Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Mexicans focus on security as election nears
Citizens have little trust leaders will protect them
ACAPULCO, Mexico — Dominga Garcia Lopez’s only son, Francisco Ramirez Garcia, had nearly completed a master’s degree in psychology, and at 36 was supporting the parents who had toiled to give him every opportunity to escape their hillside poverty above this famed Pacific resort.
Elisa Ceballos Santiago’s son, 19-year-old Arturo Rios Ceballos, who she called her “only hope,” was in his first year of university here studying electromechanics.
Both were murdered. One family saw silence as the only option to protect itself. The other demanded justice and as a result faced threats that forced it to abandon its home and business.
That limited set of options reveals just how much things have unraveled in parts of Mexico in the final year of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration. Citizens have little confidence that the government will protect them or provide justice.
Mexico is on track to finish 2018 with around 30,000 homicides, which would be the country’s deadliest year in at least two decades, and on Sunday voters will elect a new president who will inherit the problem. But none of the four candidates has laid out a detailed strategy to fix a problem that two consecutive administrations have failed to solve.
Nowhere in Mexico is the gangland violence starker than Acapulco, known as a playground of Hollywood stars for much of the last century. But the city has been in a downward spiral of violence, especially since 2006, when then President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against drug cartels and violence began rising in the country.
Last year authorities opened investigations into 834 killings in Acapulco and 2,530 in all of Guerrero state. It is the same state where 43 students from a teacher college disappeared in 2014 in a still unsolved case in which local officials, police and possibly the military have been implicated.
“It has changed the lives of a lot of people in the state,” said Garcia’s husband, Francisco Ramirez Valente.
Their son, known by everyone as Paco, was shot in December, his body found in an unmarked grave with three others two weeks after he disappeared.
His parents never pressed for an investigation, never asked who was responsible. Paco was not involved in criminal activity, they said, but was a hardworking university administrator who had volunteered working with at-risk youth around the state.
Paco’s bank account was cleaned out, so Garcia speculates it was a robbery — he had just received his holiday bonus.
Garcia said the tough crackdown on crime has only yielded more bloodshed. “There has to be someone who brings peace. There should be dialogue so that there can be reconciliation.”
That perspective aligns most closely with presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has proposed amnesty for some criminals and social solutions rather than the war on drugs.
Edgardo Buscaglia, an international organized crime expert and research fellow at Columbia University, called that an outmoded approach from when the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party controlled territory through such alliances.
“The future of Mexico is it must get closer to Colombia, to Italy, the best practices of countries that have managed to control the situation though judicial institutions,” Buscaglia said.
“One (candidate) is talking about amnesty, the other is talking about cutting off peoples’ hands,” he added, the latter a reference to Jaime “El Bronco” Rodriguez, who is currently a distant fourth in polls and proposed the draconian measure during a debate.
“There is a void of proposals in this country,” Buscaglia said.