Bullets, not hugs
A deep dive on crime and the 2024 elections
“Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the race to become the next president of Mexico, the opposition candidates Xóchitl Gálvez (PAN-PRI-PRD) and Jorge Álvarez Máynez (Movimiento Ciudadano) decided to launch their official campaigns on March 1 in two places scarred by crime—powerful symbols of the country’s ongoing battle against violence.
Gálvez held her first campaign event in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, the city with the worst ranking on the national citizen public safety survey in 2023, where 96.4% of inhabitants reported feeling unsafe. Máynez launched in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, a charming pueblo mágico that made national headlines last summer when five young men were kidnapped after leaving a fair. A gruesome video circulated shortly afterward showing their torture and murder; their remains have never been found, although at least 10 have been arrested in the case.
Meanwhile, Claudia Sheinbaum (Morena), the front-runner and former Mexico City mayor, chose the city’s massive Zócalo for her launch—a symbol of the popular support for President López Obrador’s “fourth transformation,” and one far removed from the most violent hot spots in the country today.
In the weeks since, the national conversation has continued to swirl around the painfully familiar topic of crime in Mexico and what to do about it. The candidates have presented their security proposals, and on March 11, all three candidates endorsed a 100-point “Commitment for Peace” presented by Mexico’s bishops, though Sheinbaum expressed reservations, noting her disagreement with the document’s “pessimistic assessment of the current moment.”
Meanwhile, grim predictions of a bloody campaign season leading up to the largest elections in Mexico’s history have already started to come true.
The Morena candidate for mayor of Celaya, Gisela Gaytán, was gunned down on April 2, and just last week, another mayoral candidate in Morelos was attacked but unharmed. Gaytán’s murder brings the tally to 51 politicians killed since June 2023, according to Laboratorio Electoral. In March alone, five candidates for office were murdered. A report by Integralia registered 300 incidents of “political violence” between Sept. 1, 2023 and April 1, with 73% of the attacks made against municipal-level politicians.
The slogan permeating the campaigns and the headlines like a song on repeat is: “abrazos, no balazos,” or “hugs, not bullets.”
López Obrador’s jingle alludes to a strategy of reducing direct, fatal confrontations with criminals, but it can ring as tragic, irresponsible and even cruel for many Mexicans impacted by crime.
Mexico’s Catholic leadership noted when presenting their peace plan that their own “inflection point” was the murder of two Jesuit priests in Cerocahui, Chihuahua in July 2022 by a local crime boss. At the time, another area priest lamented that “the hugs are not enough to cover the bullet wounds.”
Gálvez has played on the slogan, saying that under her leadership there would be “no more hugs for criminals,” and promises a “Mexico without fear,” while Sheinbaum—who may very well wish this phrase could be tossed in the dustbin of history—has rebutted that the “hugs” are meant for young people at risk, not for criminals.
Sheinbaum has advocated for expanding social programs that address the root causes of crime, and says she plans to scale up the positive results achieved during her term in Mexico City, while Gálvez floated the idea of building “mega” maximum security prisons, dramatically increasing the size of the National Guard (under civilian leadership) and has said she wants to “Yucatanize” the country. Yucatán is the state with the lowest homicide rate in Mexico, and has a PAN governor, Mauricio Vila.
Beyond the tired slogans and lazy rhetorical jabs, how do the two leading candidates’ security proposals actually differ? Where is there common ground? Are Mexico City and Yucatán state viable as blueprints for a safer Mexico?
First, how did we get here?
From “gray zones” to war zones
In 2014, San Fernando, Tamaulipas was paralyzed by fear.
The notorious Zetas had taken over the city located a mere 146 miles from the U.S. border back in 2010, and brutally established their presence by kidnapping, murdering and extorting the local population and migrants passing through. As explained by InSight Crime:
“The group employed a new model of organized crime, based on violently seizing and holding territory, using fear rather than corruption as a first resort.”
The name of the town itself had become a placeholder for senseless violence after the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants by the Zetas; in 2011, 193 more migrants’ bodies were discovered there in a mass grave. The highway running through San Fernando was known as “the highway of death.”
While I read about the terrors inflicted on San Fernando recently in the searing book “Fear Is Just a Word” by Azam Ahmed—told through the story of Miriam Rodríguez, a mother who dedicated her life to seeking justice for her murdered daughter—I was struck by how little has changed in this war, even as the battlefields move.
In too many areas of Mexico today, there is the same lack of law enforcement capacity, the same indifference from authorities and sudden outbursts of retaliatory violence, often administered by the military.
Miriam investigated her daughter’s case on her own, becoming a valued source of intelligence for law enforcement. In March 2014, she accompanied the Marines on a raid of a Zeta hideout, and witnessed them indiscriminately kill the people there. They weren’t there to build a case, but to eliminate enemy combatants.
Miriam herself was murdered outside her home in 2017—shot from behind.
