The one distinction that makes the numbers readable
Argentine crime statistics separate two things that English collapses into “theft”. A hurto is taking without force against a person: a pocket picked, a phone lifted off a café table, a bag taken from under a restaurant chair. A robo is taking with force or intimidation, which includes the arrebato — the snatch-and-run — because force is applied to the object. Any English-language page that reports one number for “robbery” in Buenos Aires has already thrown away the only piece of information that matters.
Here is what that distinction looks like in the barrio with the most recorded crime in the city. In December 2025, Palermo logged 437 incidents: 367 of them hurtos, 48 assaults, 22 robos, and no homicides at all. Roughly seventeen non-violent thefts for every violent one. That ratio, not the headline count, is the story of this city.
Figures: City of Buenos Aires Mapa del Delito, December 2025 data, as reported 2026-07-07. True as of December 2025.
The numbers, with their dates and their caveats
The City of Buenos Aires — CABA, the autonomous city, not the wider metro area — published preliminary 2025 figures in February 2026.
| CABA, calendar 2025 | 2025 | Against 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Homicides | 78 | 80 — down 2.5% |
| Homicide rate | 2.5 per 100,000 | lowest in about three decades |
| Robos (theft with force) | 50,069 | down 27% |
| Hurtos (theft without force) | 49,641 | down 21% |
| Armed robberies | 5,566 | down 34% |
| Motorcycle robberies | 5,587 | down 3% |
Of those 78 homicides, 18% happened in the course of a robbery. That is about fourteen people killed during a robbery, in a city of roughly three million, across an entire year — and a disproportionate share of them in neighbourhoods where no foreign professional is going to be living. It is the honest answer to “could I be killed for my phone here”, and it is also why the advice at the bottom of this page is to hand the phone over.
Nationally, the Ministry of Security’s 2025 release put the intentional homicide rate at 3.6 per 100,000 — the lowest in the published series — with robos down 21.6% and hurtos down 17.4% year on year.
Four caveats belong next to all of that, and a page that omits them is selling you something. These are reported crimes, not convictions, so the official counts are a floor. They were published as preliminary. They are publicly disputed. And the city’s figures are not the country’s.
On the dispute: the research centre ICiudad published a methodological critique in May 2026 arguing that the official reductions do not track victimisation surveys, that motorcycle robberies fell only 3% while armed robberies fell 34%, that homicides during a robbery rose about 13% even as the total fell, and that homicides largely redistributed geographically rather than disappearing — down sharply in poorer neighbourhoods, up elsewhere, for an identical citywide total. ICiudad’s own positioning is not neutral either. The correct summary is that the figures are official, preliminary, based on reported crime, and contested, all at once.
On the geography: in Buenos Aires Province, which wraps around the city and where almost no foreign resident lives, the 2025 homicide caseload rose 3.7%, and homicides during a robbery went from 31 cases to 35. CABA and the conurbano behave like different countries, and the national headlines are not describing your street.
The single biggest change to your risk, and almost nobody has updated for it
For a decade the standard expat playbook was: bring stacks of hundred-dollar bills, do Western Union runs, carry serious amounts of cash, because cards lose you a huge margin. That advice turned foreigners into walking cash safes, and it created the most reliably targeted behaviour pattern a newcomer could adopt.
Currency controls on individuals were lifted on 2025-04-11, and the gap between the parallel (“blue”) rate and the official one has collapsed since. On 2026-09-13 the blue was quoted around $1,525 buy and $1,545 sell against an official $1,480 and $1,530 — a gap of roughly one to three percent depending which side you take.
The safety consequence: the reason to carry cash is gone. You can pay by card for nearly everything and hold very little, which removes the single highest-value target you used to walk around with. If a guide tells you the blue rate gets you 40% more, it was written before April 2025 — see our blue dollar guide for the full rate board and the mechanism behind it.
Phones: the crime that actually happens to people here
On 2026-08-18 the city government declared a 90-day emergency on the stolen-phone market by decree. Used-phone shops must document the provenance of every device and component and can be closed immediately if they cannot; new authorisations for phone repair and resale businesses are suspended in the designated zones; a traceability registry for used-handset transactions is to be created. The four zones the decree names are, in effect, the city government’s own published map of where your phone gets taken:
- Retiro – Microcentro
- Balvanera – Once
- Liniers – the western edge of the city
- Chacarita – Villa Crespo
Decreto 295/26, signed 2026-08-18, running 90 consecutive days — so it lapses around mid-November 2026 unless extended. Read it as a dated fact about August 2026, not a permanent state of affairs.
Notice what is not here: a volume figure. The city declared an emergency and published no count; the telecoms regulator publishes no tally of blocked handsets. The “nine thousand phones a day” number you will find everywhere comes from a single advocacy NGO whose own method includes incidents nobody ever reported, and which has published five different daily figures across different years. The only honest statement is that the government considers the problem serious enough to legislate by decree and to name four zones.
Before anything happens
- Write down your IMEI. Dial
*#06#and save the result somewhere that is not on the phone. You cannot retrieve it afterwards, and it is what the block is keyed to. - Put your banking and wallet apps behind their own biometric or PIN. The handset is the cheap part. The real exposure is the virtual wallets and banking apps sitting unlocked on it, which is the point every Argentine source has been making since 2025.
In the first hour afterwards
- Dial
*910— the free national number to report the theft and have the IMEI blocked. Once blocked, the handset cannot carry traffic on any Argentine network. - Suspend the SIM so it stops receiving verification codes.
- Change your email password first, then banking and wallets. Email is the reset path to everything else.
- Unlink cards from ride, delivery and payment apps.
- File a denuncia — online with the city prosecutor’s office, which offers a language selection to help foreign visitors and confirms by email, or in person at any comisaría.
Be clear-eyed about what the denuncia is for: insurance, replacing documents, and the IMEI block. It does not start an investigation and nobody is going to find your phone. Readers who expect otherwise end up feeling lied to by whoever told them to file it.
Where, and when — and why the barrio is the wrong unit
Palermo tops the incident count because it has the most people, bars, restaurants and visitors in the city. That is a denominator problem, not a danger ranking, and we could find no published per-capita or per-footfall rate by barrio — so we are not going to invent one. What the geography does support is narrower and more useful:
- Transport hubs and their surrounds concentrate theft. The highest-incident single locations in the city are the Obelisco, Constitución and Retiro stations, and Plaza de Mayo.
- Homicide concentrates in Comunas 1 and 4 — 42 of the city’s 2025 homicides between them. Comuna 1 also contains Puerto Madero, among the most policed and most expensive real estate in the country, which tells you that the unit of advice here is the block and the hour, not the barrio.
- The subte has carried a permanent police presence since March 2026 — the city ran a saturation operation across every line and then settled on more than 300 officers daily across all 90 stations from early morning until midnight.
On the tourist strip in La Boca, every source agrees on daylight only and stay on the corridor. We could not verify an official designation with defined boundaries, so treat that as practice rather than as a rule with edges you can rely on.
If you are choosing where to live rather than where to walk, our neighbourhood guide has the comuna-level figures, with a blunt warning about what they do and do not measure.
The likeliest way a foreign resident actually gets hurt
It is not a mugging. Amnesty International documented at least 1,341 people injured allegedly by state agents between December 2024 and November 2025, including 155 older people and 184 press workers, in the context of protest policing. In March 2025 a photojournalist was critically injured by a tear-gas canister at a pensioners’ march outside Congress; Human Rights Watch criticised security forces for firing canisters horizontally at protesters instead of at a safe angle.
Protests are frequent, cluster around Congreso and Plaza de Mayo, often fall midweek, and are generally peaceful right up until they are not. The advice is behavioural rather than alarmist: check before you go downtown on a protest day, do not go to watch, and understand that being a foreign bystander with a phone out is not protective. Embassies publish demonstration alerts, and they are worth subscribing to precisely because they are boring most of the time.
Kidnapping: the myth, and the version you will actually meet
Extortive kidnappings across the whole country in 2025 numbered around fourteen — the lowest in a decade, down from 294 in 2015 — of which four were in the city, and roughly two-thirds were tied to organised-crime structures. A foreigner with no involvement in that world is not the target population. Reporting of the 2025 figure varies slightly between fourteen and fifteen, with one account describing two cases later dismissed; we could not open the underlying prosecutor’s report ourselves, so read it as “about fourteen” and not as a precise count.
Set that against cyberfraud complaints to the city prosecutor: 38 in 2020, around 1,700 in 2024, more than 2,400 in 2025, and roughly 200 a month through the first half of 2026. The “kidnapping” a foreigner is actually going to encounter is the secuestro virtual — a phone call claiming a family member has been taken or has been in an accident, demanding immediate payment, with app-generated background noise and, increasingly, a cloned voice. Nobody is ever actually held. The counter is unglamorous: hang up and call the person.
The same shape covers the rest of the growth category — WhatsApp account takeovers, virtual-wallet fraud, fake sales. The authorities operate a rapid-freeze protocol with banks, so reporting a fraudulent transfer quickly is genuinely worth doing.
