August 17, 2020
On January 30, 2019, when he was not yet two months old in the National Palace, the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared the end of the war against drug trafficking that his predecessors fought.
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“Bosses have not been detained,” he said, “because that is not our main function. Our task as a government is to guarantee public safety. We will no longer have the strategy of the operatives to arrest drug lords, with that spectacular nature that there was. What we are looking for is that there is security ”.
And he added: “We have to lower the number of homicides, robberies, that there are no kidnappings. That is the fundamental, not the spectacular of the operations. A lot of time was wasted on that and nothing was resolved. Officially, there is no war. We want peace and we are going to achieve it ”.
Almost a year and a half later, on June 15, he reiterated his position on not focusing on arresting the leaders of criminal organizations. “What we want is to achieve peace. And to achieve peace and tranquility, it is not enough to stop these characters, “he said on a tour of Veracruz.
Despite this, at dawn on Sunday, August 2, in the community of Franco Tavera, in the municipality of Juventino Rosas, Guanajuato, the federal government, in coordination with the security forces of Guanajuato, achieved the most relevant arrest so far. of the presidential period: that of the leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, alias The Brown.
Last Friday, when answering a question about insecurity in that state, the president Lopez Obrador said the following.
“In the case of Guanajuato, since the arrest of the head of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, there has been a decrease in homicides, they have not disappeared, but yes, Guanajuato is no longer in the first place. In these last 15 days it’s not showing up like it was in the first place. It does not mean that the problem has been solved, but hey, every day we are measuring what is happening ”.
I began to review the official data on intentional murders and it turns out that the President is right. The day they arrested The Brown they killed 19 people in Guanajuato. In the following 12 days, 90 homicides were accumulated, which is not small. However, in the 12 days prior to August 2 there were 159. That is, in less than two weeks there has been a 43 percent decrease in the number of murders in the state.
It may be that it is a temporary phenomenon in which there is a rearrangement of the criminal organization, although in other cases the arrests of drug lords have quickly led to waves of executions, either within the affected group or by rivals looking to seize the opportunity to seize territory.
Still, it’s worth dwelling on what he said Lopez Obrador: “Since the arrest of the head of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, a decrease in homicides has been observed.” Clearly, the president attributes the decrease in violence to an action that he previously considered contrary to his pacification strategy or, at least, insufficient to achieve the objective.
During his election campaign, he had promised that his government would distinguish itself from that of its predecessors — especially Felipe Calderon—And I would trade bullets for hugs and obtain peace by addressing the causes of insecurity.
On May 12, in this Binnacle, when commenting on the publication in the Official Journal of the Federation From an agreement on the participation of the Armed Forces in public security tasks, I anticipated that the policy on the matter was taking a turn, since “high levels of insecurity have deteriorated the presidential popularity.”
The arrest of The Brown —Even in collaboration with Guanajuato authorities— marks another turn of the screw in that change of course. Declaration of Lopez Obrador of last Friday implies the acceptance that the strategies of the past continue in force.
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