Many academics, journalists and historians have analyzed the perfect storm of circumstances that converged in the election of Felipe Calderón in 2006 and his declaration of war. In fact, as Benjamin T. Smith, author of “The Dope”—an essential history of the Mexican drug trade—observed of the surge in research on this topic: “Drug prohibition, it seems, has generated yet another industry.”
Of course, the roots of this eruption of violence extend far deeper into the past. As professor and researcher Guillermo Trejo has explained about Mexico’s democratic transition:
“Mexico went from a one-party to a multi-party system, but with the authoritarian system’s police, armed forces and prosecutors.”
This shift exposed the “gray zones” of criminal-state collusion to the pressures of election cycles, which at a municipal level, are frequent (mayoral terms are only for three years). Under the one-party system, these local arrangements among cops, officials and smugglers were somewhat stable, but with the end of PRI hegemony, they became fractured.
By the time of Calderón’s military deployment, the battles for control of protection networks had already started to heat up. Not only were local officials and civilians being murdered, so too were reporters. The monopoly on information under the PRI had served as a perverse form of protection—now that they were free to report on the nexus of state and organized crime, they had to be silenced.
The military engagement with cartels initiated in 2006 further atomized these criminal groups and all the metrics—from kidnapping, to forced disappearance, to extortion, to homicide—skyrocketed. As captured in this crisp understatement in a declassified 2013 U.S. State Department intelligence brief (emphasis is mine):
“While Calderon's crackdown has added pressure on the DTOs, [drug trafficking organizations] it also has
resulted in some unintended consequences. For example, the removal of
DTO leadership has allowed less experienced and undisciplined personnel to
fill the leadership vacuum, contributing to the spike of drug-related murders.”
Fast forward to AMLO’s victory in 2018, and the entry of “abrazos, no balazos.”
The nearly reflexive consensus from critical media and international observers today is that this policy has meant not merely a retreat from confrontation with criminals, but a surrender. A policy that “spreads grief, murder and extortion” according to the Wall Street Journal, and has meant “hugs for the ones who fire the bullets” according to a conservative Spanish legislator (and marchioness), who has been praised by the Mexican opposition and mocked by morenistas for some recent speeches lecturing the country on its security situation.
Yes, there are still soldiers on the streets—as of January, an eye-popping 280,455 National Guard and military personnel were deployed around the country (not to dispense hugs). There are still big drug busts and some high-profile captures of notorious kingpins—all of which appear to show more continuity than change in national security policy.
But critics contend that AMLO’s administration has not only ceded significant swathes of Mexico’s territory to organized crime, he has also reneged on his campaign promises by keeping the military at the heart of national crime policy.
It would be naive at best to blame the president’s non-confrontation strategy for organized crime infiltration, considering how this has been an endemic feature of Mexican political life for decades. San Fernando was hardly an anomaly: up to half of Mexico’s states were thought to have Zetas running protection rackets by the middle of Calderón’s term, and other smaller gangs soon adopted this business model. Journalist Marcela Turati, who has written extensively about the migrant massacres in San Fernando, has lamented that “there is a San Fernando in every narco territory.”
While AMLO’s term is on track to be the worst on record for total homicides, he and other Morena politicians point to the beginning of a decline (in February there were 25% fewer murders nationwide than the July 2018 peak).
Citizen perceptions of public safety have also shown a marked improvement. The National Urban Public Safety Survey (ENSU) published in December found 59% of Mexicans described their cities as unsafe, which is the lowest percentage recorded since the first survey was conducted in 2013.
Of course, measuring murder rates and polling citizens are not the only tools for assessing security policy, nor the most predictive. In fact, there was an earlier period of a descent in homicides (2011-2015) before violence exploded to reach peak levels at the end of Peña Nieto’s term in 2018.
Government data shows other violent crimes have also declined (kidnapping, armed robbery) nationally during AMLO’s term, but according to some recently published data, extortion reports have risen on average 26% per year between 2018-2023, becoming the third most-common crime nationwide (following mugging and fraud).
Since extortion is a notoriously under-reported crime (a mere 11% of incidents are reported according to some government data), this increase in the official figures is either a sign of better mechanisms to report it, or a disturbing indicator of just how extensive it is.
Mexico City and Yucatán as models
While crime as a hot-button political issue is presented as a national concern—in the U.S. as well as Mexico—its prevalence, characteristics and impact are highly localized. Patterns of crime vary significantly just within one city (sometimes within a neighborhood), not to mention across a country as vast and diverse as this one.
During Claudia Sheinbaum’s tenure as mayor of Mexico City, crime rates declined steeply. According to government figures, “high-impact” crimes (including murder, kidnapping, armed robbery) have declined 56% since 2019. Murders alone are down 46% and firearm injuries are down 64%.
What were the key elements to this success?
