Castañón meets federal and state forces to evaluate Tulum security

Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo met federal, state and municipal commanders on Wednesday to review Tulum security operations, including the color-coded quadrant map the municipality uses to track incidents.

The session was the weekly meeting of the Grupo de Operaciones Interinstitucionales, the table where the three levels of government compare what happened in the municipality over the previous seven days and where the next operations go.

That table carries more weight than a routine weekly agenda suggests. Tulum's police force has been under reconstruction since 2024, the man who held the security post before the current secretary was shot dead in March 2025, and the municipality's own claim that crime is falling rests on the figures reviewed in meetings like this one.

A color-coded reading of every police quadrant

Officials went through the semáforo por cuadrantes, the system that assigns each policing quadrant of the municipality a status according to reported incidents, along with the joint actions agreed at earlier sessions.

Neither the mayor's office nor the security secretariat released the quadrant readings discussed on Wednesday. Residents therefore have no way to check how their own neighborhood scored, or whether the color assigned to it moved in either direction over the past week.

"We are moving well," Castañón tells the commanders

The mayor thanked the corporations present and said the coordination among them is what produced the results the municipality has reported this year.

"We have advanced on different security matters, we are going very well, and that is why I want to thank the Federal Forces, the State Police and Traffic. It has been thanks to this excellent coordination among everyone that we have achieved important results."

He added that the corporations will keep the pressure on rather than ease it, and put the protection of Tulum families as the priority for the coming weeks.

Patrols that run 24 hours, seven days a week

Edgar Aguilar Rico, secretary of Public Security and Citizen Protection, said police presence and surveillance are being maintained 24 hours a day, seven days a week, following instructions from the mayor's office.

He described the periodic meetings as the mechanism for measuring what the operations actually achieve in the field, adjusting deployment where the numbers call for it, and keeping preventive work running between one session and the next.

Tulum security lost its secretary to gunfire in March 2025

Aguilar Rico took the post in July 2025. It had stood vacant for roughly four months after José Roberto Rodríguez Bautista, then head of the secretariat, was killed in an armed attack in Tulum on March 22, 2025. The case drew national coverage and put the municipality's security apparatus under scrutiny that it has not fully shaken off.

Rodríguez Bautista had presented the municipality's security strategy, Blindaje Tulum, alongside Castañón in October 2024. That plan set out 70 additional officers, 15 patrol vehicles, a tourist police unit, 600 surveillance cameras and a C4 command center, staged in three phases.

The weekly interinstitutional meetings are the operational layer of that strategy. They are where the deployment of federal forces, state police and municipal traffic officers is reconciled week by week.

A 70 percent drop in homicides, by the mayor's count

On May 5, Castañón said homicides in Tulum had fallen by more than 70 percent, crediting coordination among the three levels of government and naming both Aguilar Rico and state prosecutor Raciel López Salazar. He did not specify the comparison period, and the municipality has not published the underlying figures.

He has defended that reading before. In December 2025, responding to reports of rising insecurity in the destination, he called the situation a media crisis and maintained that criminal incidence had gone down.

Hotel operators, restaurant owners and residents in the coastal zone have a direct stake in which version holds. Tulum's economy runs on visitors who read security coverage before they book, and the quadrant readings reviewed on Wednesday are the closest thing the municipality has to a weekly measurement of that risk.

The next session lands in seven days

The group meets again next week, with the same three levels of government at the table and the same quadrant map on the screen. What remains unanswered is whether any of those readings will be released, so that the people living inside each quadrant can see what the commanders saw.

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