advice. That log is also what turns a report into a useful investigation.

What to expect

The signal to watch is not the number of arrests each prosecutor's office announces, but the evolution of two ENVE indicators: the share of businesses reporting extortion and the dark figure. If the law works, the second should fall before the first, because reporting becomes less costly while the phenomenon has not yet receded. A company that wants to measure itself against that trend needs its own incident log starting now.

The law changes the cost of reporting. The cost of being unprepared is still paid by the company.