President lays out plan to combat cartel violence

MEXICO CITY (AP):

Mexico’s new president laid out a plan Tuesday to combat drug cartel violence, but analysts say it appears to be largely a continuation of previous policy.

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

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

“There is a continuity in the militarisation of public safety,” Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said. “There will also be a continuation of social programmes to try to prevent youths from being recruited by organised crime.”

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

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

In 2023, Mexico had a homicide rate of about 24 per 100,000 inhabitants, more than four times higher than the US rate. But officials said that they were also worried about extortion, a crime that the cartels have increasingly turned to along with migrant smuggling, to supplement their income.

Sheinbaum blamed the killings in Guanajuato, the state with the highest number of homicides in Mexico, on low wages.

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

But Saucedo said that poverty doesn’t explain it. Guanajuato is an industrial and farming 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 move drugs toward the border with the United States.

“According to that logic, the entire country would have the same problem, because there are low wages in the whole country,” Saucedo said.

Inhabitants of rural areas say National Guard officers often refuse to leave their bases until they get orders from headquarters, even if crimes are being committed outside. And a good part of the National Guard’s force is currently assigned to rounding up migrants before they reach the US border, not fighting crime.