Leader to visit states plagued by drug cartels
MEXICO CITY — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is traveling to three of Mexico’s most violent states this week to counter what many call a “handsoff ” strategy toward drug cartels that has exacerbated tensions with state governors.
A surge in cartel killings in Guanajuato, Colima and Jalisco — all states governed by opposition parties — is threatening to become a political quagmire of fingerpointing for López Obrador ahead of 2021 midterm elections.
Together with Mexico’s rising death toll from the coronavirus pandemic, the violence could bring an end to a honeymoon for the president who famously promised to tame organized crime with “hugs not bullets” and said Mexico is no longer in the business of detaining drug capos.
With an army and National Guard distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, construction projects and dozens of other tasks that López Obrador has assigned them, it is unclear how much the president can bring to the table to fight the cartels.
“I am going to these states because they have the toughest problems with violence and especially homicides,” López Obrador said. “I am going to support the people with my presence and tell them that despite the public, notorious differences we have with the state governments, this is a matter that concerns everyone and we have a duty to act together.”
Mexico’s president has swung between blaming governors for the country’s problems — at times even accusing them of being in cahoots with cartels — and embracing them.
But at his first stop in Irapuato, Guanajuato on Wednesday, the message was cooperation and coordination.
All three of the states are seeing vicious cartel turf battles.
In Guanajato, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang are engaged in a fight that has left over 1,900 people dead in the first five months of this year, including the slaughter of the recovering addicts at a rehab center in Irapuato on July 1. According to López Obrador, 70% of these killings occurred between criminal groups.
On Wednesday, López Obrador said there were 3,000 National Guardsmen in Guanajuato.
Jalisco state has accounted for about 29% of all bodies pulled from clandestine burial pits since the start of López Obrador’s administration. A total of 487 bodies were found in the state between Dec. 1, 2018 and the end of June.