For the past six years, Mexico has boasted of its controversial “hugs, not bullets” strategy, in which its leaders avoided confronting drug cartels that were gradually taking control of large parts of the country. The idea was that social programs, not gunfights, would slowly deplete the groups’ reserve of gunmen.
Now, a month into the new president’s term, Claudia Sheinbaum, a series of bloody confrontations suggests the government is quietly abandoning the “no bullets” part of the strategy and is much more willing to use the full force of the military and the militarized National Guard.
But the challenge Mexico faces now is different from that of the country’s war on drugs from 2006 to 2012. Today, the cartels are more diversified, more deeply entrenched in migrant smuggling and more willing to use foreign recruits and teenagers to fill their ranks.
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All of this has led to a series of violent clashes in which security forces firing on suspected cartel convoys end up killing bystanders and migrants and reporting disproportionate death tolls, with soldiers unharmed while most suspects are eliminated.
Sheinbaum has carefully avoided using the “hugs, not bullets” slogan popularized by her predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office on Sept. 30. After all, she promised to continue each and every one of the former president’s policies. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.
But the Mexican president has had to perform some verbal acrobatics to avoid completely disassociating herself from that policy.
“Of course it’s not about giving hugs to criminals, no one has ever said that,” Sheinbaum said shortly after taking office. The hugs, he said, were intended for impoverished young men, to prevent them from being recruited as cartel gunmen.
“There are signs of a change in tone toward organized crime, but it’s too early to tell,” said Falko Ernst, a security analyst. “It seems unlikely that Sheinbaum’s government will risk facing a constant stream of politically inconvenient violent images by betting on a strategy of bullets only,” but there may be more willingness to confront “the most blatant and daring displays of power” by the cartels.
It’s hard to imagine Sheinbaum, however, issuing public praise to drug lords for behaving well, or saying — as López Obrador did — that “I’m going to accuse them to their parents and their grandparents” if they cause too much violence.
She has also been reluctant to tolerate criminals taking police and soldiers hostage, or to boast of reductions in Mexico’s “fatality rate” — the measure of suspects killed, wounded or detained, versus casualties on the side of law enforcement — the way her predecessor did.
In a famous move in 2019, López Obrador ordered the release of kingpin Ovidio Guzmán after his Sinaloa cartel threatened to throw the northern city of Culiacán into chaos to win his freedom. López Obrador said he made the decision to avoid bloodshed.
Sheinbaum’s government has been a little different. On her first day in office, soldiers in the southern state of Chiapas opened fire on a pickup truck “like those used by criminal groups in that region.” But after firing, they found only migrants, six of whom were killed and 10 wounded.
Ten days later, army and National Guard troops killed three innocent bystanders while chasing armed suspects. And this weekend, the National Guard opened fire on a truck carrying migrants, killing two Colombians and wounding at least four.
Then there are the disproportionate death tolls: López Obrador has long criticized previous governments for shootouts in which all suspects were killed, and very few were captured alive. But in Sheinbaum’s third week in office, soldiers killed 19 cartel suspects in Sinaloa and arrested one in a shootout, but suffered not a scratch.
And toward the end of her first month in office, soldiers chasing hitmen who had killed two local police officers shot dead 17 of them, but lost no soldiers. Most of the dead, and 10 of the 15 gunmen arrested in the clash, were Guatemalan.
“The strategy of hugs and not bullets has long since ended,” said security analyst David Saucedo, pointing to an increase in the number of high-level drug-related arrests and extraditions of suspects. “The U.S. government pressured Andrés Manuel López Obrador to reactivate the capture of high-profile drug traffickers.”
One of the main differences Sheinbaum faces is that Mexican cartels have become involved in the lucrative business of smuggling migrants from faraway countries.
In the old days, cartels charged a commission to smugglers transporting Central Americans, who used to make up the vast majority of those crossing Mexico to reach the United States. Those migrants paid hundreds or a few thousand dollars each.
Since smugglers opened a new route through the Darien Gap, people from farther away have crossed Mexico — and can pay much higher smuggling fees.
At the same time, strict immigration measures in the United States and Mexico have left a significant number of Central and South Americans unable to enter the United States, said military analyst Juan Ibarrola, noting that “it is big business and it is by far more business than drugs.”
Ibarrola says cartels now use migrants as human shields, and sometimes as cannon fodder for their hit squads.
“The recruitment of more foreign fighters is another sign of the gradual deepening of Mexico’s armed conflicts,” Ernst said. “It has been left unchecked — like the use of homemade explosives — it is a trend that has been allowed to expand.”
Expanding is exactly what the cartels did during López Obrador’s six-year term, from late 2018 to 2024.
“We were six years under a policy of a president who did not understand or did not understand that the worst thing he could have done, among the bad things he did, the very serious mistakes he made, was not to confront criminals with the legal use of force and violence,” said Ibarrola, who is convinced that the policy has now changed.
The other problem Sheinbaum faces is the result of her determination to continue López Obrador’s strategy of militarizing law enforcement agencies in Mexico, essentially assigning soldiers a task for which they are not trained.
Together with the mix of migrants and drug traffickers, this seems an almost certain recipe for more deaths of innocent bystanders.
“It is a fact that the National Guard does not correctly apply the rules of engagement on the use of force,” said Saucedo. “They often open fire and shoot before investigating or trying to subdue the suspected criminals.”
Source: latimes
