President Sheinbaum has invited governors and state leaders to the morning meetings she holds from Monday to Friday with the security cabinet, regardless of which party they belong to. So far, the PAN member Libya Dennise García, governor of Guanajuato, has attended; as well as the Morenistas Rutilio Escandón Cadenas, from Chiapas; and Rubén Rocha from Sinaloa, among others.
(Photo: @LibiaDennise )
Another coincidence between the strategies, although it is stated differently in the discourse, is to confront the generators of violence. Former President Felipe Calderón declared war on criminals, while in Sheinbaum’s government one of the axes is to “neutralize generators of violence and criminal networks with attention to areas of high crime incidence.”
Jonathan De Vicente Encarnación, director of Political Advocacy of the organization Mexico United Against Crime, considers that another of the similarities, perhaps the most obvious and important, is using elements of the Armed Forces in security tasks.
“Where the strategy falters is in once again resorting to the Armed Forces as an operational arm for the execution of this strategy. We must remember that one of the reforms approved was also the reform of the National Guard, which turns it into a military force and from our perspective it fully and permanently militarizes security,” he explains in an interview.
Jonathan De Vicente Encarnación, director of Political Intelligence at MUCD
The National Guard, although it was profiled as a civilian security force during López Obrador’s six-year term, in fact it was always a military corporation that now has more than 130,000 elements and is attached to the Secretariat of National Defense.
This operational, military training and command capacity is added to the thousands of soldiers who are fighting crime in entities such as Sinaloa, Guerrero, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Colima and Tamaulipas, among others.
Based on official data, there is a deployment of at least 79,000 troops of the so-called Permanent Armed Force, which carries out security tasks throughout the national territory.
The difficult challenge of results
The president of Mexico has assured that her strategy will give results, however, she has avoided giving deadlines and percentage of reduction.
“There is a security strategy that will give results, as I have proposed. It is not from one day to the next,” he said on October 28.
Sheinbaum had a violent outburst. In his first month in office, more than 2,200 intentional homicides were recorded, including that of the mayor of Chilpancingo, Alejandro Arcos, and that of Father Marcelo Pérez, in Chiapas.
Alejandro Martínez Serrano, an expert in national security and professor at La Salle University, assures that in order to evaluate the president’s security strategy, one must wait at least a year.
“One year from now, October of next year, we can already make that first assessment of the effectiveness of these new actions. We are literally a month into this administration and it is too early for that balance. I would leave it for at least a year,” he says.
In the case of Felipe Calderón’s government, homicide showed a slight reduction at the end of his six-year term.
One of the successes that experts see in the president’s security strategy is to create the National Intelligence System, the undersecretary of Intelligence and Police Investigation and the undersecretary of Prevention in the SSPC.
“There are positive aspects such as the new undersecretary of intelligence and investigation. The use of intelligence is key, especially if it is used to prosecute crime and discourage organized crime. If it is misused, such as for espionage , human rights would be violated,” adds De Vicente.
