Roots of Mexico’s confidence against crime

A new president’s tactics to curb violent cartels reflects the country’s past progress as a democracy against nonelected threats.

The Monitor's View

What an entrance. On Tuesday, or only a week after she became Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo sent her security czar to walk the streets of Culiacán. The city is the epicenter of a murderous struggle between two factions of a giant drug cartel in the state of Sinaloa.

By his mere presence in one of Mexico’s most violent cities, Omar García Harfuch, the new secretary for federal public safety, was sending a nuanced message: Just as Mexico was able to make progress as a democracy in recent decades, it is now improving its approach to defeating organized crime.

Mr. García, a former police officer, was in Culiacán to show that President Sheinbaum plans to deploy some tactics that are different from those of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. While she will keep the crime-fighting social programs of AMLO (as the former president is known), she and her security chief will apply lessons they learned when she was mayor of Mexico City and he was head of the capital’s security. Together, they halved homicides in the city and suppressed many organized gangs.

The new plan includes a focus on only six Mexican states – the ones with the most violent incidents. It also relies heavily on better police intelligence, mediation between cartels, and more coordination among security officials at all levels, from prosecutors to the military.

“Security is a problem that requires shared responsibility and a unified response,” the new president said in laying out her plan. Nearly two-thirds of Mexicans see public safety as the nation’s gravest problem, according to a government survey earlier this year.

Mexico, like many countries in Latin America, has been on a long learning curve in the battle against crime syndicates. Yet despite many setbacks, the region has a strong reason to believe it can someday succeed. Since the 1980s, most countries have successfully fought back against other powerful forces, according to two scholars writing in this month’s Journal of Democracy.

“Drug cartels and their bosses have replaced power-hungry generals, Marxist guerrillas, and predatory business elites as the forces most inimical to democracy,” wrote Javier Corrales and Will Freeman.

Building democracies to resist “nonelected threats” like generals, rebels, and elites once seemed improbable, they stated. Many countries still contend with those threats, but most of Latin America is now democratic.

“The lesson for today’s leaders is that institutional reforms can subdue security threats,” the two scholars concluded.

Mexico’s new leader is avoiding failed anti-crime policies and adopting different ones nationwide that have largely worked in the capital. For Mexicans, progress in their democracy has given them hope of making progress in upending a deep culture of organized crime. Good builds on good.

During his walk in Culiacán, Mr. García displayed that confidence in such progress. He has the people’s faith in rule of law behind him.