MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s new president laid out a plan Tuesday to fight drug cartel violence, however analysts say it seems to be largely a continuation of earlier coverage.
President Claudia Sheinbaum mentioned that she plans to extend intelligence and investigative work, however her principal focus will apparently stay the “hugs, not bullets” method utilized by her predecessor.
Sheinbaum took over final week from her mentor, former President Andres Manuel López Obrador, who largely failed in his personal plan to carry down Mexico’s murder fee. López Obrador refused to confront the cartels, as a substitute counting on the armed forces and appeals to gangs to maintain the peace.
“There’s a continuity within the militarization of public security,” Mexican safety analyst David Saucedo mentioned. “There can even be a continuation of social packages to attempt to stop youths from being recruited by organized crime.”
Sheinbaum’s prime safety official, Omar García Harfuch, mentioned that “we’ll proceed with the technique begun within the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to offer precedence consideration to the poorest households.”
Mike Vigil, a former head of the DEA’s overseas operations, mentioned that the brand new plan seems to be “extra of the identical.”
In 2023, Mexico had a murder fee of about 24 per 100,000 inhabitants, greater than 4 occasions greater than the U.S. fee. However officers mentioned that they have been additionally apprehensive about extortion, a criminal offense that the cartels have more and more turned to together with migrant smuggling, to complement their revenue.
Sheinbaum blamed the killings in Guanajuato, the state with the very best variety of homicides in Mexico, on low wages.
“Clearly, in Guanajuato there’s a improvement mannequin that has failed,” she mentioned.
However Saucedo mentioned that poverty does not clarify it. Guanajuato is an industrial and farming hub the place drug use is comparatively excessive, nevertheless it additionally has rail and freeway hyperlinks that cartels are combating over, as a result of they’re used to maneuver medication towards the border with the USA.
“Based on that logic, the whole nation would have the identical downside, as a result of there are low wages in the entire nation,” Saucedo mentioned.
Within the final weeks of López Obrador’s presidency, Mexico’s Congress formally handed the Nationwide Guard over to the management of the Protection Division. The 120,000-member power was initially imagined to be underneath civilian command, however had already been largely educated and recruited by the military.
The shortcomings of that militarized method is obvious in provincial cities and cities, the place the Nationwide Guard performs set-piece patrols and establishes safety cordons like troopers, however do little on-the-street investigative work like police, arrest comparatively few individuals and construct even fewer felony instances.
Inhabitants of rural areas say Nationwide Guard officers typically refuse to depart their bases till they get orders from headquarters, even when crimes are being dedicated exterior. And a superb a part of the Nationwide Guard’s power is at the moment assigned to rounding up migrants earlier than they attain the U.S. border, not combating crime.
García Harfuch pledged Tuesday to have the guard perform extra as a police power, although that isn’t their coaching.
He pledged to create a kind of nationwide safety academy to coach regulation enforcement, and set up an workplace to combine intelligence on the gangs gathered by the military, navy and federal investigators.
“The necessity is to transform the intelligence the nation has, into investigations,” mentioned García Harfuch, who previously served as Mexico Metropolis’s police chief.
Sheinbaum faces an ongoing downside, as illustrated by the killing final week of the mayor of Chilpancingo, the capital of southern Guerrero state. The mayor’s head was apparently severed and left on the roof of a pickup truck within the gang-dominated metropolis.
And violence within the northern state of Sinaloa has heated up intensely after two prime Sinaloa cartel capos flew to the USA in July, the place they have been detained. The 2 capos have been from completely different factions of the cartel, and the concept that one of many capos pressured the opposite onto the airplane has sparked infighting.
To date this 12 months, from January to August, homicides have been down 10.7% from their peak in the identical interval of 2018, however that 12 months was an outlier due to cartel turf battles. The 2024 figures on homicides within the first eight months of the 12 months have been 8.6% greater than they have been in 2017, underneath López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.
