Rarely has President López Obrador had such an unfortunate expression as yesterday when he said that the elements of the armed forces that we saw in a video persecuted, threatened, insulted, by a convoy of hitmen in the streets of Nueva Italia, Michoacán, in broad daylight, they had not reacted because now “we take care of the elements of the Armed Forces, of the Defense, of the National Guard, but we also take care of the members of the gangs, because they are human beings.”
Sorry, but the Mexican State exists to protect citizens and their institutions from this type of organized criminal groups that violate the right to peace, coexistence and prosperity. The State is not here to take care of criminals and their gangs, it is here to fight them. No one says that violence must always be resorted to for this, but what we are experiencing is exactly the opposite: those who exercise violence against citizens are criminals, the almost 130,000 deaths so far in the six-year term, the figure highest in history, the one hundred thousand disappeared, the third of the national territory that is not under the control of the Mexican State, the massacres that take place every week are the demonstration that this “care for criminal gangs” is nonsense that has a very high cost for society and for institutions.
Not only because it demerits them, but also because their elements are increasingly attacked by criminal gangs that often operate, as in the case of Nueva Italia, with total impunity. One fact only: since the six-year term began, every day a police officer is murdered in the country. One police per day. No day ends with at least 70 homicides and these sometimes exceed a hundred. I don’t know if criminal “gangs” are taken care of, but definitely neither citizens nor institutions are taken care of.
At the National Palace, President López Obrador also argued that not responding to the criminals’ attacks was “a responsible attitude.” Sorry, but that’s another fallacy. It could be a responsible attitude if the assassins had been persecuted, arrested, prosecuted. None of that happened. In any case, more than worrying about protecting the gangs, one should worry a lot about the fact that in broad daylight convoys of armed hit men circulate through the cities, even giving themselves the luxury of attacking the military with absolutely nothing happening.
Michoacán, we have said many times, is a drug trafficking laboratory. What happens in that state is almost always transmitted to the rest of the country. And for months the security and military forces have been attacked with impunity by criminal groups and this has spread to other parts of the country. The persecution of Nueva Italia is a demonstration of this, but it is part of a logic that we have seen over and over again, in communities, in cities, in attacks on soldiers and members of the National Guard, in drone attacks against them and their units, with attacks even against military installations. A few weeks ago we saw, in Sinaloa, how a group of assassins took over a military camp, disarmed the soldiers, beat them, humiliated them, insulted them. We saw how Caborca, in Sonora, was taken over by criminal groups that traveled for miles in an armed convoy along federal highways without anyone bothering them. We have seen how sailors and soldiers are kidnapped as a measure of pressure before an arrest.
It’s true what the president says: it’s not like before. We had not seen this type of aggression against institutions and society before. The degree of criminal empowerment that we are experiencing, where these groups feel empowered and capable of taking over communities, towns, operating in broad daylight in cities and territories, is unprecedented. The Fox, Calderón and Peña Nieto administrations made mistakes, to varying degrees, in the fight against organized crime, but what we are seeing and experiencing in recent times is unparalleled and the results of “taking care of the gangs” have not generated any benefit to society and institutions. What exists is impunity. The greatest damages suffered by criminal groups are those that come from their own confrontations.
In an interview he gave us for the book La Nueva Guerra, del Chapo al fentanilo (2021, Grijalbo), General Luis Crescencio Sandoval told us that “the Armed Forces, said the Secretary of Defense, continue to carry out operations and carry out tasks for the benefit of security, but there are aspects that the President has entrusted us with a lot. First, the unrestricted respect for human rights and second, the correct application of the National Law on the Use of Force, being very emphatic about it.” He also insisted that these instructions did not seek to weaken his actions. “By insisting on respect for human rights, a confusion was generated among the troops that made them hesitate to act in certain cases, resulting in attacks by some people who were against the law. But that was not an instruction from the President, he never indicated that we allow ourselves to be beaten; on the contrary, he expressed his concern about these events, stating that we could not continue to allow our soldiers to be beaten ”. For this reason, criminal gangs cannot be “cared for” “in the same way” as military elements, as the President said yesterday. They are not the same, they are not the same, it is not fair or sensible.
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