The Pacification of Mexico

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Proceso article

Subject Matter: Rampant criminality in Mexico
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Since the first half of the nineties, Mexico has experienced a security crisis. At the end of his six-year term, Carlos Salinas had to create a Security Commission that depended directly on him. It was only to manage his departure, while Ernesto Zedillo presented the National Public Security System in his first year in office.

Reporter: Jorge Carrasco Araizaga
Since then, those who have succeeded have improvised around this proposal and have created, dissolved, modified  the police corporations and the bodies responsible for developing public safety policies.

In that quarter of a century, crime followed its own dynamic. It grew and developed, for internal and external reasons, until it became what it is now: a belligerent force that challenges the State on a daily basis.

It has taken territory, plundered and murders its population, wins cultural battles and even receives indirect subsidies from the police and military personnel who have been trained with resources from the treasury.

For some time now, the Mexican State has failed to guarantee the integrity of people and the possession of their property, the premise from which the State emerged as an institution.




Therefore, nobody is surprised by the results of the Inegi on the National Survey of Urban Public Safety (ENSU), according to which eight out of ten Mexicans feel insecure in the city where they live.

It is the failure of the State put in figures. To say of its own inhabitants, Mexico is a country with fear.

The power of the criminal organizations is no secret to anyone. The Army, the Navy and the Federal Police have publicly accepted it. What they will never admit, starting with their political bosses, is that Mexico is experiencing an internal armed conflict of even greater proportions than a civil war because of the number of deaths, missing persons, displaced persons and a large number of other violations of human dignity, which are essential rights in a democracy.

The recovery of peace is the main theme of the 2018 presidential election. Without peace there is no development. Neither economic, nor educational, nor of any kind. Companies have increased their expenses to have more security and transfer those costs to consumers. In many parts of the country, teachers are being trained on how to react to protect children in cases of shootings outside of schools.

The dilemma is to maintain or not, the war on organized crime of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña, whose most ominous balance, is the feast of barbarism in which the State also participates. The result has also been beneficial for criminal groups. They continue to make huge profits in this economic war.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador says he is willing to end that scheme. He is the only presidential candidate in that position. Even when he proposed it, the early days of his eventual government would also be marked by violence, given the current cycle of confrontation and the inertia he will maintain. But as much as he wants to do it and get up early in the morning to have meetings with his security cabinet, his will is not enough for Mexico to have peace.