by Renee Celeste and Biodun Iginla, The Economist Intelligence Unit News Analysts
The Mexican president’s security strategy is not working
THE GUN battles on the streets of the Mexican city of Culiacán was, once again, a tale of organised crime against the disorganised state. It started as an attempt by soldiers and other armed law enforcers to arrest a prized target: Ovidio Guzmán López, whose father, Joaquín (aka “El Chapo”), once ran the Sinaloa drug gang and is serving a life sentence in an American prison. Chapo Junior now leads one of the gang’s factions, along with his brother. But soon after the security forces nabbed him on October 17th, reinforcements from the family business arrived. As lorries burned and bullets cracked, bystanders cradled children and fled. At least eight people died in the shootout. Outnumbered, the soldiers let Chapo Junior go free.
This was a novel kind of failure for Mexico’s authorities. Shootouts have been commonplace since 2006, when the then-president, Felipe Calderón, mobilised the army to fight drug gangs. The state has also suffered its share of humiliations, not least the escape from a Mexican prison of El Chapo in 2015. But never has the government buckled so publicly in the face of organised crime.
The deployment of just 30 troops, with no secure perimeter and no air support, suggests the operation in Culiacán was poorly planned. To make matters worse, some 50 inmates broke out of a nearby prison during the mayhem. Viral footage showed soldiers and narcos chatting amiably in the streets. The government, which struggled to get its story straight, eventually claimed that its surrender had, in fact, averted a massacre.
The episode in Sinaloa revealed much about what Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s populist president, thinks about the scourge of violence. He laments decades of economic stasis which, he argues, have pushed the poor into crime. And he is sceptical of using force to fight criminals. On October 20th Mr López Obrador, who is commonly known as AMLO, said past presidents had “turned the country into a cemetery” by “wanting to put out fire with fire”. His crime-fighting plan relies on a mix of welfare for the young, a clampdown on corruption and a new 60,000-strong national guard. It is not enough.
The president predicted that, with this formula, homicides would drop within six months. That was in April. Since then the homicide rate has kept ticking up. This year the number of murders is likely to surpass the record of 33,000 in 2018. That the carnage in Sinaloa came in the same week as the slaughter of 14 police officers in the western state of Michoacán, and the killing by soldiers of 14 suspected criminals in the neighbouring state of Guerrero, has dampened hopes that progress is coming.
It is possible that neither the president nor Alfonso Durazo, his security secretary, authorised the botched raid in Culiacán. Whoever did may have been in search of a trophy. It would have been the first big one for the president’s national guard, created this year. The United States, which has requested Chapo Junior’s extradition on drug-trafficking charges and is keen to learn more about the whereabouts of Chapo Senior’s $13bn loot, may have leaned on Mexico to make the arrest. Uttam Dhillon, the acting head of the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration, visited Sinaloa last month and met the governor, Quirino Ordaz Coppel. However it started, the debacle made clear that the government is unwilling to pay much of a cost to arrest high-level drug traffickers, says David Shirk of the University of San Diego.
When to kick the hornet’s nest
Unchecked, gangs will commit crimes like theft and extortion, induce corruption and terrorise citizens. But their existence alone need not send killings rocketing. Rather, murders in Mexico often rise when a gang’s power is threatened by the state, by a rival or by pressure from civil-society groups. Gang members defend their rackets with force. Almost any attempt by the state to constrain gangs risks triggering a short-term rise in violence.
Unchecked, gangs will commit crimes like theft and extortion, induce corruption and terrorise citizens. But their existence alone need not send killings rocketing. Rather, murders in Mexico often rise when a gang’s power is threatened by the state, by a rival or by pressure from civil-society groups. Gang members defend their rackets with force. Almost any attempt by the state to constrain gangs risks triggering a short-term rise in violence.
For governments eager to stem violence, negotiating with gangs, rather than trying to dismantle them, can seem like the easiest path to calm. In El Salvador the government secretly brokered a truce between gangs in 2012 that brought down the murder rate. Even as the government of Mr Calderón waged a war on organised crime, it disproportionately locked up the rivals of the Sinaloa gang—raising suspicions that it was merely seeking to give Mr Guzmán Senior a peaceful monopoly. The strategy of presidents before AMLO of removing kingpins caused infighting as would-be heirs killed each other to seize vacant thrones. Splintering gangs found new lines of work, such as fuel theft, and spread across the country.
AMLO may be betting on an implicit deal in which the state and the crime groups treat each other gently, buying some time for poverty-eradication to work its pacifying magic. On that theory, the Culiacán operation was a departure from his strategy rather than an expression of it. But pacts can go wrong. When the truce in El Salvador fell apart the homicide rate more than doubled.
The worry is that after the state’s retreat in Culiacán, gangs know that if they threaten enough bloodshed it will bend to their will. AMLO has given them the incentive to be more violent and unreasonable when threatened, not less.
Even if the murder rate does fall because the government attacks the gangs less aggressively, there is little reason to expect success from AMLO’s long-term plan to undermine their power. The president’s silver bullet against recruitment—rapid economic growth—is proving tricky to discharge.” His national guard features the same soldiers patrolling the streets with a new logo on their uniforms, says Alejandro Hope, a security analyst. Its deployment across the country does not always correspond to the rates of violence on the ground. A tenth of the force is nabbing migrants to please President Donald Trump rather than fighting drug gangs.
AMLO’s crime-fighting plan is “not a broad strategy for improving law enforcement,” says Mr Hope. Elements of such a strategy, such as improving the quality of state and local police forces, are missing from it.
Chapo Junior had barely been whisked to safety when the internet began flooding with narcocorridos, flattering ballads about gangsters that often featured his father and his epic escape. “The reckless government went to wake up the child,” crooned one singer. “Now they woke him up and they don't know what to do.” With a few small changes, it was the same old song.
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