The crisis of territorial sovereignty of the Mexican State in Chiapas, Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Guanajuato and other entities is proving the exhaustion of the government model commonly known as “hugs, not bullets” and that in strict terms is none other than the unviability of the criminal governance model.
To get away from the logic of criminal violence that generated government violence, The administration of President López Obrador assumed, without declaring it, the model known as criminal governance: granting the cartels the co-responsibility of reducing expressions of violence in exchange for relative tranquility for their criminal activities.especially of production of marijuana, cocaine and heroinwhose products were taken to other entities and USA.
The criminal governance model was based on an understanding and not a formal signed pact through which the State stopped persecuting, arresting and repressing the criminal gangsin exchange for the fact that they will avoid the violence in their area of influence and in some way contribute to stability in the securitysince the violence was determined by the dispute over gunshots of the territory between two or more criminal gangs.
In this model, the federal State would be dedicated to deploying security forces with a deterrent and not persecutory nature, removing another natural generating element of violenceas had been demonstrated in a model by President Felipe Calderón of persecution and beheading of drug trafficking cartels with violent activities organized crime. The problem detected by the authorities lay in the capacity for violent and armed organization of the criminal gangs and their normally exaggerated terror responses, which was forcing federal forces to escalate the violence response with risks of violation of human rights.
The drug trafficking cartels They didn’t understand the logic of the criminal governance and they assumed that the government’s withdrawal was a kind of criminal victory. Naturally, the two great drug trafficking cartels –Sinaloa and Jalisco— entered into a territorial war to take over key areas for their crimes. In this sense, Chiapas represents a basic area of security national for Mexico because it is the gateway to Central and South America in terms of migration, drug trafficking, political insurgency and smuggling and a national security zone also for the United States for the same reasons and circumstances that end at the Rio Grande border.
These five years of the criminal governance model — which is parodied by a presidential statement about charging criminals with their grannies — have seen an unprecedented deployment of National Guard and the support of the Armed forces regulars with greater firepower than criminal gangs, but the political strategy that complemented criminal governance has been lacking: the reconstruction of the social fabric and above all the reinforcement of the political structure of the State at the regional level, failing to fulfill the commitments of the fifth transitional the law of National Guard which granted strict co-responsibility to state and municipal governments to avoid the territorial criminalization of the national State.
The criminal gangs They took advantage of the operational withdrawal scheme of the authorities to expand their criminal activities, grow in criminal structures, take over decision-making spaces of the government system at its three levels at the local level and expand their territorial domain competing with other local or national gangs.
The federal government authorities somewhat repeated the mistake of the Calderón model: they focused on the capture of criminal leaders demanded by USAbut without dismantling criminal power structures. El Chapo Guzman, Ovidio Guzmán López and even Calderón’s Secretary of Public Security are imprisoned in the United States, but the Sinaloa Cartel continues to operate and expand its activities drug traffickingwith special interest in the production and export of fentanyland, by the way, continues to conquer territorial areas fighting with violence against the Jalisco Cartel.
The only way to end criminal expansion would be to urgently transition to an operational strategy to dismantle criminal structures and not only bosses.
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