Politics: No answer to soaring violence
Inegi has released its annual report on homicides in Mexico corresponding to 2018, and the data confirms that the year was the most violent since the institute first began publishing such data in 1990. With the exception of a slight downtrend from mid-2011 to late 2014, increasing homicidal violence has been constant over the past 13 years, with the number of intentional homicides per day climbing from an average of 55.5 under Felipe Calderón, to 71.4 under Enrique Peña Nieto, and to 104 during the first seven months of Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration.
This is part of the public security environment the López Obrador administration inherited. Homicidal violence is a structural problem with no quick fixes, however, the current administration has responded to the deterioration by simply discarding all previous policies and instead insisting on establishing a National Guard. Formally, the new security force began operating on July 1 but very little is known about its functioning, given that the information concerning its size, funding, internal organization, and security strategies is minimal, contradictory, and confusing, and the government’s general security policy leaves much to be desired.
The policing action that President López Obrador has most bragged about has been his crackdown on the theft of fuels (known colloquially as “huachicol”). He began the year with major operations against fuel traffickers that had led to significant gasoline shortages in parts of the country during January. But despite his claim in March that such theft was reduced by 95%, there are many indications that the huachicol business is thriving and may be expanding even further. Though kidnapping statistics are among the most unreliable, there are signs such abductions, too, are on the rise, as are public perceptions of insecurity. The percentage of those who say they feel insecure in their respective communities increased slightly in the last six months and has risen as high as 97.4% in the Greater Mexico City Area.
Until AMLO's government redefines and seriously applies a public security policy and works to seriously involve state and municipal governments, we cannot expect any improvement in public insecurity.
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