Trump’s demands allow Claudia Sheinbaum to dismantle her predecessor’s security policy

The policy of ‘hugs, not bullets’ (abrazos, no balazos) with which Andrés Manuel López Obrador kept the fight against organized crime to a minimum, has been shattered in Claudia Sheinbaum’s first five months in office. Although the numbers are not yet entirely telling nor the results statistically comparable, the public discourse is very different. The president and her security czar, Omar García Harfuch, delightedly show off the thousands of arrests of drug lords across the country, the tons of drugs seized and clandestine laboratories dismantled, as well as the weapons, vehicles, and properties confiscated. Added to the daily grind is Operation Northern Border, launched to satisfy Donald Trump’s demands, which expands the trophies on display. The Republican’s demands, which Mexico is preparing to meet, cannot hide the fact that Sheinbaum’s strategy against crime is quietly disrupting her predecessor’s plans.

From the very appointment of former police officer García Harfuch and the intelligence and investigative powers granted to him for this fight, analyses indicated that things were going to be different. Security expert Bernardo León sums it up in one sentence: “They’re putting in the effort. Now the criminals are scared; they know it’s serious.” Despite this, the specialist believes that this drive can’t take them very far, given, he asserts, that crime sustains some of the country’s administrations. “They won’t be able to betray certain agreements.” León also sees two other obstacles: the Attorney General’s Office, with its enormous investigative power over crime, and the Mexican army and the National Guard, which “are going their own way.” Only if Attorney General Alejandro Gertz is removed from the equation could similar progress be made, the expert believes. In any case, in this area, he says, the previous administration is over and “Trump’s demands have served as an alibi.”

Even though the homicide figures were becoming uncomfortable during the previous administration, López Obrador brought them into the political arena: wherever his party, Morena, governed, things were getting better, or else the massacres were blamed on the victims, on drugs, or on a lack of values. The crimes that occurred in Guanajuato, where an opposition party, the PAN, governed, were presented in morning press conferences as a political failure, and the blame was placed on the prosecutor. Today, the prosecutor has changed, but the PAN continues to govern that state. However, the rhetoric has shifted. “This is not a political issue, it’s a matter of coordination. We are going to sit down with the governor to further coordinate efforts,” Sheinbaum said Tuesday. García Harfuch himself met with the authorities in Guanajuato shortly after taking office, and the statements that emerged from those meetings revealed a new political tone.

León recalls: “When López Obrador came to power, I was tasked with designing a national model for policing and civic justice, so that state and municipal police could also investigate crimes. I wasn’t at the meeting, but I was told that when it was presented to the president, he looked bored,” the expert laughs over the phone. “They didn’t put a cent into it; they spent the entire six-year term building the National Guard, in short, with the famous hugs, not bullets.” Later, during the transition from one six-year term to the next, on August 9, López Obrador called García Harfuch, they took a photo, and everyone assumed they were on the same page, but León doesn’t give that any credence. He does believe, however, that things have taken a different direction now.

The differences in current security practices have to do with Trump, says another security expert, Elena Azaola, “but that’s not the only thing,” she asserts. “They come from [García Harfuch], a leading agent, a technician, an expert, who has implemented a policy of coordination between agencies, with greater use of intelligence, and who builds cases well so that a judge can’t dismiss them.” Azaola, a researcher at the seminar on violence and peace at the Colegio de México, says that those discontinuities that existed between the arrest of a criminal and their appearance before a judge have been broken. “This government is mindful of this, and the investigation files are very well put together.” However, the researcher laments the lack of results in other areas of security, such as those concerning disappearances or the harassment suffered by Indigenous peoples by logging companies, mines, water resources, etc. “The issues of interest to the U.S. are getting more attention [from Mexican officials] than our own pain,” she asserts. Like Léon, this expert believes that the Attorney General’s Office remains “a disaster.”

Azaola believes that Sheinbaum and García Harfuch’s vision is different from that of López Obrador, although they refuse to acknowledge it so as not to undermine the promised political continuity. “The president has even said that ‘hugs, not bullets,’ referred to young people, when we all know that it was the previous president’s national security policy.” More eloquent, however, is the phrase Sheinbaum delivered Tuesday when pointing to a 15% decrease in intentional homicides: “We are doing this out of conviction and, furthermore, because of the agreement with the United States.”

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