President Andrés Manuel López Obrador once again told lies in the morning. Speaking of security, he stated that if the premise that violence is fought with violence had been maintained, the country today would be ungovernable. What do you consider governable? Or who is he referring to when he talks about government? Hopefully it will clarify its definitions and explain why it will maintain the security strategy, sharing diagnoses and hard data, not salivating over dogmas, prejudices and falsehoods. Let him argue rationally, away from his diatribes that hinder an informed debate and away from the passions.
Until now, López Obrador has shown to have a conceptual confusion about what the fight against criminals is. Equating the use of force by the State with the violence of criminals is an error that has led it to give up on the primary function of a government, safeguarding the security of its citizens. Not fighting those who commit crimes only safeguards the security of the criminals, giving them impunity, leaving the people at their mercy. As he noted in this space from the first months of his administration, by documenting the field day he gave to the drug cartels, he was giving them the present and the future of the country.
In the president’s analysis there is no synapse, but he responds with epithets that disqualify those who criticize him. It hurts López Obrador to be confronted and contrasted, and to be compared disadvantageously with his predecessors. Yesterday he set as a starting point, reiterating the principle of all his hatred, the government of President Felipe Calderón, when he started “the war on drugs”, ignoring the context of the country that he received from President Vicente Fox.
Fox took a country with 13.7 intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, and handed it over with 10.9. One explanation for this reduction is that the nation was divided between two predominant forces, the Pacific Cartel, led by the Sinaloa Cartel, which brought together all criminal organizations except the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. A year before he left power, Los Zetas began challenging the Pacific Cartel in Michoacán, leaving five heads in a Uruapan bar in 2005.
Fox did not fight the drug cartels, which were taking over territory, which is the most serious thing to allow criminal organizations, because their conquest of territory means the disappearance of the State. Without the presence of federal, state, and especially municipal authorities, they are powerless against the military and economic power of the cartels. By the time Calderón took office, 80 municipalities were under total control of drug traffickers, perhaps 10% of what the Pentagon considers they have today.
López Obrador has said that Pax Narca, when controlled by a single organization, reduces violence. It isn’t true. The Pax Narca diminishes the confrontation between criminals, but it does not bring security or tranquility to the town. On the contrary, they live subjected, intimidated and lose their freedom. Faced with this reality, Calderón abandoned the old PRI policy of attacking one cartel and turning a blind eye to the other, managing the drug trafficking business as López Obrador is doing today with the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
By attacking all criminal organizations, the intentional homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants began to increase: in 2008, 11.8; in 2009, 14.3; in 2010, 17.6; in 2011, 19.4. That was the most violent year of Calderón’s six-year term, because the strategy of force, to behead the cartels and annul their leaders and their legions of thugs, was faster than the cartels’ ability to reorganize. Calderón gave President Enrique Peña Nieto a sustained drop in intentional homicides, which benefited from inertia: 15.3 in 2013; 13 in 2014; and 14 in 2014.
Peña Nieto began his government with the same premise as López Obrador: violence generates more violence and he stopped fighting the cartels. And like López Obrador today, he leaned towards a criminal organization, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, to end Los Caballeros Templarios and confront the Sinaloa Cartel, which fragmented in 2008. It was a debacle, which López Obrador should analyze . In 2016, the intentional homicide rate rose to 18.3 per 100,000 inhabitants; 23.2 in 2017, and 26.9 in 2018, when he delivered the presidential sash.
When Peña Nieto changed his strategy in 2015, and began to confront them, it was already too late. The most violent month in the history of Mexico is still October 2018, when Peña Nieto had already surrendered to López Obrador, before he assumed the Presidency, adding 10,181 murders that month. Without analyzing the mistakes of his predecessor, López Obrador followed his same strategy: not fighting crime. The intentional homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants began to rise, 27.4 in 2019; and probably the covid-19 pandemic came to his rescue. In 2020 there were 27 intentional homicides per 100 thousand inhabitants, and 25.83 in 2021, during the most severe confinement.
Given the strategies based on the intentional homicide rate, López Obrador has had worse results than the entire Calderón administration, and worse, compared to the first four years of Peña Nieto. But that’s not the worst. Maintaining the non-combat against criminals has allowed them to take over national territory and collect indirect taxes from people and companies. López Obrador may say what he wants, but he will not return the country to the levels of seven years ago.
You probably don’t give a damn. Losing the country is not on his priorities. The problem will be for the people when he leaves and for whoever succeeds him, who will have to rebuild a nation that, whatever he says, he will leave destroyed.
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