The president disbanded the Federal Police and created the National Guard to tackle the increased violence, but three years later, the criminal gangs have expanded their reach.
CELAYA, Mexico – The butcher was killed and no one knows why. The execution occurred in broad daylight as he worked in a family-owned restaurant, one of many weekly unsolved murders in Celaya, one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities.
His colleagues and family cried and drank tequila to calm their nerves, while a forensic expert walked between tables still covered with food from customers who had fled in the case. shootings.
The city’s plight is part of a worsening security situation across the country. Police in places like Celaya say they have been defeated by criminal gangs in wars they are losing, while federal forces tasked with fighting these battles often emerge after mass shootings. end.
Many officials and analysts say the relentless bloodshed – a sign of a government losing control of the country – has been exacerbated by the transformative security strategy led by incumbent president Andrés Manuel López. Obrador released, shortly after taking office, gutted the intelligence community. activities and so far has not quelled the carnage.
Violence continued unabated across Mexico month after month: For several days in August, gangs and drug cartels raged across four states, shooting at police and military, burning businesses and vehicles, closing roads and businesses, including in Celaya. Days later, the son of the mayor of Celaya is assassinated outside a pharmacy. More violence this week forced Schools and universities cancel classes in the state of Zacatecas.
Mr. López Obrador downplayed the violence under his rule and instead blamed the problem on previous administrations.
“Our adversaries are exaggerating,” the president said at a recent press conference. “It’s like staged, it’s propaganda. No big deal, but they wanted to embrace that violent banner. “
In Celaya, however, the restaurant attack was just an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. It seems that everyone in this city of about 500,000 people in central Mexico knows someone killed or missing. The murders in the city are up 32 percent in the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2021. Community volunteers meet weekly to search for bodies. The government is rarely able to stop the violence or bring its perpetrators to justice.
Celaya was once a prosperous and peaceful center in the state of Guanajuato, with major highways and rail links to the United States. A vibrant auto industry has drawn Japanese families to live amid its beautiful colonial architecture, traveling to the factories of Honda and other international companies.
But Celaya took a brutal turn about four years ago, when one of Mexico’s most powerful gangs, the Jalisco New Generation, fought a local crime syndicate. Now, local authorities struggle to assert control over security, and many expats as well as wealthy Mexicans have been displaced.
“It’s called the cockroach phenomenon, they’re crossing the border from state to state,” said Víctor Alejandro Aguilar Ledesma, the Catholic bishop of Celaya, of the cartel. He said the violence forced him to speak out, something the church usually avoids. This summer, the whole country was stunned when gunmen executed two priests in northern Mexico after someone they were after captured their church sanctuary.
The problem is the government’s lack of an effective plan at the national level, according to city police officials and Guanajuato state security chief.
Mr. López Obrador famously said that his security strategy would be “hugs, not bullets” – investing in communities to fight poverty as a cause of crime, and disbanding the Federal Police to Building a civilian-led National Guard would be “unscrupulous . “
But under these changes, Mexico has lost almost half of its intelligence capacity to investigate and dismantle the country’s vast criminal network, creating crime for criminals.
“What should the government do? Manage. And what should a doctor do? Care for the sick. A civil engineer? Let’s build roads,” said the bishop.
The president denied that Mexico had become more violent during the first half of his six-year term, which ends in 2024. Murders are down nearly 3% from 2018, the year he took office, through the end of 2021. , but the cartels have broadened their reach. Last year, violence sparked “massive displacement” events that displaced 44,905 Mexicans from their homes – a almost fivefold increase from the previous year, according to Mexico’s Commission on Defense and the Promotion of Human Rights.
As the president prepares to give his annual union address, the situation increasingly frustrates Mexicans: In a poll released this week by El Universal newspaperMore than half of the respondents said the worsening violence indicates a failure of the federal government’s security strategy.
When Mr. López Obrador disbanded the Federal Police in 2019 over documented corruption concerns, Mr. establishment of a new National Guard under the direction of the civilian-led Department of Security and Citizen Protection to tackle crime and allow the government to pull the military off the streets. Now, he is expected to turn over that force to the Department of Defense.
So far, the National Guard has not delivered the security he promised. Many former Federal Police officers refused to participate because of pay cuts. Others who joined soon left because former military officials who headed the National Guard did not treat them equally, according to police officers interviewed.
The disbanding of the Federal Police also means that Mexico’s crime-fighting force nearly halved overnight, according to an unnamed US official who shared sensitive details. The Federal Police has about 10,000 investigators; The National Guard has only a few hundred men, the official said.
Alejandro Hope, a security analyst based in Mexico City, analyzed government data and said that, although the National Guard is nearly three times the size of its predecessor, the force is This force made only about 8,000 arrests last year compared with about 21,700 for the Federal Police in 2018. Only. 14 National Guard arrests stemmed from intelligence work.
“Without good intelligence and investigative units, you will always put out fires and not be able to stop them from starting,” said Cecilia Farfán Méndez, a Mexican security researcher at the University of California San Diego. .
Senior Mexican officials agree.
“The intelligence areas that the Federal Police have, they are practically gone,” said Sophia Huett López, director of security for the Guanajuato state government.
“Here, the job of the National Guard is purely patrolling,” she said, adding that a deep investigation is needed to take down criminal organizations.
In Celaya, as with many Mexican cities and towns, the city police force is too small. At the rate recommended by the United Nations, a city the size of Celaya should have a police force of 2,300; instead it has 900.
Celaya’s security minister, Jesús Rivera Peralta, said he had been trying to eradicate the joint and had recently fired around 200 police officers for corruption and poor performance.
As in much of Mexico, corruption is deeply rooted. Two Celaya officers, who asked to remain anonymous, publicly complained about finding drugs and a backpack with cartel badges inside their superiors’ car.
With a steady stream of smuggled weapons from the United States, where gun laws are lax, the gangs outmaneuvered Celaya police. Over the past few months, grenades have been used in police patrols.
“A scene of absolute war,” said Edgar García Carrillo, an emergency room doctor at the city’s main hospital, of a shooting that left eight people dead. He estimates that the number of violence-related injuries has tripled in the past four years.
“I have never been involved in a war, but here you feel as if you are,” he said.
Last week, the bodies of a woman and a young man were found in an open field, the stench wafting toward a nearby residential area and military prep school. Security forces and residents looked like a forensic expert in a white hooded suit, photographing decomposing corpses.
After an outbreak of violence across Mexico in August, officials from one of Celaya’s largest high schools met with Rivera and his top security officials, pleading for more protection from the mob. criminals harassing students on their way to school, robbing and selling drugs.
“Is it possible to set up a monitoring unit nearby?” Maura Martínez, a school official asked. “It’s a dream we have, but how could it be?”
“The problem is that recently, security checkpoints have become the slaughterhouses of officers,” said Edgar Chávez, a police commander, adding that they will try to Do your best to improve security.
Murders in Celaya have increased from less than 80 in 2010 to more than 800 in 2020, dropping somewhat last year to about 640 – and hundreds are missing.
Olimpia Montoya’s brother and a friend, a police officer, hit the road one day in 2017, and there’s been no sign of them since. Authorities denied the disappearance when the girl’s family reported it, and asserted, without evidence, that the two were in a secret relationship and ran away together. It took government forensic experts five years to collect all the DNA they needed from the family to see if it matched any unidentified bodies.
Ms. Montoya no longer believes she will find her brother alive, but hopes to find his body and give him a proper burial so that she and her parents can attend.
“They don’t want to leave this world without knowing what happened to their son,” she said.
Jesús Padilla contributed reporting from Celaya, Mexico.
