Pena Nieto fails in fight with cartels
>> MEXICO CITY: Ten years after Mexican troops were unleashed against drug cartels, the country will mark the anniversary without fanfare today, with murders rising again and the military eager to return to barracks.
President Enrique Pena Nieto, who inherited the drug war when he took office in December 2012, has promised his countrymen and women a “Mexico in peace”.
His government has created a new federal police force and imprisoned or killed several drug kingpins, but Mr Pena Nieto has kept troops on the ground despite allegations of abuses and criticism from human rights groups.
The administration has no events planned to commemorate the controversial deployment that was launched by his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, on December 11, 2006.
Ten days after taking office, Mr Calderon deployed some 5,000 troops to his western home state of Michoacan — the start of a militarised campaign against drug trafficking.
Mr Calderon’s six-year term was marked by a surge in murders, rising from 10,253 in 2007 to a peak of 22,852 in 2011.
The figure dropped in the first two years of Mr Pena Nieto’s presidency, only to rise again in 2015.
Although murders remain well under the worst years of Mr Calderon’s presidency, there were 17,063 homicides in the first 10 months of 2016, already surpassing last year’s 12-month total of 17,034.
Much of the bloodshed is blamed on ultra-violent turf wars between drug gangs.
The government has captured major fugitives, such as the Sinaloa drug cartel’s powerful leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
But the weakening of major drug cartels such as the Beltran Leyva, Zetas, Gulf and Knights Templar has led to the emergence of smaller gangs that seek to diversify their business through kidnappings and extortion.
“The war has become much more complex. The level of death has escalated,” said Raul Benitez Manaut, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The drug cartels have terrorised the population by leaving the decapitated bodies of their rivals on roadsides or hanging them on bridges, while mass graves are regularly found in the countryside.
Police have been accused of colluding with criminals while soldiers and marines have faced allegations of committing torture, extrajudicial killings and sexual abuse.
Even Defence Minister Salvador Cienfuegos agrees that troops do not belong in a law enforcement role.
“We didn’t ask to be here. We don’t like it. We didn’t study how to chase criminals,” Mr Cienfuegos said on Thursday.
He said he would be the first to raise “not one, but two hands” in favour of returning troops to barracks.
Although Mr Pena Nieto acknowledged on Friday that the armed forces were doing tasks that “don’t correspond to them in the strictest sense”, he insisted that they are “determined to continue” policing the streets.
But Javier Oliva, a Mexican security expert at the London School of Economics, said “there is no strategy” and the troops are always one step behind.
Drug consumption i n the United States, meanwhile, has not ceased and the legalisation of marijuana in several US states has prompted drug cartels to step up production of heroin while synthetic drugs proliferate.
In Mexico, civilians have paid a heavy price for the international drug trade.
In 2010, 72 Latin American migrants were slaughtered by the Zetas drug cartel in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas after they refused to be recruited by the gang.