Roots of Mexico’s Confidence in Crime

What an entrance. On Tuesday, just a week after she became Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo sent her security czar through the streets of Culiacán. The city is the epicenter of a internecine battle between two factions of a giant drug cartel in the state of Sinaloa.

By his very presence in one of Mexico’s most violent cities, Omar García Harfuch, the new Minister of Federal Public Security, sent a nuanced message: just as Mexico has been able to progress as a democracy in recent decades, it is now improving its position as democracy. approach to defeat organized crime.

Mr. García, a former police officer, was in Culiacán to demonstrate that President Sheinbaum plans to employ some tactics that differ from those of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. While she will maintain the crime-fighting programs of AMLO (as the former president is known), she and her security chief will apply the lessons they learned when she was mayor of Mexico City and he was head of the capital’s security. Together they cut the city’s homicide rate in half and suppressed many organized gangs.