In the Mexico of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador there may be more hugs than in that of his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto, but the same or even more shots are recorded. The end of the war against drug traffickers that he decreed with his arrival in power has not meant, for the time being, a decrease in violence or in the activity of criminal organizations.
The cartels have even gained ground in areas such as municipal politics. They succeeded in several states after the federal and local elections of June 2021 in which they managed to place candidates who won thanks to acts of violence, in certain cases lethal, and coercion against political rivals and against the voters themselves. They are crimes of such seriousness associated with electoral processes that they lack precedents in Mexico. Many candidates lost their lives for having the chance to win at the polls the candidates anointed by organized crime.
It is in this context, and when President López Obrador still has a couple of years left to rush through his six-year term, that Mexico takes stock of its policy of “hugs, not bullets” as a strategy to end violence. . Despite the fact that the rates of intentional homicides are equal to or even higher at times than those of his two predecessors in the presidency, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president and his cabinet insist that little by little criminal activity in general it is slowing down as much as blood crimes, no. They ask for a little more time.
Felipe Calderón in December 2006, then president, declared the so-called war against drug traffickers. He made the armed forces participate in the fight and repression of organized crime. “He supposed to put the army of hitmen of the cartels and the Mexican Army on the same plane,” explains Professor Sergio Aguayo, a member of the College of Mexico and a specialist in organized crime violence in his country.
López Obrador explains every time he has the opportunity that his idea is not to confront the cartels with more violence. “Evil is not fought with evil”, he has said on many occasions. His bet is to attack the social roots that make the criminal industry attractive or the only way out for certain sectors of the population, beyond maintaining intense investigative and intelligence work to dismantle drug companies. “Now precision shots are being fired against criminal structures,” said Rosa Icela Rodríguez, Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection of the Mexican government, recently.
With the intention, at least on paper, of trying to reverse the social deficiencies that, according to the current president, are partly behind the proliferation of organized crime, the federal government has launched an unprecedented social aid program, many of them aimed at young people who are the ones who day by day nurture the hired killers and other positions in the criminal structure of the cartels.
“Never before had there been so much assistance in Mexico. It has been taking place since the presidency of Salinas de Gortari in 1988 and has continued until now, only that López Obrador has increased it,” explains Anabel Hernández, a Mexican investigative journalist, drug cartel scholar and author, among other books. , from The drug lords.
This may partly explain the duality that some opinion polls present. Last May, on its front page, the newspaper Reforma published a survey that reflected that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, has a 62% approval rating among citizens. However, 44% of those surveyed consider that his handling of security problems in the country is poor. And that ends up nuanced with the perception of insecurity: 66% of those who responded to the survey questions believe that it has worsened in the last year.
This is the duality that occurs at this time in the figure of López Obrador. While his social assistance and education policy, for example, has approval ratings of 62 and 56%, what has to do with violence, he would fail in light of the aforementioned opinion poll. Citizens think that the presence of organized crime has increased (62%) as well as the prevailing violence in the country (67%).
For Professor Sergio Aguayo, the president’s popularity is maintained because, for the time being, the country’s finances, despite everything, are solid. “The price of oil, narcotics, the tourism industry and public investment sustain them,” explains the researcher. Also, AMLO is leaning heavily on the military. “And they are working. They are very loyal. There are two empowered actors in Mexico: the military and the criminals,” says Aguayo.
Anabel Hernández believes that the problems of violence will end up turning the polls around and the policy of “hugs not bullets” will take its toll on the president. “Your public security policy -criticizes the journalist- contains a main strategy that is the absence of the State and, if it is not the State, who is going to protect the people in a Mexico in which street vendors are already being extorted for offer their products on the street.
