MEXICO
CITY (AP) — The notoriously violent Jalisco cartel has responded to
Mexico’s “hugs, not bullets” policy with a policy of its own: The cartel
kidnapped several members of an elite police force in the state of
Guanajuato, tortured them to obtain names and addresses of fellow
officers and is now hunting down and killing police at their homes, on
their days off, in front of their families.
It
is a type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most
gang-plagued nations of Central America and poses the most direct
challenge yet to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of
avoiding violence and rejecting any war on the cartels.
But
the cartel has already declared war on the government, aiming to
eradicate an elite state force known as the Tactical Group which the
gang accuses of treating its members unfairly.
“If
you want war, you’ll get a war. We have already shown that we know
where you are. We are coming for all of you,” reads a professionally
printed banner signed by the cartel and hung on a building in Guanajuato
in May.
“For
each member of our firm (CJNG) that you arrest, we are going to kill
two of your Tacticals, wherever they are, at their homes, in their
patrol vehicles,” the banner read, referring to the cartel by its
Spanish initials.
Officials
in Guanajuato — Mexico’s most violent state, where Jalisco is fighting
local gangs backed by the rival Sinaloa cartel — refused to comment on
how many members of the elite group have been murdered so far.
But
state police publicly acknowledged the latest case, an officer who was
kidnapped from his home on Thursday, killed and his body dumped on a
highway.
Guanajuato-based security analyst David Saucedo said there have been many cases.
“A
lot of them (officers) have decided to desert. They took their
families, abandoned their homes and they are fleeing and in hiding,”
Saucedo said. “The CJNG is hunting the elite police force of
Guanajuato.”
Numbers
of victims are hard to come by, but Poplab, a news cooperative in
Guanajuato, said at least seven police officers have been killed on
their days off so far this year. In January, gunmen went to the home of a
female state police officer, killed her husband, dragged her away,
tortured her and dumped her bullet-ridden body.
Guanajuato
has had the highest number of police killed of any Mexican state since
at least 2018, according to Poplab. Between 2018 and May 12, a total of
262 police have been killed, or an average of about 75 officers each
year — more than are killed by gunfire or other assaults on average each
year in the entire United States, which has 50 times Guanajuato’s
population.
The
problem in Guanajuato has gotten so bad that the state government
published a special decree on May 17 to provide an unspecified amount of
funding for protection mechanisms for police and prison officials.
“Unfortunately,
organized crime groups have shown up at the homes of police officers,
which poses a threat and a greater risk of loss of life, not just for
them, but for members of their families,” according to the decree.
“They have been forced to quickly leave their homes and move, so that organized crimes groups cannot find them,” it reads.
State
officials refused to describe the protection measures, or comment on
whether officers were to be paid to rent new homes, or if there were
plans to construct special secure housing compounds for them and their
families.
“This is an open war against the security forces of the state government,” Saucedo noted.
López
Obrador campaigned on trying to deescalate the drug conflict,
describing a “hugs, not bullets” approach to tackle the root causes of
crime. Since taking office in late 2018, he has avoided openly
confronting cartels, and even released one capo to avoid bloodshed,
saying he preferred a long-range policy of addressing social problems
like youth unemployment that contribute to gang membership.
But
former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau said in April that López
Obrador views the fight against drug cartels “as a distraction ... So he
has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude
towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.”
