The Mexican Drug Wars

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The notoriously violent Jalisco cartel has responded to Mexico’s “hugs, not bullets” policy with a policy of its own: The cartel kidnapped several members of an elite police force in the state of Guanajuato, tortured them to obtain names and addresses of fellow officers and is now hunting down and killing police at their homes, on their days off, in front of their families.

It is a type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most gang-plagued nations of Central America and poses the most direct challenge yet to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's policy of avoiding violence and rejecting any war on the cartels.

But the cartel has already declared war on the government, aiming to eradicate an elite state force known as the Tactical Group which the gang accuses of treating its members unfairly.

“If you want war, you'll get a war. We have already shown that we know where you are. We are coming for all of you,” reads a professionally printed banner signed by the cartel and hung on a building in Guanajuato in May.

“For each member of our firm (CJNG) that you arrest, we are going to kill two of your Tacticals, wherever they are, at their homes, in their patrol vehicles,” the banner read, referring to the cartel by its Spanish initials.

Officials in Guanajuato — Mexico's most violent state, where Jalisco is fighting local gangs backed by the rival Sinaloa cartel — refused to comment on how many members of the elite group have been murdered so far.

But state police publicly acknowledged the latest case, an officer who was kidnapped from his home on Thursday, killed and his body dumped on a highway.

Guanajuato-based security analyst David Saucedo said there have been many cases.

“A lot of them (officers) have decided to desert. They took their families, abandoned their homes and they are fleeing and in hiding,” Saucedo said. “The CJNG is hunting the elite police force of Guanajuato.”

Numbers of victims are hard to come by, but Poplab, a news cooperative in Guanajuato, said at least seven police officers have been killed on their days off so far this year. In January, gunmen went to the home of a female state police officer, killed her husband, dragged her away, tortured her and dumped her bullet-ridden body.

Guanajuato has had the highest number of police killed of any Mexican state since at least 2018, according to Poplab. Between 2018 and May 12, a total of 262 police have been killed, or an average of about 75 officers each year — more than are killed by gunfire or other assaults on average each year in the entire United States, which has 50 times Guanajuato’s population.

The problem in Guanajuato has gotten so bad that the state government published a special decree on May 17 to provide an unspecified amount of funding for protection mechanisms for police and prison officials.

“Unfortunately, organized crime groups have shown up at the homes of police officers, which poses a threat and a greater risk of loss of life, not just for them, but for members of their families,” according to the decree.

“They have been forced to quickly leave their homes and move, so that organized crimes groups cannot find them,” it reads.

State officials refused to describe the protection measures, or comment on whether officers were to be paid to rent new homes, or if there were plans to construct special secure housing compounds for them and their families.

“This is an open war against the security forces of the state government,” Saucedo noted.

López Obrador campaigned on trying to deescalate the drug conflict, describing a “hugs, not bullets” approach to tackle the root causes of crime. Since taking office in late 2018, he has avoided openly confronting cartels, and even released one capo to avoid bloodshed, saying he preferred a long-range policy of addressing social problems like youth unemployment that contribute to gang membership.

But former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau said in April that López Obrador views the fight against drug cartels “as a distraction ... So he has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.”

that any attempt to take off the gloves so to speak to deal with this sort of stuff would be met with condemnation from the North Western countries, or at least, by Western Europe.

Mind you, if the European countries would back Mexico up on the moral front if it took a harder stance on the cartels, we would applaud the move.

Could you expand on that? Israel has a shit ton of problems, but I'm doubting that Colombia is considered an apartheid state at this point. Or does that mean they have a reputation for a high degree of terrorist activity?

The United States and Mexico are set to discuss an overhaul of their joint fight against drug cartels during a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said Mexico no longer wants helicopter gunships and other weapons to combat drug traffickers, urging the United States to invest in regional economic development instead.

Ahead of Blinken's visit, his first to Mexico as the top US diplomat, Washington indicated that it was ready to revamp a 13-year-old program called the Merida Initiative that provided US military firepower, technical support and security training.

"We believe we are due for an updated look at our bilateral security cooperation," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.

He said Washington wanted to see the "significant gains" made by the Merida Initiative "preserved, that that cooperation is deepened and that we have an updated approach that accounts for the threats of today."

The Mexican government has gone further, calling for an end to the Merida Initiative.

"We don't want it to be like it was before when they brought us a helicopter gunship and a photo was taken of the US ambassador with the president," Lopez Obrador said in June.

He argues that investing in development projects in the region would help counter not only drug trafficking but also migrant flows — another major challenge facing the two countries.

Under the Merida Initiative, the United States has given Mexico about $3 billion since 2008 for law enforcement training and equipment such as Black Hawk helicopters.

At the same time, US authorities have focused on helping Mexico to arrest drug kingpins like Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and send them to the United States to face trial.

- Merida Initiative 'dead' -

Blinken, accompanied by US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, will hold meetings with Lopez Obrador and other top Mexican officials, including Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, during his one-day visit.

Mexico will use the talks to push for steps to speed up extraditions between the two countries and reduce the flow of arms from the United States, Ebrard said this week.

In August, Mexico filed an unprecedented lawsuit against major US gunmakers in a Boston court over illegal cross-border arms flows that it blames for fueling drug-related violence.

Mexico is plagued by cartel-related bloodshed that has seen more than 300,000 people murdered since the government deployed the military in the war on drugs in 2006.

Many experts believe the strategy of militarization has failed because it has resulted in the cartels being fragmented into smaller, more violent cells, while drugs continue to flood into the United States.

The new security framework will focus "not just on crime, but also on the underlying cause of crime," a senior US administration official said.

"We're going to be looking at ways we can increase joint efforts to decrease demand for narcotics," he said.

The two countries would continue to pursue the cartels, including their laboratories and supply chain, the official said.

But the new strategy would put more emphasis on stopping flows of firearms and drug money from the United States to Mexico, in order to "deny revenue to these cartels," he added.

Forging a new joint strategy will not be easy, said Michael Shifter, president of the US-based think-tank Inter-American Dialogue.

"The Merida Initiative is indeed dead," he said.

"Mexico is expected to press for significant US assistance and investment in the southern part of the country, but with budget pressures and other priorities in Washington, US officials are unlikely to be receptive," he said.