Commonly repeated, and now wrong
| You will read | The position as of 2026-09-13 |
|---|---|
| “Bring cash dollars, cards lose you 40 to 80 percent” | Dead since April 2025. The gap is roughly one to three percent, and carrying cash is now cost without benefit. |
| “Express kidnapping is a real risk” | About fourteen extortive kidnappings nationwide in all of 2025, four of them in the city, mostly tied to organised-crime disputes. |
| “Nine thousand phones are stolen every day” | One NGO’s figure, built partly from unreported incidents. Nine thousand a day is 3.3 million a year in a metro area of about 15 million — against a Ministry of Security judicialised count of 198,427 for all robberies across that metro area in 2024. |
| “Crime fell 27 percent, so it is basically safe now” | The figures are official, preliminary, based on reported crime, and publicly disputed. All four at once. |
| “Palermo is the most dangerous barrio” | It has the highest raw incident count, of which 84% was non-violent theft and none was homicide in the reference month. |
| “Rosario is a narco warzone” | Rosario recorded 45 homicides in the first half of 2026 against 150 in the first half of 2023 — its lowest half-year in 25 years. Some travel advisories have not caught up. |
| “Uber is illegal and drivers get attacked” | Outdated framing. Ride apps operate in the city and the direction of travel through 2026 is formal regulation — professional licensing, vehicle inspection, passenger insurance. It is actively in flux, so treat no account of the legal status as settled. |
Two more worth saying plainly. Argentina sits at Level 1, “Exercise Normal Precautions” — the lowest of the four tiers of the United States travel advisory system — on an advisory dated 2026-07-10. That is the same tier as Japan, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and Ireland, and one tier better than France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden, all of which are Level 2. So “the same as most of Western Europe” is wrong in both directions: Western Europe is split down the middle, and the five largest economies in it are all rated worse than Argentina. That is not a safety certificate, but it is the right comparison for someone arriving with Latin-America-generic fear. And the “security incidents up 20 percent” headline that circulates each December comes from a private alarm company’s marketing index, with “security incident” never defined anywhere in the coverage. It does not belong in a serious page.
If something happens
Hand it over. Argentine police prevention guidance is explicit: do not resist, stay calm, follow instructions, no sudden movements, do not try to run. Report it afterwards with the day, time, place, a description and what was taken, and get medical attention if you are hurt. The robbery-homicide count above is precisely why that advice is not optional.
The numbers worth having in your phone are short: 911 for emergencies, 101 for police, 107 for medical, 100 for fire.
There is a dedicated tourist police station on Avenida Corrientes with interpretation in English, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese, and a separate tourist ombudsman. The city’s official tourism site publishes the current address and contact details and you should take them from there rather than from us — we found two different street numbers in circulation and would rather send you to the source than print the wrong door. For fraud that follows a theft, the federal cybercrime prosecutor’s unit takes complaints directly, and the city prosecutor’s online denuncia form covers the rest.
Common questions
Will I get mugged in Buenos Aires?
You are far more likely to be pickpocketed, or to have a phone taken off a cafe table, than robbed at knifepoint. In the barrios foreigners live in, non-violent theft outnumbers violent theft several times over — in Palermo in December 2025 the ratio was roughly seventeen to one.
Can I use my phone in the street in Buenos Aires?
Yes, with situational awareness. Walking while absorbed in a screen is the single most-described setup in every source. Be deliberate about it near the Obelisco, Constitucion, Retiro and Once, and on main avenues late at night. Record your IMEI by dialling *#06# before you need it.
Is it safe to walk at night in Palermo, Recoleta or Belgrano?
Generally yes, on lit main streets. Nothing in the data supports the idea that a Buenos Aires barrio becomes a free-fire zone after dark; what it does support is that risk concentrates around transport hubs and unlit side streets. We could not find a reliable night-versus-day breakdown for the city, so we are not publishing a percentage.
Do I need to carry cash dollars in Argentina?
No, and since April 2025 there is no financial reason to. Currency controls on individuals were lifted and the parallel-to-official gap has collapsed to roughly one to three percent as of September 2026, so carrying large amounts of cash is now cost without benefit.
What should I do if someone pulls a weapon on me?
Hand over what they want. Argentine police prevention guidance is explicit: do not resist, stay calm, follow instructions, make no sudden movements and do not try to flee. Report it afterwards with the day, time, place, a description and what was taken.
Will filing a denuncia get my stolen phone back?
No. A denuncia gets you a document for insurance and for replacing ID, and it lets the IMEI be blocked so the handset cannot be used on any Argentine network. It does not start an investigation.