Politics: Organized crime’s significant violent intervention in the June 6 mid-term elections
Organized crime, specifically drug cartels, has increased its control over state and municipal governments. This played out in the recently concluded June 6 mid-term elections. There were 91 killings of candidates and their staff during the campaign, along with 1,000 violent attacks on Election Day itself.
No state has been spared from the spiral of violence, and many of those accused of having ties to drug cartels were candidates for state governor, and were, in fact, elected. This was also the case on a municipal level in states throughout the country.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador downplayed the role of organized crime during the campaign and on Election Day. The day after the vote he declared that "...those who belong to organized crime, in general, behaved well..." The President thus continued sending a message that there would be no persecution of drug lords. AMLO remains firm in his policy of “hugs not bullets.”
This permissiveness has given the green light to organized crime that it can act with increasing cynicism and in broad daylight without fear of being arrested or prosecuted. Organized crime – estimated now to encompass 200-300 gangs – has expanded the scope of its control and operations from the drug trade, to kidnappings and extortion, and then into economic activities through investment of its illicit earnings into productive activities, including doing so through bribes and threatening established business. A necessary condition for this expansion and heightened strength is to exert and consolidate greater influence over local and state governments, first of all through the complicity or collaboration of the police, and increasingly, by gaining control over and reconfiguring government institutions, particularly on a municipal level. A corollary of this has been that sectors of the population that benefit from handouts from organized crime through its control of local government accept and even support such a situation as normal.
Eradicating organized crime and its influence and control in government institutions is key for the future of Mexican democracy and society itself.
Now read on...
Register to sample a report