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Trust in Mexican state institutions has eroded to historical lows after a twelve-year militarised campaign against organised crime, which presidents from both these parties championed. By , the percentage had dropped to 28 points. According to the Pew Research Center, in , 93 per cent of respondents in Mexico were dissatisfied with the way democracy worked in the country, and only 17 per cent trusted government institutions a great deal or somewhat. He pledged to end graft by remaining scrupulously honest himself and by stopping the opaque rigging of public contracts for the benefit of a few well-connected companies.
His core security proposal is to steer the country away from militarised policing toward measures like local truth commissions and amnesties for non-violent offenders. First, organised crime in Mexico has mutated. At the start of the militarised campaign in late , six major drug trafficking organisations competed for a handful of coveted drug production and transshipment zones and accounted for the bulk of lethal violence.
As the government killed or captured many big crime bosses, these six cartels have splintered into dozens of smaller groups. Aggressively colonising new territories across the country, these groups have proven more harmful than their progenitors by engaging in extortion and kidnapping for ransom to generate income.
In many regions, no single group is dominant, driving relentless cycles of violent competition that now underpin a patchwork of local conflicts. As a result, is on track to surpass as the year with the most homicides countrywide since authorities began collating data in Secondly, public safety in Mexico has become overwhelmingly dependent on the army and navy. Underfunded, understaffed and outgunned, municipal police forces have proven unable and at times unwilling to confront the advance of organised crime.
A total of individuals tied directly to political parties or campaigns, including 48 declared and undeclared candidates, were killed from September to election day on 1 July — more than in any other electoral season, and more than ten times the number during the previous campaign of In the same period, civil servants were also killed. Thirdly, the fault lines of crime and conflict run deep inside the state, undermining the official view that the battle between state and organised crime, as well as internecine criminal feuds, are the only causes of violence.
Corruption, including within armed forces and federal police, underpins state collusion with criminals. This, combined with the lack of effective external oversight mechanisms, have undermined public trust in these forces and exacerbated violence. B and II. C below. Crisis Group also spoke to vigilantes and members of organised crime. Its Federal Forces division in particular has frequently engaged in anti-organised crime operations.
The state did not arrest or kill its top leaders until years later. Hide Footnote Yet violence spiralled. The number of first-degree murders more than doubled from 10, in to 22, in After dropping to 15, in , they again peaked in and , with 20, and 25, cases registered, respectively. Hide Footnote From January through April , 8, murders were recorded, indicating a trend that would make this year deadlier still. Estimations as to how many homicides can be attributed to organised crime range from Hide Footnote In addition, as of 30 April , the state had registered more than 37, people as disappeared.
More recently, spikes of violence have brought extreme insecurity to states such as Jalisco, Colima and Guanajuato. Rather than fitting a single model, each region suffers violence rooted in different sets of criminal actors pursing diverse strategies, with distinct roles for state actors in each case.
The causes of this extreme violence are diverse, many of them reaching beyond simple feuding for control of illicit markets.
Hide Footnote The mutation of Mexican organised crime can be most clearly traced here. The website narcodata. Hide Footnote A hybrid criminal-political actor, it upended traditional forms of local governance, such as elected village representatives, and at the height of its power reportedly distributed local political positions.
These cells allegedly included armed units of the Knights Templar that had turned against their former bosses. Hide Footnote These organisations control patches of territory, engage in frequent armed clashes and drive the internal displacement of civilians.
The source said entire families with kinship ties to one criminal group had been given 24 hours to leave the area before being killed, after it was taken over by a rival. He said 40 people under threat, including children, had fled to Tijuana and Mexico City. The World Bank estimated that, as of the end of , there were , internally displaced persons in Mexico. Hide Footnote At These groups extort local residents and businesses and also produce and traffic in drugs, particularly crystal methamphetamine.
The recent fragmentation of the criminal landscape has exacerbated these longstanding vendettas. Salamanca, in the central state of Guanajuato, starkly demonstrates the transformation of Mexican crime and its increasingly lethal nature. Violence has spiralled upward in the state with the geographic spread and diversification of organised crime, while the erosion of local state institutions, the police foremost among them, has made it harder to stem the tide. The municipality, the second most violent in the state, lies in a corridor for oil and gas pipelines.
