On Tuesday, May 20, Ximena Guzmán parked her car at the same spot in Mexico City she did every other day, waiting to pick up her coworker José Muñoz. As usual, they were to drive to the capital, where they would begin their workday in the office of Mexico City’s mayor, Clara Brugada. Tragically, no such thing would occur that day, or any day thereafter. As Muñoz walked out and got inside the waiting car, a man waiting close by on the busy street pulled out a handgun and fired 12 shots at close range into the car, killing both occupants. The murderer, his job done, fled through the streets and successfully escaped the city with the help of at least three accomplices.
The brutal double murder has left Mexico City in a state of shock. The capital, the most populous city in the country and the seat of the Mexican federal government, has come to be seen as a safe haven from the crime and disorder of the cartel-controlled countryside. The killing, which bears the hallmarks of a professional assassination of the type frequently employed by organized criminal enterprises elsewhere in Mexico, has upended that sense of normality—doubly so as the government has struggled to find any significant information on the culprits and the motives behind the killings.
Both victims were important members of Brugada’s personal team, Guzmán working as the mayor’s secretary and Muñoz as her political advisor, but neither had a significant public presence. Working in an essentially private capacity, there was little reason anyone would have picked up a grudge against them. Instead, the murders seem aimed at the mayor herself, although their intentions and identity remain a mystery.
Whatever the purpose behind the attack, its execution was consummately well-planned. The conspirators staked out Guzmán and Muñoz for at least a week beforehand, familiarizing themselves with their schedule and route to work. When the killer fled, he ran into the area of the city with the fewest security cameras, where he picked up an electric scooter. He met up with three of his accomplices in a vehicle, which they ditched after driving for some distance for another, different vehicle they had placed in preparation for the escape.
The evidence left behind for the government to investigate is minimal. The handgun and bullets are unremarkable, the security cameras don’t provide sufficient detail to identify the suspects, and the cars were stolen and their plates changed to make identification difficult. All the conspirators wore gloves and left no fingerprints. The principal hope for investigators was finding DNA evidence in the vehicles and changes of clothing left behind, but that hope seems to have been extinguished under suspicious circumstances: Two police commanders in charge of evidence have been suspended, and the Secretariat for State Security has opened an internal investigation into the matter, although prosecutors deny that evidence has been tampered with or adulterated. The possibility of various conspiracies involving cartels or other bodies of organized crime—never a stretch of the imagination in Mexico—have thrown the public into a frenzy of speculation.
The entire episode has heaped more fuel on the fire of discontent with the security situation in Mexico. The country is currently suffering from a wave of violent crime that began in 2015 but continued under the previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador promoted a “hugs, not bullets” strategy for dealing with crime that attempted to deal with the issue by reducing youth unemployment and increasing welfare provisions for vulnerable populations. The approach was not very successful in achieving reductions in crime: Murders dropped slightly during López Obrador’s presidency, but the number of missing persons increased dramatically—over 10,000 people were reported missing in 2024.
The current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s tenure has been plagued by high-profile cartel murders, such as the grisly assassination of the newly inaugurated mayor of Chilpancingo, whose head was left sitting on top of his car as a warning to those who seek to combat cartel crime. The murder of politicians is not uncommon in Mexico, but to have it happen in the capital, the seat of federal power, is unusual and strikes a harsh blow against the Mexican government’s prestige.
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Sheinbaum has made security one of the themes of her presidency. She has quietly dropped the “hugs, not bullets” rhetoric of her predecessor, and instead emphasized a strategy based on strengthening the Mexican intelligence services and the investigative capabilities of the government’s crime-fighting forces, which is an important step in the right direction. But that didn’t stop her from implementing sharp cuts in the 2025 federal budget for security services, stripping 36 percent of the funds for security and civil protection to fund her promised project of building a million additional houses in the country by 2030.
That was a bet that the Mexican security services could be significantly streamlined and, with a new strategic approach to crime-fighting, obtain better results for less money. The results so far have shown some promise: April 2025 was the month with the lowest murder rate since 2016. But the continued wave of missing persons and ever-more public political assassinations demonstrate that Mexico still has a long way to go.
