The security cabinet meeting between Mexico and the United States I know will take place today in Washington, will face the weakest Mexican government, and with the greatest political vulnerability before its counterparts, as it takes place in a context of humiliation for the Army and the federal forces by submission, by omission, before the drug cartels. The hypertext is provided by the emails of the Ministry of Defense hacked by the group that calls itself Macaw.
There are millions of messages extracted from their security systems, but a few found at random in an immense volume of 36,000 documents, which are the first door opened by Guacamaya while the six terabytes it has selectively provided are finished downloading, opened a window to information about the organized crime.
The Army has the precise mapping of all the drug cartels, the criminal gangs that are associated with these large organizations, the institutional protection networks that include protection of governors, the purchase of mayors, deputies and aldermen, their intelligence systems to know the steps and plans of interest and social groups. Their human and technological intelligence is vast and systematic.
However, violence continues to grow in the country and the drug cartels continue to expand their territories in a permanent struggle to conquer more. The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is where the highest number of deaths have been recorded in times of peace, although there is a kind of civil war between criminals, where the Mexican State is basically a passive witness. Only in a fortuitous or extreme way have the federal forces been involved in a fight where, by presidential instructions, they must be observers and be on the lookout, despite having all the information necessary to prevent it.
There is no better sample button than what happened a few days ago in San Miguel Totolapan, in the Tierra Caliente of Guerrero, where the first line of investigation of the federal authorities points to the leader of La Familia Michoacana in the entity, José Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga , La Fresa, as the person responsible for the murder of Mayor Conrado Mendoza, his father Juan Mendoza, who was also mayor, and 18 more people. Four days later, the Army deployed soldiers and heavy artillery to that area in search of the perpetrators of the massacre.
As has been the six-year pattern, they were reactive, not active.
The massacre, like many others in the country, could have been avoided if, as the emails hacked by Guacamaya show, they had acted in accordance with what the law requires of the federal government. La Fresa must have felt so unpunished that, sitting in a soft chair and dressed in luxury clothes and a watch, he recorded a video for YouTube where he posted disinformation. Hurtado Olascoaga and his brother Jhonny (sic), El Fish, who control that region of Tierra Caliente, had never shown their faces in this way. Now they do it because they must be sure and confident that the government will not touch them.
The hacked emails mention in detail the mayors who protect criminals in Guerrero, with no more justice against them than that which the criminals themselves apply to harm their enemies. The same happens with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, where despite having clear knowledge of who they are, where they are or what links they have with authorities at the highest state level in some entities, no action has been taken against their leaders. The consequence has been that, as was seen in Jiquipilas, on the Chiapas border with Oaxaca, they are openly challenging the Sinaloa Cartel, which is the master of the drug routes in that stretch of the Mexican Pacific.
The same can be said of the criminal map drawn up by the Secretary of Defense in Mexico City on the criminal groups that operate in the federal capital. Until very recently, it was a kind of sanctuary for its leaders and families, and a storage and redistribution center for drug cartels. Not anymore. The criminal organizations, despite the fact that the government of Claudia Sheinbaum, contrary to the strategy of her political boss López Obrador, does use intelligence information from the Navy and carry out joint actions to combat them, they are surpassing them at worrying levels. Last Saturday, what had never happened, happened: a convoy of criminals circulating in the Milpa Alta city hall.
If they know that due to the surveillance capacity in the streets of the capital and the high number of local and federal security forces concentrated in Mexico City, an unregistered convoy can be stopped in a maximum of 90 seconds, why what did they do? Impunity is the variable in their challenge. And how can they not have that perception if the one who makes it a reality is the president himself, who, in the face of the slightest criticism, maintains that he will not confront criminals?
Police or military authority in Mexico is not authority. The humiliations of soldiers, whose hands the president metaphorically has tied, are intolerable and unacceptable in any country where the law is law, and the rule of law exists. López Obrador’s strategy was unsustainable before Guacamaya, and today it becomes a handicap when the details of the information in the hands of the Army are known: they knew everything and did nothing.
The cartels advance in their territorial expansion and drug trafficking grows. The concern of the United States is for the fentanyl that killed more than 100 thousand of its citizens last year, and that mostly passes through Mexico, concentrating 76% of the export in Sinaloa, as another hacked email showed.
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The Mexican security cabinet will be naked before the American, without answers to its questions, nor margin to resist pressure. The cries of the macaw have been louder than the parakeets of the National Palace.
#cries #macaw