In just over three weeks in office, President Claudia Sheinbaum has inherited a whirlwind of violence that many say was set up by her predecessor’s policy of not confronting drug cartels, and using the army for law enforcement.
Sheinbaum, who took office on Oct. 1, would rather discuss the government’s plan to make all judges eligible for election.
Instead, she has had to deal with the army’s killing of six migrants on the day she took office and the death of three bystanders at the hands of soldiers in the border city of Nuevo Laredo 10 days later. They were killed by army and National Guard troops pursuing drug cartel suspects.
Sheinbaum’s third week in office was capped by the murder of a crusading Catholic priest who gangs had threatened, and a lopsided encounter in northern Sinaloa state in which soldiers killed 19 drug cartel suspects, but suffered not a scratch themselves. That awakened memories of past human rights abuses, like a 2014 incident in which soldiers killed about a dozen cartel suspects after they had surrendered.
“It is all very disappointing, and it looks dark for the future,” said Santiago Aguirre, the head of Miguel Agustín Pro Human Rights Center. “Everything is breaking down, and instead of taking care of these priority issues, all the government’s political capital is being wasted on a judicial reform that will cause more problems than solutions.”
Sheinbaum has said all the incidents are under investigation. Still, she has dedicated only a few minutes in her first three weeks in office to talking about them, compared to the hours she has spent extolling the virtues of judicial reform. She says electing judges will remedy corruption.
But critics note the real problem isn’t corrupt judges releasing suspects; it’s the fact that civilian police and prosecutors have been so underfunded and ill-trained that over 90% of crimes never make it to court in the first place.
It was Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — who left office Sept. 30 — who decided to make the armed forces the centerpiece of his security strategy and give up on the slow, steady work of reforming police and the judiciary to root out corruption.
Sheinbaum has vowed to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including the “hugs, not bullets” strategy of not confronting the cartels, but rather seeking to drain the potential pool of recruits through scholarships and job training programs.
López Obrador failed to significantly reduce Mexico’s historically high homicide rate, but the charismatic former president had a talent for depicting himself as the victim, brushing off past incidents and accusing media reports on violence as “sensationalism” meant to smear him.
But since Oct. 1, the abuses have come so fast that Sheinbaum has had neither the charisma nor the time to brush off the incidents. On Thursday, a drug cartel set off two near-simultaneous car bombs in the state of Guanajuato, injuring three police officers and strewing burning wreckage across streets.
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