The attitude of the federal government towards criminal drug trafficking groups oscillates between ignorance, disinterest, fear and complicity.
The last tour of President López Obrador through the Golden Triangle, that border area between Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, which has historically been the center of drug trafficking in the country, has culminated, once again, with a sum of statements as meaningless as disproportionate.
If the greeting to the mother of Chapo Guzmán and the confessions that he personally ordered the release of Ovidio Guzmán in the past (it is not true that Ovidio did not have, as was said these days, an arrest warrant: he had a current request for extradition to the United States and even that afternoon, at the Culiacán airport there was a plane ready to take him to the United States), which he ratified this weekend, has now added the request to stop calling the golden triangle as such and is called the “triangle of good people”.
I don’t know how many good people live there but, in reality and to be more accurate, we would have to call it the “Sinaloa cartel triangle”, because it is that criminal organization that commands and controls that territory.
An example: the press delegation that accompanied the president, was detained and inspected by a Sinaloa cartel checkpoint, interrogated and practically followed until the presidential rally, a few kilometers from the ranch owned by Chapo Guzmán (property where his mother and other relatives and to which no authority, of course, has ever thought of applying, for example, the extinction of domain).
The President, who always boasts about his long road trips, preferred this time to make that trip by air, in a military helicopter, and for this reason he did not have to run into the drug traffickers’ checkpoints, as happened to his press entourage. .
It was said that this road, on which colleagues and media officials of the presidency were detained, was supervised by the president himself: it is impossible that these checkpoints have not been seen. It is also clear that the gunmen had no intention of attacking the authorities, only to control their passage and their territory, because on that route that delegation never ran into a military checkpoint.
But worse still, the President dismissed those facts, said that they were simply people who are taking care of their territories and assured that there is no control of organized crime in any area of Mexico, and argued that this was said by the conservatives and the reporters who they interrogated him, he left them a phrase that has more than one meaning, he told them “don’t believe the conservatives because if you believe them you may have problems, I mean they may cause confusion.”
The truth is that those who claim that large areas of the national territory are controlled by drug traffickers are not conservatives, they are officials of the federal government itself, analysts, citizens who live this tragedy on a daily basis.
It is also said by none other than the head of the North American Defense Command in declarations before the Senate of that country, and other authorities of the American Union have endorsed it.
According to General Van Hercke, chief of the northern command (where the internal security of the American Union is protected, considering Mexico and Canada as part, in that sense, of its territory, and a body with which the Mexican army maintains an excellent relationship) 35 percent of the national territory is controlled by criminal groups.
As was seen over the weekend, the golden triangle (a territory that has literally lived off drug trafficking for decades and where the country’s main drug traffickers have taken refuge, beginning with Chapo Guzmán, Azul Esparragoza and Mayo Zambada, among many others), is controlled by criminal groups, so much so that the president could not or did not want to travel by land due to the presence of checkpoints of those same criminal groups that the executive wants to continue protecting, as he said two weeks ago.
It seems that they do not want to bother the criminal groups, especially the Sinaloa cartel, which, when they can, also intervene in elections. We saw it a year ago in Sinaloa and we hope that this presidential visit does not prompt them to act in the same way in the disputed elections in Durango next Sunday.
There are no better or worse cartels, there are different cartels. And as such there are only two in Mexico, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation. Both act differently, but both resort to violence, extortion and whatever is necessary to maintain their spaces, routes, territories.
Obviously, despite the media manipulation, the one in Sinaloa is much more successful than the one in Jalisco, because, beyond internal conflicts, it maintains its commands and main structures (there is Mayo Zambada who, at 74 years old, has never been arrested) for decades, as well as its extensive distribution networks in the United States, increasingly focused on fentanyl.
It also seems obvious that this vision is shared by the authorities because they have not carried out important actions against the Sinaloa cartel throughout the administration, neither before nor after the Culiacanazo. What happened in the recent presidential visit seems to ratify it.
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