Mexico’s president proposes a plan to combat cartel violence. But it seems like more of the same

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s new president on Tuesday laid out a plan to combat drug cartel violence, but analysts say it largely appears to be a continuation of previous policies.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said she plans to expand intelligence and investigative work, but her main focus will apparently remain the “hugs, not bullets” approach used by its predecessor.

Sheinbaum took over last week from her mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who largely failed in his own plan to reduce Mexico’s homicide rate. López Obrador refused to confront the cartels, instead, they rely on the armed forces and rely on gangs to keep the peace.

“There is continuity in the militarization of public security,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo. “There will also be a continuation of social programs to prevent young people from being recruited by organized crime.”

Sheinbaum’s top security official, Omar García Harfuch, said that “we will continue the strategy started in the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to prioritize the poorest families.”

Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of foreign operations, said the new plan appears to be “more of the same.”

In 2023, Mexico had a homicide rate of about 24 per 100,000 residents, more than four times higher than the U.S. rate. But officials said so were they concerned about extortiona crime that the cartels have increasingly turned to, along with migrant smuggling, to supplement their income.

Sheinbaum blamed the murders in Guanajuato state with the highest number of murders in Mexico, at low wages.

“It is clear that there is a development model in Guanajuato that has failed,” she said.

But Saucedo said poverty doesn’t explain this. Guanajuato is an industrial and agricultural hub where drug use is relatively high, but it also has rail and highway links that cartels are fighting over because they are used to transport drugs to the U.S. border.

“By that logic, the entire country would have the same problem because there are low wages across the country,” Saucedo said.

In the final weeks of López Obrador’s presidency, the Mexican Congress formally transferred the National Guard the control of the Ministry of Defense. The 120,000-strong force was originally supposed to be under civilian command, but had already been largely trained and recruited by the army.

The shortcomings of this militarized approach are clearly evident in provincial towns and villages, where the National Guard carries out regular patrols and sets up security cordons like soldiers, but does little investigative work on the streets like the police, arrests relatively few people and even builds police units. fewer criminal cases.

Residents of rural areas say National Guard officers often refuse to leave their bases until they receive orders from headquarters, even when crimes are being committed outside them. And a large portion of National Guard troops are currently busy rounding up migrants before they reach the U.S. border, not fighting crime.

García Harfuch promised on Tuesday to make the guard function more like a police force, although that is not their training.

He pledged to create some sort of national security academy to train law enforcement officers and create an agency to integrate intelligence on the gangs collected by the Army, Navy and federal investigators.

“It is necessary to translate the intelligence that the country has into investigations,” said García Harfuch, who previously served as Mexico City’s police chief.

Sheinbaum faces an ongoing problem, as illustrated by last week’s murder from the mayor of Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern state of Guerrero. The mayor’s head was apparently chopped off and left on the roof of a pickup truck in the gang-dominated city.

And violence in the northern state of Sinaloa Tensions have flared after two top Sinaloa cartel capos flew to the United States in July, where they were detained. The two capos were from different factions of the cartel, and the idea that one of the capos forced the other onto the plane has led to infighting.

So far this year, from January to August, homicides are down 10.7% from the peak in the same period of 2018, but that year was an outlier due to cartel fighting. The figures for homicides in the first eight months of the year for 2024 were 8.6% higher than in 2017, under López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.