With a wide laugh, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador showed yesterday morning a photograph taken in January 2007 where President Felipe Calderón appears with military fatigue in the middle of two governors, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, from Jalisco, and Lázaro Cárdenas, its current advisor coordinator, from Michoacán.
His entire narrative was interspersed with the defeat he suffered in the 2006 elections and how, while Calderón embarked on the drug war to gain legitimacy, he indicated, he restarted his pilgrimage through the country in what would be a new search for the can. “I was the first to criticize that security policy,” he stressed.
López Obrador gives a biased version, but not entirely wrong. Cárdenas, who was also mocked yesterday, had asked Calderón, then president-elect, for federal support, because President Vicente Fox had refused to support Michoacán with federal forces, where Los Zetas were savagely clashing with the Pacific Cartel – controlled for Sinaloa.
In parallel, during the transition, Calderón went to a meeting in Cuernavaca, together with those who would be his attorney, Eduardo Medina Mora, and his Secretary of Security, Genaro García Luna, with senior representatives of the DEA, who showed him with data and information the loss of territory to the cartels and their institutional penetration.
García Luna proposed a 360-degree strategy, against all the cartels, but Calderón was reluctant. Political instinct changed him.
In the first days of December 2006, without consulting the president, García Luna detained Flavio Sosa in Mexico City, one of the social leaders in the takeover of Oaxaca in 2005, who had arrest warrants for kidnapping, qualified robbery with violence, fire, sedition and attacks on general communication channels.
Calderón complained about the arrest, pointing out that it was a decision that should not have been taken unilaterally, but in the following days he saw how the polls showed that people supported the action.
Calderón, driven by the need for legitimacy after the turbulent electoral process of 2006 in which López Obrador wanted to prevent him from assuming the Presidency in the streets, while the director of a capital newspaper, a well-known constitutionalist and a current member of the Foreign Service, explored the possibility after the election was annulled, he found a respite and a path in Sosa’s arrest. The war on drugs began.
It was bloody, because the Federal Police, the Army and the Navy confronted the drug cartels with fire. If the results are measured by the intentional homicide rate, it was successful. In May 2011 it had a turning point and the number of crimes began to fall steadily, although seen in an integral way, it was a failure.
The social policy that he tried since 2007 to attack the causes of the violence did not work. The municipal police, the fundamental trench to prevent the shaken “waste nest”, as Medina Mora defined at the time, from being contained, were never able to do so, due to lack of training and because many municipalities diverted their budgets to electoral works.
López Obrador criticized the security policy without worrying about the details, he took what did not work, the social programs in violent areas, and discarded what did work, the frontal combat.
Last Wednesday he explained what they have academically called Pax Narca, as if it were an achievement that there is no violence where a criminal organization dominates the territory.
Their responsibility is not to ingratiate themselves, but rather to prevent cartels and other minor gangs from imposing their law and owning communities, cities, states and regions.
In a series of lurid statements, because of the way in which he himself justifies that it is the criminals who bring peace to the cities and not the government that provides it, he also rejected that criminals control between 30 and 35% of the national territory. , as estimated by the Pentagon.
He did not provide any proof of this. The blows of reality seem to contradict him all day, when San Cristóbal de las Casas, Texcaltitlán, Guasave or Colima appear, to mention four points where violence broke out in the world of the law of the strongest, which due to federal inaction, they apply it the criminals. His reality only exists in the morning at the National Palace. It is not what is thought in the country -just look at the polls-, nor in the rest of the world. For a sample button, the update of the travel alert for Mexico that the Department of State made this week as a recommendation for its citizens:
1. Do not travel to Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa or Tamaulipas, for crimes and kidnappings.
2. For the same reasons, reconsider traveling to Baja California, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, Morelos, Nayarit, Sonora, and Zacatecas.
3. Increase your precautions when traveling to Aguascalientes, Baja California Sur, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Mexico City, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Tabasco, Tlaxcala and Veracruz.
According to the State Department, which feeds its travel alerts with the information sent by the United States Embassy in Mexico, the entire country, except Campeche and Yucatan, is a high risk for its citizens.
The recommendations are orders to the diplomatic personnel and their officials: they cannot travel between cities at night, they cannot take taxis on the street, and they can only enter Mexico by road, except during the day through two highways, Nogales-Hermosillo and Nuevo Laredo. Monterey.
The message from the Foreign Ministry is forceful: “Violent crimes, such as homicide, kidnapping, vehicle theft and robbery are common in Mexico and are widespread.”
President López Obrador will be able to continue with his morning frivolities and mocking laughter. He may try to accuses the past of his omission and inability to resolve the present and his failed security strategy. What he will not be able to prevent is that violence overwhelms him and his government.
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