MEXICO UNSURE HOW TO FIGHT CRIME, VIOLENCE
Government’s “hugs, not bullets” campaign is being put to the test.
ME X ICO CIT Y » The Mexican army — the country’s last line of defense against violent gangs — is struggling with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s desire to avoid confrontation while simultaneously dealing with gangs that have become more aggressive and often use townspeople as human shields.
López Obrador has given the army a bigger role than it has had in decades, but he also given it the mandate of avoiding civilian casualties. For months, that has meant allowing army patrols to be slapped around by crowds, disarmed and humiliated. But the army’s patience appears to be running out, with soldiers firing warning shots in some recent confrontations.
The issue came to a head recently when a patrol carrying out the army’s bread-and-butter role — drug crop eradication — was ambushed in the southern state of Guerrero, killing three soldiers.
Whereas previous administrations might have flooded the area with heavily armed troops, López Obrador said he wants to avoid confrontations; the one thing he doesn’t want in his term is an army massacre of the kind that has occurred in the past in Mexico.
But it leaves the army with a conundrum: Drug cartels and criminal gangs have learned to use crowds of townspeople armed with stones and cudgels as human shields, while the army has made little or no progress in the use of nonlethal force — tear gas or Tasers — to handle such situations.
This has put to the test the president’s campaign slogan of “hugs, not bullets” in dealing with Mexico’s violence, part of an ambitious vision for helping the country regain its moral compass that he has dubbed the “Fourth Transformation.”
Over and over, crowds of townspeople — often in the pay of gangs — have confronted soldiers and marines, with troops not fighting back. In May a video emerged of a squad of a half dozen soldiers being abducted and disarmed by vigilantes linked to a gang in western Mexico. The soldiers are pushed and insulted by the vigilantes until they agree to return a .50-caliber sniper rifle that had been seized by a previous patrol.
While some saw it as a humiliation, López Obrador invited the soldiers to the presidential offices and congratulated them for keeping their heads and not firing their weapons.
“We do not want a peace imposed by authoritarianism, by the use of force; we do not want the peace of the graveyard,” said López Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1 promising to reduce the sky-high levels of violence and human rights abuses amid the country’s militarized war on drug cartels. “We have to draw youth to us, to embrace youths” by providing jobs, training programs and scholarships to avoid them being recruited by gangs.
But there are signs the military is tiring of turning the other cheek. The possible change in sentiment has generated fears of a return of rights abuses, such as in 2014, when soldiers executed at least a dozen gang suspects after they surrendered, and other cases.
“This is a structural problem of the Mexican government,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope, noting that in the past, “law enforcement forces either used excessive force, or did nothing at all.”