Hide Footnote Guanajuato recorded just homicides in This figure rose to by the end of , and 1, in Guanajuato accounted for In the last two years, local inhabitants and state personnel said, criminal cells operating under the label of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation had pushed into the area from neighbouring states, destabilising established arrangements between local state officials and criminal groups and using extreme violence.
Hide Footnote These cells have ambushed municipal policemen, killing or abducting them. One incident involved six unarmed officers gunned down in a routine traffic stop in Salamanca on 2 June. Hide Footnote On 18 August , armed men believed to be part of Jalisco Cartel New Generation stopped three police officers, tortured them and then filmed them accusing police commanders of collusion with rivals.
The video was broadcast on social media and the three officers were found dead the next day. A psychologist working for the municipality said this incident sent fear rippling among the local police, with dozens of officers resigning over the following days.
Salamanca residents said the shake-up in the criminal landscape had made them feel less safe, because Jalisco Cartel New Generation was wiping out the comparatively harmless local crooks. Now comes the cartel. Territorial takeovers elsewhere by Jalisco Cartel New Generation have involved extortion and kidnapping for ransom. There are few reports of these practices in Salamanca thus far, which may mean that public safety in the area has not yet hit rock bottom. A particular concern is the breach of trust between local residents and state security forces. Pope Francis famously visited Ecatepec and addressed a congregation of , people during his trip to Mexico in February A local activist working with at-risk youths in one of the main hotspots in Ecatepec, where criminal lookouts watch for outsiders and strange movements, said youth gangs were once the most violent actors here.
Hide Footnote They have pushed into Ecatepec in the past decade, striking alliances with local groups and imposing themselves as sole drug suppliers, as well as taking up lead roles in extortion. Here, too, alleged collusion with politicians and police, at both the municipal and state levels, has reportedly been instrumental to criminal colonisation and impunity. The case is pending. Hide Footnote As a result, Ecatepec has become another arena of violent competition for national organised crime groups, accentuating existing levels of lethal violence.
Hide Footnote The municipality and surrounding areas now resemble a patchwork where a combination of low-level street crime and organised criminal incursions drive increasing levels of violence in a municipality that is already in the top ten in Mexico for numbers of homicides from to Intensified criminal competition could lead violence to escalate further and wider. A prominent politician from a suburb next to Ecatepec said that oil siphoning has become more common in the past couple of years, adding that three well-identified local groups are behind it.
Local informants said larger crime groups are also well established in the same municipality, but use it primarily as an operational hub for cargo theft on the highways running into Mexico City and other commercial districts in the state of Mexico. While these groups currently do not target civilians for extortion or kidnapping for ransom, local inhabitants and officials express fear that they could soon take that predatory turn.
Corruption, collusion and authoritarianism in the police and the armed forces has undermined their adherence to the law and their operational effectiveness. Internal resistance to establishing a system of external oversight for these forces is entrenched. The U. Department of State, As mentioned above, the government responded to the Open Society report by saying by far the greatest number of violent offenses are committed by criminal organisations, that the armed forces have protocols to ensure their actions respect human rights, and that the state is committed to investigating any reported abuses.
Hide Footnote By defining a clear enemy, officials use this diagnosis to justify extensive military involvement in public security. In reality, however, the boundaries between the Mexican state and organised crime are porous. Hide Footnote Electoral democracy exposed local politicians to lethal violence, either because they were associated with one side of a criminal feud or because they refused to engage with illicit actors at all.
But there are no effective financial oversight mechanisms at the municipal level, nor sufficient resources to strengthen the workings of local institutions. A coordinator for an opposition party campaign in a state of Mexico municipality claimed such practices remained essential to the preservation of political power.
How far is it from Ecatepec de Morelos to Monaco? Flights Vacation Rentals Restaurants Things to do. Hide Footnote Yet proceeding down this path risks creating incentives for upper-echelon members of criminal groups to save themselves from prosecution with violence. Southern Railways train. Week September 23 - September Interior of standard class. The only drawback I experienced, is noisy railway line outside of the window.
The poor local governance, he added, has led federal authorities to progressively strip municipalities of their security and policing responsibilities, but not work at staving off criminal infiltration or undertake systematic reform of these institutions. Municipal police forces have suffered from this criminal takeover. From to early , of the 2, police officers killed, served at the municipal level. Hide Footnote At the same time, the dissolution or replacement of municipal police with federal or state police forces has become the standard response to alleged corruption and criminal collusion.