The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has the election just around the corner and a concern that has increased in recent years. It is about insecurity and violence, a sad reality in large areas of the country, which has stagnated Mexico in an annual count of more than 30,000 murders, with unbridled extortion and organized crime imposing its law in productive sectors outside its spheres. classic activities, case of drug trafficking. After almost 20 years of internal conflict, the discussion about the direction of government policies is intensifying. How to radically change the situation appears as a necessity for the Government that comes out of the polls on June 2.
The Armed Forces and their police activity are the common thread of the current administration in terms of security. Also from the previous ones. The Army, the Navy and, in recent years, the National Guard, have been key in the State’s strategy against organized crime, more or less aggressive, depending on who was in charge of the Executive. 281,209 soldiers currently patrol the streets of the country, a historical record. The list of deployed soldiers and recorded murders gives an idea of the Government’s difficulties in turning around the insecurity panorama.
López Obrador began his mandate by pointing out that he would not put out the fire with more fire, a metaphor that reflected his ideas on the subject. Given the serious crisis of violence that was experienced in the last years of the Peña Nieto Government, the president-elect proposed a change. The Army would continue to be deployed, but no longer in a dynamic of attacking organized crime, but rather as guarantors of peace. “Hugs, not bullets,” he said several times after winning the election, in 2018. But, as Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an academic at the University of California, an expert in organized crime and drug policy, says, “no one who studies these issues will “He is going to say that this is a strategy, but rather a slogan.”
It is the original sin, assuming that that phrase was more than that. “In Latin America, after the financial crises of the 1980s, it became clear that you needed economists to manage the economy,” argues Farfán-Méndez, “but we have not seen anything similar in security. We continue to observe inventions, ideas, setting up secretaries, suppressing them, but you do not see a body of technocrats, in the good sense of the word, dedicated to security,” he adds. “Every administration that arrives changes everything. Look at the number of years of investment in the Federal Police, which they then erased with the stroke of a pen,” he continues.
If “hugs not bullets” was the idea, ending the “corrupt” Federal Police and creating the National Guard was the vehicle to put it into practice. Furthermore, the Guard was the solution to the discussions of those years about the police activity of the military, a task, defended by experts, academics and activists, for which they were not prepared. The Guard, a body of hybrid nature, between civil and military, would replace the Army over the years, thus closing a problematic, illegal anomaly.
But that changed in a short time. López Obrador pushed for the Guard to be attached to the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), without civilian supervision. His agents would be trained by the military in military installations. The civil road was closed. The military, López Obrador defended – and defends – are a guarantee of loyalty and honesty, a more than questionable statement, given the cases opened for corruption and bad practices against dozens of them. “The country that receives the person who wins now in June will have an Army that is much more central to the discussions, beyond security. A much stronger actor than 6, 12 or 18 years ago,” concludes Farfán-Méndez.
Territorial control
Criminal groups in Mexico have become extractive agents. López Obrador’s six-year term began with a deep crisis of fuel theft. There were extreme cases. In his first days in office, the president even reported that the Government had found a pipe coming out of the Salamanca refinery, in Guanajuato, illegally extracting gasoline. In that state and others, such as Hidalgo, the Army camped directly on the pipelines, to prevent theft. For several days, the Government’s actions against huachicoleros – the name by which fuel thieves are known – caused a shortage at gas stations in several states.
But then, the plan still responded to the slogan. Unlike what happened a year earlier in Puebla, when Peña Nieto’s Government attacked the huachicoleros, the military and accusations of extrajudicial executions, the new approach avoided confrontation. This continued for a while, even after the cowardly attack against a group of children and women from the Mormon Langford-Lebarón family, between Sonora and Chihuahua, in 2019, which left nine dead. After that and many other massacres, things changed and hugs arrived with nuances.
“During the first three years of the administration, with this policy of not directly confronting criminal organizations, they took the opportunity to expand their presence and, therefore, their territorial control,” says Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Consultores, a company dedicated to monitoring crime in the country. “I feel that the Government, when it realized the mistake and began to record the expansion of these organizations, changed its strategy. That was more or less in the second half of 2021. And they launched an attack against the leadership of many regional mafias,” he adds.