Mexico City has the highest number of police (3.7 per 1,000 people) in the country—four times the national average. There has also been increased scope for police investigative work, more coordination between prosecutors and cops, and more surveillance. In Sheinbaum’s security proposal, she lists strengthening “investigative capacity” as part of scaling up her law enforcement success to the rest of the country; though she also supports keeping the National Guard under military, not civilian, control.
How does this strategy compare with that of the peaceful state of Yucatán?
Mexico City and Yucatán are vastly different: the entire population of the latter is 2.3 million people, barely a quarter of the population of Mexico City proper (9.5 million). The contrast in population density is stark, with 59 people per square kilometer in Yucatán and 6,163 per square km in Mexico City. Yucatán also doesn’t have much history of geographical significance for drug traffickers.
However, the megalopolis and the southeastern state do have a few things in common: Yucatán ranks fourth in the country for the number of police per 1,000 inhabitants (1.2), based on 2022 data. Yucatán also came in fourth in the number of investigative police on duty with 459 registered (Mexico City had 829).
In January, federal authorities reported that Yucatán had 8,841 police deployed, a significant increase over 2022 when 3,735 were listed by INEGI. For some perspective, this would mean Yucatán today has over twice as many police on duty as the state of Guanajuato, which has a population three times bigger and is also a flashpoint in cartel turf wars. Guanajuato (also a PAN stronghold) had a homicide rate of 50.8 per 100,000 and the highest total number of murders recorded in any state in 2023.
While Gálvez holds up Yucatán as a model of PAN governance, the state has also received praise from López Obrador who recently described it as “a model in security matters.”
Putting more cops on the streets is a blunt instrument, and hardly a one-size-fits-all solution to security issues. Mexicans generally rank the police quite low on the scale of trustworthiness and effectiveness, and considering that local and federal police were often the founders of smuggling and protection rackets across the country, this wariness is understandable. It could also be the case that familiarity breeds contempt: in 2023, the top three institutions in citizen confidence level were the Navy, the Army and the National Guard, with state prosecutors, municipal police and traffic cops ranked at the bottom. In other words, the local law enforcement agencies most people are more likely to encounter.
Where does this leave us in comparing the two emblematic cases representing Morena’s policies or those of its opposition rivals?
Sheinbaum emphasizes the importance of crime mitigation through social programs and increased police capacity, while Gálvez says she’ll do away with the “hugs” and bring Mexicans justice via maximum security prisons and increased police capacity—which is something shared not just by the candidates, but by both Mexico City and Yucatán.
Both appear to have tamed crime via more coordinated and robust civilian law enforcement.
The bald eagle in the room
Mexico's national security and crime policy is inextricably tied up in the U.S. war on drugs, and with the rise of fentanyl, this isn’t going to change any time soon.
Trade—legal and illegal—between the two countries is booming. Mexico was the largest trade partner of the U.S. in 2023, and the top exporting country to the world’s biggest economy. Billions of dollars worth of cargo and freight move between the two countries every day, and there are exponential opportunities for smugglers—of drugs, people and weapons.
In an election year in both countries, it would be foolish to expect rational rhetoric in the face of what is objectively a failing war. The number of fatal drug overdoses in the U.S.hit 112,000 in a 12-month period for the first time in 2023, while Mexico has tallied over 400,000 murders since 2006, and current official figures show there are nearly 100,000 people missing.
In a recent piece contrasting violence in Baltimore with violence in Mexico, journalist Ioan Grillo describes a scene that I think crystallizes the tragic ironies of this war:
“I was surprised when I saw what they call an ‘open air drug market’ on Laurens and Pennsylvania. It wasn’t hidden in a back alley but on a busy street in front of a store with two crews hawking marijuana and one serving heroin. After years of busting dealers, the cops decided to take a hands-off approach. But it’s a paradox when you think there are military confrontations in Mexico to bust Ovidio [Guzmán] for making fentanyl but they sell dope so openly close to the U.S. capital.”
At this point, do we even know what a victory would look like?
If anything shows the truth of economist Thomas Sowell’s observation that there are no solutions, only trade-offs, it is the drug war.
The bloody fallout from the U.S. “supply-side” focus in the drug war is impossible to ignore. And yet, the promises of U.S. decriminalization and harm reduction policies are also elusive. The legalization of marijuana across a swath of U.S. states has hardly crippled the region’s criminal organizations; in fact, organized crime’s sensitivity to market changes has enabled cartels to profit more with less effort, selling potent and lucrative synthetics that are easier to smuggle across the border (and don’t require cultivating fields). Meanwhile, lax drug law enforcement in favor of harm reduction policies in some U.S. cities (for example, the open-air drug market mentioned above) has had uneven results. Overdoses continue at a sickening pace.
In other words, the complexities of this transnational public health and law enforcement quagmire don’t lend themselves to clean, campaign-friendly talking points.
And the bullets continue to fly.
Wow, thank you for this. Extremely well thought out and written.
As always, outstanding writing and analysis. Keep up the good work! S. Blake-Smith