Michoacan Sees a Decade of Militarized Failure in Mexico's War on Crime Mike LaSusa - Insight Crime
go to original December 8, 2016

Mexico drug wars: Murders on the rise in Michoacán (Al Jazeera English)

This week marks ten years since Mexico's government embarked on a militarized campaign against the country's criminal organizations, but while many criminal leaders have been captured or killed, a decade of confrontation has failed to substantially improve the nation's security situation.

On December 11, 2006, days after being sworn in, Mexico's then-President Felipe Calderón announced that his administration was deploying thousands of federal troops to combat organized crime in his home state of Michoacán.

Interior Minister Francisco Javier Ramírez Acuña said at the time that "the battle against organized crime is only just beginning, and it will be a fight that will take time."

Ten years later, Michoacán remains one of Mexico's most violent states.

Vigilante groups - which have long posed a dilemma for local authorities - continue to operate in the area. Several such groups are suspected of participating in criminal activities, rather than combating them.

And despite the recent capture of several top leaders, the dominant local criminal organization, the Knights Templar, appears as willing as ever to directly confront the authorities, reportedly downing a government helicopter during a September security operation.

In many ways, Michoacán is a microcosm of the larger problem, as high levels of violence persist at the national level, even areas where the government has spent millions on security. The months of August and September were the deadliest in Mexico in almost 20 years, with organized crime estimated to account for nearly 60 percent of the more than 15,000 homicides recorded so far this year.

Violence associated with organized crime is not only on the rise, but it also appears to be spreading to areas of Mexico that had not previously seen high levels of criminal activity. The state of Colima, which borders Michoacán to the north, may be the most extreme example of this trend. Homicides there have spiked by as much as 900 percent this year compared to last.

This backsliding on modest security gains in recent years has not gone unnoticed by the Mexican public. A recent survey showed that citizens' perceptions of security are in decline, and more than seven in ten respondents believe that the government's current strategy is making the country less safe.

In spite of this, the government of current President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued to rely on the armed forces to carry out internal security functions, particularly in areas with high levels of crime-related violence like Michoacán. And representatives of Peña Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional - PRI) recently proposed legislation that would expand the armed forces' role in the drug war.

Read the rest at Insight Crime

Related: Mexico, the U.S. and the Drug War: Joint Responsibility (Mexico Voices)

Related: Crime Spike in Mexico Forces Large Companies to Boost Security Spending (PanAm Post)

Related: Mexico Drug War: A Decade of Unnecessary Bloodshed (Mexico Voices)

Related: Mexico's War on Drugs: What Has It Achieved and How Is the US Involved? (The Guardian)

Related: Mexico Drug War: Ten Years Later (Mexico Voices)

InSight Crime is a foundation dedicated to the study of the principal threat to national and citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean: organized crime. We seek to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime in the Americas by providing the general public with regular reporting, analysis and investigation on the subject and on state efforts to combat it.

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