By then, the news from half the country reported the extortion advances of dozens of criminal groups. Mexico witnessed the chicken crisis in Guerrero, with the murder of producers and sellers, supposedly for not complying with the designs of these organizations; that of the lemon in Michoacán, when groups linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and old regional mafias turned the orchards of Tierra Caliente into the scene of their war; or the tortilla case in Guanajuato, when criminals targeted merchants for not paying the required fee.
“That’s when the change in trend occurs,” says Guerrero, referring to the annual murder curve, which began to decline in 2022. “We had a stagnation, and then they start to go down. But of course, there had been three years of a lot of carelessness and negligence… In terms of criminal expansion, recovering those territories was no longer achieved,” says the expert, who adds that “in many places where homicide has decreased, it is not due to a work of institutional strengthening or best practices, but rather by a dynamic of reaching agreements with groups so that they no longer fight.”
This pact agenda may have gone further in some regions. Last week, the International Crisis Group, an organization that studies organized crime, released a report titled The labyrinth of generals: crime and the military in Mexico, which assures, based on the statements of dozens of sources, that there would be pacts at the regional level between criminals and authorities so that the violence of the former is not visible. “In practice, this seems to imply hiding corpses,” says the report, which points out a possible case in Michoacán, in which a criminal group would have hidden the bodies of dozens of CJNG civilians, victims of clashes with the Army.
What’s coming
These months of the electoral campaign leave a number of proposals from the leading candidates, Claudia Sheinbaum, from Morena, and Xóchitl Gálvez, from the PRI-PAN-PRD coalition. Close to López Obrador, Sheinbaum has avoided distancing herself from the militarist policies of the outgoing president. She has said that the National Guard will remain in Sedena, an aspect in which Gálvez disagrees, who is committed to demilitarizing public security and strengthening local police forces. For the rest, the logic of both is similar, leaving aside prison occurrences of the second, in the purest Nayib Bukele style.
“There is a temptation to continue pretending that things are going well,” says Falko Ernst, part of the International Crisis Group, under the assumption that the winner is Sheinbaum, who has a double-digit lead over her opponent. “In any case, we see signs that more methodical work is going to be done, because continuing to pretend is difficult. “Both campaigns have opted to concentrate resources in violent areas,” he adds. According to the organization’s report, 16% of the murders committed in 2022 were recorded in five municipalities of Guanajuato, Baja California and Sonora.
This methodical work that both candidates aim for seems essential for true change. Sheinbaum has highlighted these months the great reduction in homicides that Mexico City registered during his years in office, from 2018 to 2023. Assuming that in the capital the increase in disappearances has nothing to do with the decrease in homicides, as they have defended by some academics these years, the escalation of a local strategy to the national level seems complicated anyway.
“Despite the controversy over the disappearances, the great work in Mexico City has to do with police purging, investigation and intelligence, and then the coordination of the police with the Prosecutor’s Office,” says Eduardo Guerrero. “But of course, this work has focused on urban contexts, with a significant police surplus. It is difficult for these schemes to work in rural contexts, with institutional anemia, such as Guerrero, Chiapas, Tabasco, Sinaloa or Nayarit,” he argues.
Their future success or failure lies in the achievements of the new Government team in terms of security. We must not forget, however, that any formula must take into account the proximity of the crime to the State. “One of the big problems we have is thinking that crime exists as if in a bubble, separated from everything else,” explains Farfán-Méndez. “State scaffolding is used to carry out criminal activities,” he adds. “Everything will depend a lot on the result of trying to control the forces themselves, specifically the prosecutor’s offices,” says Ernst, who sees true nests of corruption in the investigative agencies. “The most important problem is to undo these links between fragments of the State and organized crime, and at the same time create spaces in the institutions that allow them to operate outside of these fragments,” he concludes.
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