Mexico City, December 2025.
This was not the year of a spectacular rupture or an openly declared crisis. Its gravity lay elsewhere. It was the year in which real power completed its separation from formal power without the need to announce it. Mexico closed the annual cycle not as a failed state in the classical sense, but as a territory where sovereignty ceased to function as a unitary attribute and began operating as a fragmented, negotiated, and in many cases externalized function.
Persisting in reading violence as an anomaly is now analytically insufficient. Throughout 2025, violence did not interrupt governance; it sustained it. It operated as a silent infrastructure of order. Within this framework, organized crime stopped behaving as a disruptive actor and consolidated itself as a parallel territorial regulator, capable of imposing rules, administering local economies, and producing functional stability where the state barely manages damage control. What emerged was not an absence of power, but a reconfiguration of it.
From a geopolitical perspective, this transformation did not occur abruptly. Sovereignty was ceded layer by layer. First in specific territories, then along logistical corridors, later within informal labor markets, and finally in the narrative control of reality itself. The outcome was not a vacuum, but the increasingly normalized coexistence of formal authorities and de facto powers that no longer hide, yet do not openly confront one another. The dispute ceased to be about total control and shifted toward the management of equilibrium.
In this process, prolonged militarization played a decisive role. Far from reversing fragmentation, it normalized it. The armed forces ceased to function as a temporary solution and became a permanent institutional substitute. Implicitly, the Mexican state acknowledged its civilian limits and chose containment over recovery. Order is preserved, but not transformed. This, perhaps, is the clearest structural signal left by the year.
At the collective psychological level, the country entered an advanced phase of trauma adaptation. Fear ceased to be an exceptional event and became part of the landscape. Society learned to coexist with levels of violence that, in other contexts, would provoke immediate political crises. This adaptation does not imply indifference; it is survival. The normalization of risk became a prerequisite for everyday life to continue under conditions of persistent threat.
Here the psychiatric dimension of the phenomenon becomes evident. Mexico displays consistent symptoms of structural dissociation. Official discourse and lived experience no longer interact. They coexist without touching. While the state speaks of governability, large segments of the population reorganize their behavior around unwritten codes, tacit agreements, and strategic silences. This is not simple denial; it is a sophisticated institutional and social defense mechanism against a reality that offers no immediate resolution.
Added to this is the full integration of the criminal economy as a macroeconomic actor. It controls capital flows, informal employment, consumption, and mobility. In many regions, it also provides something the state no longer guarantees consistently: predictability. That predictability, even when violent, produces functional stability. This explains why broad sectors of society do not rebel against real power, but rather tolerate it, avoid it, or incorporate it into their daily calculations.
The transnational vector confirms this reading. From Washington, Mexico is perceived as an indispensable buffer. It contains migration, filters illicit flows, sustains productive chains, and prevents visible collapses that would require direct intervention. Yet perspectives from other regions are even more revealing. From the Middle East, Africa, the Indo-Pacific, Australia, and the polar margins, Mexico is not viewed as a state in crisis, but as a functional territory. It does not export instability, it does not generate shockwaves, and it fulfills its role within the global informal system. In geopolitics, such utility weighs more than sovereignty.
From Africa, Mexico appears as a mirror case of hybrid governance, where parallel economies sustain order. From the Middle East, as an effective laboratory of coexistence between formal and de facto power without state collapse. From the Indo-Pacific and Australia, as the western frontier of the North American order, subordinate yet reliable. From the polar regions, as a stable logistical node that does not alter strategic balances. Mexico does not alarm. And not alarming is, in itself, a form of value.
Domestically, the year also clarified the real function of elections. They operate as rituals of emotional discharge rather than as mechanisms for the effective redistribution of power. They do not alter structures, but they legitimize their continuity. Alternation manages expectations without touching the core. Voting substitutes for deeper political action and functions as a form of democratic anesthesia. Sovereignty is not contested there.
The generational vector further deepens the diagnosis. For broad segments of the young population, the future has ceased to be perceived as a state-based horizon. Migration has consolidated itself as a narrative of ascent. The criminal economy, as a labor option. Legality, as a distant abstraction. Trauma is no longer only present; it is intergenerational. When the future is externalized or criminalized, sovereignty ceases to be a collective aspiration.
Thus, the close of 2025 does not redefine real power through a single event, but through accumulation. Through the repetition of silences, through the effectiveness of low-intensity governance that manages crises without resolving them, and through psychosocial adaptation to functional disorder. Real power no longer needs legitimacy; it merely needs to operate. Formal power, in turn, no longer promises to recover sovereignty; it promises stability.
What is truly unsettling is not that this order exists, but that it is beginning to appear irreversible. That it may become inheritable. That fragmented sovereignty may cease to be a historical anomaly and turn into the stable form of the state. In such a scenario, real power no longer needs to be imposed or justified. It is enough that no one questions it. And when a society reaches that point, the problem is no longer political or criminal. It becomes existential.
Mexico is not on the brink of collapse. It is farther from that than it seems. It is installed on a dangerous plateau where real power functions, violence is managed, and sovereignty is redefined without being named. Understanding this is not an act of pessimism. It is the minimum condition for an honest reading of the country as the year comes to a close.
Mario López Ayala is a senior Mexican journalist, geopolitical analyst, and applied psychologist at Phoenix24. His work integrates strategic intelligence, cybersecurity, and algorithmic governance with the study of collective behavior in high-pressure political and media environments. He is an active member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ/FIP), the world’s largest organization of journalists, representing 600,000 media professionals from 187 unions and associations across more than 140 countries, headquartered in Brussels. In Mexico, he is also part of the United Communicators Organization of Sinaloa (OCUS), where he promotes professionalization and critical analysis of the contemporary media architecture and its implications for security and democratic governance.