The origin of the disaster: Calderón, Cárdenas Batel and improvised militarization
The contemporary history of violence in Michoacán has a founding moment: December 2006, when then-governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel requested the sending of federal troops to Felipe Calderón to confront La Familia Michoacana. That operation, presented as the beginning of the “war on drugs,” lacked a solid intelligence diagnosis, measurable objectives and an exit plan. The result: the fragmentation of criminal organizations into more violent and territorialized cells, the exponential increase in homicides, and the consolidation of illegal economies that replaced the State in basic functions.
The Michoacanazo of 2009, which arrested 11 municipal presidents, showed the depth of criminal infiltration, but did not generate a strategy for institutional reconstruction. Calderón militarized without dismantling protection networks; he fought without offering economic alternatives; and left the territory without having recovered the legitimate monopoly of violence. Nineteen years later, Michoacán is still hostage to the consequences of that intervention without diagnosis or perspective.
Déjà vu: 2015 and 2025, the same preventive rhetoric in the face of the same criminal reality
The Michoacán Plan presented by Enrique Peña Nieto in 2014-2015 constitutes the most accurate mirror of the current announcement. Then there was talk of “crime prevention”, “reconstruction of the social fabric”, “economic development with justice” and “institutional strengthening.”
The Commission for the Security and Comprehensive Development of Michoacán was created, federal forces were deployed and special economic zones were announced.
The results are known: between 2015 and 2018, the number of police officers per thousand inhabitants in Michoacán fell from 2.9 to 2.1; Intentional homicides increased dramatically with the entry of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and the formation of Cárteles Unidos; and municipalities such as Uruapan, Apatzingán and Aguililla consolidated their position as territories of criminal governance.
Peña Nieto’s plan failed because he privileged the rhetoric of prevention over the operational need to root out criminal structures entrenched in local power. Today, Plan 2025 reproduces the same discursive architecture: three axes (security and justice, economic development, education and culture), reinforcement of federal forces, security tables and community participation. The difference is barely semantic; The conceptual structure is identical.
The technical impossibility: security without dismantling criminal power
The main structural flaw of Plan 2025 is its inability to recognize that in Michoacán there is no power vacuum that the State can fill through police presence and social programs. There is a constituted power: criminal organizations that collect taxes, regulate markets, administer parallel justice, control routes and territories, and co-opt or execute authorities that are not subordinated to their logic. In this context, implementing “fortnightly security tables” or “alert systems for mayors” is like trying to regulate vehicle traffic in the middle of a war. There are no minimum governability conditions for public policies to work.
Before talking about economic development, it is necessary to recover territorial control through intelligence operations that identify, dismantle and prosecute criminal structures and their political protection networks. This implies not only the presence of the National Guard, but also coordinated financial, ministerial and military intelligence operations with specific dismantling objectives.
Without this prior phase, any social program becomes a resource that can be captured by the same structures that generate violence.
Crisis containment, non-state intervention: the limits of short-termism
Plan 2025 is not a comprehensive state intervention, but a response of political containment to the media pressure generated by the murder of Carlos Manzo. Its reactive nature is evidenced by the absence of a public intelligence diagnosis, the lack of measurable impact indicators, the lack of a specific schedule of actions by region, and the omission of inter-institutional coordination protocols.
“Reinforcement of federal forces” is announced, but it is not specified how many elements, with what operational mandate, in what priority areas, under what unified command scheme. There is talk of a “specialized prosecutor’s office”, but its autonomy, budget, technical capabilities or shielding mechanisms against infiltration are not detailed.
“Poles of economic development” are promised, but how to protect businessmen and day laborers from systematic extortion is not identified. True state intervention requires a multi-year budget commitment, an institutional apparatus designed specifically for Michoacán, and an exit strategy that contemplates the transition from federal presence to strengthened local institutions. The 2025 Plan lacks all this.
The fallacy of simultaneity: social development versus security
The second axis of the plan—economic development with justice—reveals a fundamental conceptual confusion: the belief that it is possible to implement social policies in territories without the rule of law. Programs to support agricultural laborers, investment in rural infrastructure and job creation are relevant public policy tools, but they operate under the assumption that there is a State capable of regulating markets, protecting labor rights and guaranteeing that resources are not captured by de facto powers. In Michoacán, this assumption is false.
Avocado and lemon producers already pay “taxes” to organized crime; day laborers are subject to territorial control systems; and any investment in infrastructure requires negotiation with armed groups. Pretending that transportation scholarships, sports centers and cultural festivals will transform the dynamics of violence without having dismantled extortion structures is naivety or simulation.
Social policy and security policy are not incompatible in the long term, but they are sequential: first the legitimate monopoly of force is recovered; Then the social fabric is rebuilt. Reversing the order is wasting resources on programs doomed to be irrelevant or co-opted.
Tables without operations: the institutionalization of failure
The sixth spine of the plan—biweekly security roundtables and institutional coordination—represents the institutionalization of inaction. The security roundtables have been held uninterruptedly for two decades in Michoacán, under all administrations, without altering the correlation of forces between the State and organized crime. Why would they work now? Because they will meet every fifteen days instead of every month. The international evidence on violence reduction is conclusive: coordination tables are useful when they accompany intelligence operations with criminal dismantling objectives.
Alone, they are bureaucratic rituals that produce diagnoses without operational consequences. What Michoacán needs is not more meetings, but clear chains of command, shared intelligence protocols, forensic technical capabilities, effective protection of witnesses and officials, and a litigation strategy that brings organized crime operators and their political protectors to justice. None of this is mentioned in Plan 2025, which prefers the simulation of inter-institutional coordination to the discomfort of recognizing that the problem requires State actions that transcend the discourse of peace.
