As Mexico’s new president takes office, a renewed fight to curb cartel violence begins

Claudia Sheinbaum has become Mexico’s first female president, succeeding her popular predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo). However, she has inherited a country full of violence and faces an uphill battle to keep the country in check.

Mexico’s 2024 election season was the country’s deadliest ever. Dozens of candidates, as well as their relatives and other party members, were murdered in the run-up to election day. And three more candidates were killed in the days following the vote after winning their respective races.

Now the state of Sinaloa in northern Mexico is being rocked by a brutal gang war. More than ninety people have died in recent months. Local media report that bodies have been found with sombreros on their heads or with pizza slices pinned to them with knives.

The violence is believed to pit gang members loyal to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the jailed co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, against others linked to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the cartel’s other founder.

Violence was widely expected. Zambada was arrested in July by US federal agents near El Paso, Texas, along with El Chapo’s son, Joaquín Guzmán López. After his arrest, Zambada claimed he had been kidnapped by the younger Guzmán and taken to the US against his will.

Read more: Mexico: Leading Sinaloa Cartel members arrested after huge symbolic victory for US

Amlo has placed the blame for the recent cartel killings, at least in part, on the US. When Amlo was asked on September 19 whether the US was partly responsible for the increase in violence in Sinaloa, he said: “Yes, of course… because they carried out this operation.”

Since Amlo took office in 2018, his policy towards organized crime has been based on the slogan: “Abrazos, not balazos‘ (Hugs, not bullets).

For him, the answer to violence is not more violence. Instead, he has emphasized economic development and the implementation of measures to address poverty, social injustice and the lack of employment for working people in Mexico.

However, records show that a record number of murders occurred during Amlo’s presidency. More than 171,000 murders took place in Mexico between 2019 and 2023, far more than under the country’s two previous presidents.

Amlo has emphasized in his daily press conferences that there is no impunity for crimes in Mexico. However, the murder of 47 journalists during Amlo’s presidency, some of whom exposed the cartels’ crimes, has gone largely unpunished.

The reason for this is that government and local officials are often corrupt and compliant to the cartels – a situation that Amlo’s government has done little to address. In 2015, a Mexican journalist named Moisés Sánchez, who reported on corruption and violence in the eastern state of Veracruz, was found dead after being kidnapped from his home.

According to the then prosecutor, Luis Ángel Bravo, a former police officer, confessed to participating in Sánchez’s murder. Bravo told reporters that the suspect said he had acted on orders from local Mayor Omar Cruz. The mayor denied the accusation, but soon fled and has been on the run ever since.

More of the same?

As Amlo’s protégé, Sheinbaum could continue his government’s pacifist stance toward organized crime. She mainly appealed to voters by promising to strengthen his legacy, and has promised to continue some of his policies.

However, after she was elected president in June, she pledged: “I commit myself to leading Mexico along the path of peace, security, democracy, freedom, equality and justice.” And Sheinbaum is certainly no stranger to tackling crime.

During her tenure as mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, Sheinbaum claimed to have halved the city’s murder rate by installing more security cameras and giving police more power to police areas with high crime rates.

But there are questions about the feasibility of rolling out the same measures on a much larger scale. And even if they were, it’s questionable whether they would deliver the same level of success.

What can Sheinbaum do to stop the violence? Building on Amlo’s efforts to help young people – the social group most exposed to cartel recruitment – ​​find stable employment is one possible solution.

In 2019, the Mexican government introduced an employment program called Jóvenes constructs the future (Youth Building the Future) to give unemployed and uneducated young men the opportunity to develop their skills in an effort to reduce their participation in criminal violence.

However, these types of programs can target the wrong people. Research has shown that most of the young men currently recruited by criminal organizations in Mexico were not previously unemployed, but were working in precarious conditions.

In fact, data shows that 70.7% of young men imprisoned for murder in Mexico have worked in agricultural and manual labor with low wages and no access to social security. It is these people, for whom the cartels are an attractive alternative, that Sheinbaum should focus on.

Read more: Mexican government fails to provide decent jobs to vulnerable youth, leaving door open to cartel recruitment

It must also work with the US, Colombia and governments across Central America in their efforts to fight crime. Research shows that Colombia’s drug seizure policies have increased the profitability of narcotics trafficking and subsequently fueled more violence in Mexico.

For example, one study found that the decline in cocaine supply in Colombia between 2006 and 2009 could have contributed to as much as 14% of the increase in violence in Mexico over the same period.

People across Mexico expect Sheinbaum to address the violence spreading across the country. But to do that, she must be willing to step out of her predecessor’s shadow, or Mexico could soon be on the brink of disaster.