Violence in Mexico emerges as the thorniest issue for presidential aspirations

The thousands of people who end up underground in Mexico every year, whether with a gravestone or without it, make it impossible to look the other way. There is also no way to hide the reality that hits the country the hardest and that only intensifies during election time. That will be the most controversial matter in the campaign that the two presidential candidates with the possibility of winning will maintain. Both nominees will be weighed down by past policies. The candidate on the right, Xóchitl Gálvez, is weighed down by the policies of the Felipe Calderón era, while the candidate on the left, Claudia Sheinbaum, will have to deal with the security disaster that this six-year term has entailed and the militarization that came with it. In the absence of a specific electoral program explaining how to combat violence, there are already signs of how the opposition will attack from that flank and some signs of the possible escape routes that the ruling team will use.

Security will be the great offensive deployed by Gálvez, who frequently remarks on the levels of violence in the country, also when she travels outside of it, such as on her tour of the United States and Spain, where she asserted the urgency of reversing this tragedy not only out of logical humanity (so many corpses!) but due to the need to offer the business community a territory without conflicts. The insinuations of drug traffickers’ support for former campaigns by current president López Obrador published in the media, and other manifestations of organized crime against the president, contribute to the sense of limited strength that the opposition still displays at the beginning of the presidential race.

Gálvez’s team, which champions the alliance between the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for the June 2 election, therefore has something solid to attack. It is more complicated to see how Sheinbaum will organize her defense strategy. The candidate embraces the continuity of this six-year term, but in terms of security she will be forced to distance herself in some way from the president’s policies and there are already signs of this. The figure of Omar García Harfuch comes to the fore. The former Secretary of Security of Mexico City stands as a symbol of civil versus military power and as the person who exemplifies the successes against crime in the Sheinbaum Administration in the Mexican capital. Harfuch is the person in charge of the candidate’s team for this matter, and he will draw the lines to follow. His image is already taking away the limelight from Sheinbaum herself at some of her campaign events. Nothing is coincidental in politics.

This week, Harfuch outlined in a conference with businessmen the predominant idea defended by the official candidate to combat crime, whether organized or not. He spoke of strengthening local and state police and prosecutors’ offices and granting the National Guard greater investigative capacity. A “preventive model with research,” he said. But it will not be easy to separate this line of action from the militarization that has dominated security matters in this six-year term. Neither for Sheinbaum nor for Gálvez, according to analysts. “The next president will inherit a kind of deterministic prison in terms of security based on a transexennial arrangement that will limit the capacity for action,” says Humberto Beck, a historian at the international studies center Colegio de México. “Despite the legal dispute that persists, in fact the National Guard functions as a branch of the Armed Forces and the Army is involved in security tasks, as well as many others. The strange thing is that there are not more soldiers in ministries other than those of National Defense or the Navy,” he says, underscoring that reversing this process will be complicated.

Beck maintains that three powers co-govern in the country: the civil, the military and the criminal, which has gained alarming strength in some territories. “Sheinbaum’s best card is to showcase Harfuch’s supposed achievements as the head of the capital’s police, because at the federal level there is nothing on that side.” The symbol of the police officer “gives him the ability to argue that his project is different from that of López Obrador,” adds Beck.

“Of course, security is the great issue to be resolved in this country and it is the best weapon for the opposition, because not only has the fight against violence not improved in this six-year term, but it will be the one with the most deaths,” says the political analyst Paula Sofía Vásquez Sánchez. The campaign itself will be full of blood, as is already being seen before it begins, with nearly 20 murdered candidates and government employees. “It will be interesting to see how many candidacies are unique, without contenders, because that will be a measure of the places co-opted by crime,” she adds. This expert understands why Sheinbaum exhibits Harfuch as a model against crime, “perhaps for the same reason that the police officer was also her first choice for the Mexico City candidacy. It gives her a framework for the national campaign, but Claudia has to reckon with militarization. What is going to happen to the work of the armed forces in terms of security?” asks Vásquez Sánchez. She believes that Sheinbaum has no choice but to “throw Harfuch forward to mask that militarized security. The way the country is, a police officer is a better option than a soldier,” she says.

Capitalizing on the country’s insecurity entails risks. An unfortunate slip on the part of the opposition could hit back: you don’t do politics with the dead, some would say. A simple photo of Xóchitl Gálvez with former president Felipe Calderón in Spain has been enough to intensify criticism of the candidate regarding her political security program. “I don’t know what the opposition’s strategies are in this matter, but I suppose they will have to focus on the entities. In Guerrero it is the hottest issue, but there are many other States that are seeing how they lose governability and enter a criminal logic, such as Chiapas, Morelos, Guanajuato or Zacatecas,” says the analyst. Taking advantage of the violence in the campaign will depend a lot on the opposition in these places, maintains Vásquez Sánchez.

This campaign will be measured by the attacks on the state of security and by the defense mounted by the president’s successor, but in this matter, there are those who believe that the most sensible thing will be to distance oneself from the results presented by the López Obrador Administration.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition