Crime Is Mexicans’ Greatest Concern, but They Have High Trust in the Government: OECD

ByDora Villanueva

This article by Dora Villanueva originally appeared in the June 29, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Mexico City. Three out of every four people in Mexico consider that one of the main problems the country faces is crime, making it the country of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where the prevalence of this issue is highest. However, a survey conducted by the organization shows that more than half of the people in the country have high or moderate trust in the federal government.

According to the OECD survey on trust in public institutions, with 53 percent of respondents having a high or moderate level of trust in the national government, Mexico is among the five countries in the organization where this indicator is highest, only behind Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Luxembourg.

Another 18 percent of respondents said they have neither trust nor distrust in the federal government, and 29 percent state that they have low or no trust in this authority, according to the OECD report published this Monday, which, in Mexico’s case, is made up of in-person interviews among the country’s urban adult population.

Although there was a reduction of one percentage point in the high or moderate trust level that Mexicans report toward the national government, going from 54 to 53 percent, overall the OECD highlights this result as stable and maintains that only in eight countries —Australia, Canada, Iceland, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway, and Switzerland— does the majority of the population express moderate or high trust in their national government.

The OECD noted that in Iceland, Mexico, Korea, and Norway more people have high or moderately high trust in the national government than in local government; but in all the other countries where the survey was conducted —including Bulgaria, Brazil, Croatia, Peru, and Romania, which are candidates but are not yet part of the organization— local government is perceived with greater trust than the national government.