Crime projected to remain rampant in Mexico under Sheinbaum

The rampant crime in Mexico that prevailed during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will continue during new President Claudia Sheinbaum's six-year term, according to Eduardo Ordóñez, an independent consultant on political risk and security.

Ordóñez said the lack of state control in the interior of the country, where criminal groups dominate, is probably the most serious problem facing Sheinbaum, who took office on October 1.

"The whole country is on fire, not just Sinaloa," he told BNamericas, adding that the torching of cars is common in states such as Michoacán, Zacatecas, Guerrero and Morelos, where in mid-September Coca-Cola Femsa decided to suspend operations at its Puente de Ixtla plant to protect its employees.

Since the arrest in late July of Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, one of the founders of the Sinaloa cartel, at a private airport in Texas more than 200 people have died and 300 have disappeared in the northern state.

The surge in violence is due to the intensification of internal power struggles between two factions of what is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico: La Mayiza, affiliated with Zambada, and Los Chapitos, led by the sons of ‘El Chapo’ Joaquín Guzmán Loera.

Around the same time as the arrest, Femsa had to suspend operations at its 191 Oxxo stores in Nueva Laredo, in the northern state of Tamaulipas, due to violence and demands made by criminal groups of company employees.

“Imagine the point at which the State is not the one who controls the territory, and it doesn’t have the will to do so with this government of ‘hugs not bullets’. In other words, it will be the same with Claudia Sheinbaum,” Ordóñez said.

The consultant criticized the security strategy announced by the president last month to concentrate on the most violent municipalities and states, where it will send the national guard, which now depends on the defense ministry (Sedena) after the constitution was reformed. However, there is a lack of clarity about what the guard will do because the government of the Morena party, which was founded by López Obrador, has reiterated that it will not respond with violence.

This is one of the reasons why, in Ordóñez's opinion, it will be very important to see how the secondary laws that will have to be amended with the constitutional changes, which the opposition described as the consolidation of the militarization of the country, will turn out. The legislation is the 2019 law on the use of force and the 2022 national guard law.

“It will be important because it will determine how the national guard will act, when they can exercise the legitimate use of violence. Now, this government has not given any signs that they want to have a monopoly on violence. In other words, they let them kill each other, almost. Look at what is happening in Sinaloa,” said the expert.

“I'm of the opinion that the situation in Mexico is so serious that… the State has to take back something that is its own and exclusive. If not, you’re not the State. In other words, the State has to monopolize three things. Everything else can be subcontracted, but the State has to monopolize the exclusive use of legitimate violence, it has to monopolize the collection of taxes and it has to monopolize justice. If you share these with someone else, you are no longer a State in the true sense,” Ordóñez said.

The consultant believes that the real problem with the recently approved constitutional reforms in terms of security is not the transfer of the national guard to Sedena but that an extremely important article was amended to give this body the power to investigate crime, when the military are not prepared to be detectives and that should be the exclusive responsibility of public prosecutors.