It is necessary to reorient the anti-crime strategy: Víctor M. Quintana

Arturo Sanchez Jimenez

Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday June 25, 2022, p. 5

Chihuahua is experiencing an upsurge in violence that makes it clear that a change in government strategy is required to deal with it, considers Víctor M. Quintana, a sociologist and contributor to this newspaper.

In a telephone interview, the coordinator of advisers of the Morena parliamentary group in the local Congress affirms that the state government is not doing anything to deal with the torrent of violence that is not only expressed in an increase in homicides, but also in forced displacement and disappearances.

The federal government, says the former deputy, has done its part to address the causes of the problem and maintains social investments of more than 3 billion pesos in the state, but it needs to reformulate its approach to the problem “with a different strategy, very grounded in the communities.

“This year the massacres have been increasing. On June 12 alone, six people were killed in Cuauhtémoc, then another four; they killed four more in Chihuahua, last Friday four more at the Denny’s in Ciudad Juárez, over the weekend they found four decapitated bodies between Parral and Jiménez, and then came the Jesuit priests and the tour guide in Cerocahui,” he says. Quintana.

He warns that the outburst of crime cannot be fully explained only by the confrontation between criminal groups and that although a drop in executions had been seen in the cities, In the mountains, disappearances continue, forced displacement of communities, clandestine logging, house fires, forest fires, which are not all due to the dry storm, but to actions of intimidation by criminal groups against the communities..

In his vision, “a different strategy is needed, very grounded in the communities. Strategies from above have a point where they no longer work, because drug traffickers they are below, they are acting in the communities, they terrorize some, they take shelter in others”.

The challenge it is how to fight against a phenomenon that has permeated the social structure of the sierra, which has several generations and in which “the indigenous have borne the brunt.

“The narco not new to the area. The activity of planting drugs dates back to the 1940s. It began in Sinaloa, in the border area with Chihuahua, during World War II with the need to plant poppies to supply the United States army with opiates. Many people dedicated themselves to this for a minimum survival strategy and because for many years it did not have criminal connotations.

It took the murder of the Jesuits and the tour guide for him to be a little shaken. This should be a wake-up call to review the strategy well.