Mexican politics has entered a post-election phase, a time of transition and change shrouded in uncertainty. Following Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory on June 2, speculation has been unleashed about what will happen in the coming years, who will occupy which positions and what the key policies will be. The president-elect has so far presented 13 officials for her future cabinet, but has left for later the team that will face perhaps the most thorny issue, the insecurity crisis that the country is going through. All eyes are on that, where she will have to face the discouraging numbers left by the Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with an average of more than 30,000 homicides per year.
To deal with the wave of violence, Sheinbaum has chosen Omar García Harfuch as her main advisor, who is expected to be the head of the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC). What seems to be a fact is that, regardless of the position he occupies, the former police officer will be the one to lead the strategy of the new Government. According to the sources consulted, the virtual president’s team is considering the possibility of creating a new intelligence agency, with investigative capabilities, to support coordination between the different agencies in charge of security and access to justice. The same team hopes that the Army, which has gained a lot of ground in recent years, will maintain the power it has gained until now.
Both the former secretary of security for the capital and the president-elect have hinted that the key will be to replicate the model—which they sell as successful—applied in Mexico City when Sheinbaum governed, between 2018 and 2023. That strategy rested on four axes: addressing the causes of violence, improving the capabilities of the police, enabling agents to investigate, and maintaining good coordination with the Attorney General’s Office and other security corporations. The last two points will be crucial for the policy of the next six-year term. It is still unknown how they expect to apply this urban model to the entire country, with conditions that vary from state to state. It is also unknown which police force they intend to give better conditions and investigative capabilities to, because there has not been a Federal Police since it was dismantled to create the National Guard, in the hands of the Ministry of Defense.
Sheinbaum’s team also faces a legal technicality: the Constitution establishes that investigations are the responsibility of the police forces that are under the command of the Prosecutor’s Office. A wall that could be torn down with the constitutional reform on security, which López Obrador presented, with the new majorities that will take office in the next legislature.
García Harfuch had his own police force in Mexico City. If he receives the SSPC, he will not have a specific one, since, as Sheinbaum explained this week, they plan to leave the National Guard under the command of the Army, as ordered by the president. In fact, this will be the first government in two decades that will continue a uniformed body created in the previous six-year term. The lack of operational capacity of the federal secretariat discouraged the police in the face of strong rumors of heading the agency. But the idea of the next government will be to compensate for this lack with a new agency —or directorate— dedicated to doing intelligence work and supporting coordination and cooperation between the different security forces, the state prosecutors’ offices and the Attorney General’s Office, led in principle for the next three and a half years by the current prosecutor, Alejandro Gertz Manero. The fact that Sheinbaum has chosen the former Mexico City prosecutor, Ernestina Godoy, as her legal advisor sends a clear message of the confidence she has in the two people she entrusted with combating insecurity in the Mexican capital.
Initially, the possibility of this agency being outside the dependencies and operating autonomously was evaluated. However, sources close to the president-elect have indicated that the new intelligence agency could finally end up within the SSPC’s organizational chart. The person in charge of designing it, according to the same sources, has been the former Supreme Court minister Arturo Zaldívar, one of Sheinbaum’s main advisors on justice matters, Zedryk Raziel reports. Among the names to lead it, García Harfuch stands out again, former head of the Criminal Investigation Agency of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and defender of police intelligence.
Upon arriving at the Secretariat of Citizen Security in 2019, García Harfuch received a police force without investigative capabilities. By agreement with Sheinbaum, and in correspondence with the local Prosecutor’s Office of Godoy, they underpinned a strategy that consisted of strengthening the capital’s police and coordinating closely with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The daily meetings were then headed by the head of Government. Along these lines, the former official detailed in a forum in February: “The problem of insecurity at the national level will not be solved without strengthening the 32 state police forces and the State prosecutor’s offices.” Sheinbaum and García Harfuch defend that the work they carried out in the capital bore fruit with the reduction of high-impact crimes. However, the former Secretary of Security knows that the great ingredient in the issue of violence is the perception that is had of it, and that will be one of the points to attack in the next six-year term.
Another of the unknowns surrounding the security policy of the next government is what will happen with the Armed Forces, which made progress with López Obrador in areas such as the construction of airports or the management of customs. Ground gained by the Army, ground that the Army will not return, is acknowledged within Sheinbaum’s team. The militarization of security policy in the current Government has been one of
the points most criticized by the opposition. The incoming administration knows that they will not be able to force the Army to return to the barracks, one of the most heard requests among those reluctant to Obradorism. The interpretation made by some Government collaborators understands that the success of the security strategy lies in containing an empowered Armed Forces and directing them to cooperate with the rest of the institutions, in the midst of a scenario in which segregation reigns.
The last time Sheinbaum’s security advisors spoke openly was a couple of months ago with a group of businessmen, in the middle of the electoral campaign, when the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) was preparing to discuss the important issues of the next six-year term under the umbrella of the Dialogues for Transformation. At that meeting, García Harfuch roughly outlined the lines of what the security policy of the future Government will be. Since then, they have succumbed to secrecy.
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