Mexico battles the MAGA movement over organised crime

The Trump administration appears to be making plea deals with members of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s largest gang, without the knowledge of Mexico’s government

Claudia Sheinbaum came to power in October promising to tackle Mexico’s entrenched, murderous gangs. Her record was convincing. As mayor of Mexico City she curbed violence by using data and improving policing. She has started applying similar methods on a national scale.

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Crime-weary Mexicans welcomed the intelligence-led crackdown. Ms Sheinbaum has enjoyed high approval ratings. But her assault on the gangs has always had a second audience: America’s President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans who see Mexico as a source of their country’s problems. Ms Sheinbaum is bent on convincing Mr Trump that she has the gangs in hand. Officials in Washington have been considering drone strikes on Mexican drug labs and cross-border raids by special forces without consulting Mexican officials. That would sorely diminish Ms Sheinbaum at home.

Short of military action, Mr Trump has not been holding back. Citing the need to stem flows of migrants and fentanyl into the United States, his government in February designated Mexican gangs as foreign terrorist organisations and slapped tariffs on Mexican exports.

More recently, American attention has intensified. The Trump administration appears to be making plea deals with members of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s largest gang, without the knowledge of Mexico’s government. Details are not public. On May 11th the governor of Baja California, a Mexican border state, announced that her American visa had been revoked, as had her husband’s. (She says the decision is administrative and implies no misconduct.) A list of other Mexican officials reportedly facing similar treatment is circulating. Authorities in the United States have not explained, but the revocations are thought to result from American suspicions that Mexican officials are colluding with gangsters.

The change of gear has jolted Mexico. Officials worry that it will not be possible to squash the gangs fast enough to keep MAGA at bay, despite dramatic changes in the past six months. Ms Sheinbaum has abandoned the security policy identified with her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of “hugs not bullets”. His approach assumed that poverty was the root cause of crime, and that the best way to curb it would be through government-led social schemes. In practice, Mr López Obrador mostly let the gangsters prevail.

Ms Sheinbaum has instead pushed intelligence gathering and co-ordination between different branches of Mexico’s security apparatus. She has also started to negate some of Mr López Obrador’s militarisation of the police, which critics say led to brutality and shoddier detective work. Her security secretary, Omar García Harfuch, is hiring investigators for a new police agency which, along with a new special-forces branch, should eventually bring 15,000 officers under his command.

The government says it has made 20,000 arrests for serious offences since October, seized 154 tonnes of illegal drugs and confiscated over 10,000 firearms. This far outstrips the rate of seizures and arrests under Mr López Obrador. Recovery of stolen fuel, a black-market business worth hundreds of millions of dollars, has also increased. Quotidian co-ordination with the United States has improved. In February both countries agreed that border patrols would meet more often and share more information. The number of migrants nabbed crossing the border illegally has plummeted since Mr Trump’s election, as has the amount of fentanyl being seized by US Customs and Border Protection.

Tijuana, just south of the border with California, is a good place to see Ms Sheinbaum’s new model in action. General Gilberto Landeros, security minister of Mexico’s Baja California state, says local, state and federal security teams meet daily to co-ordinate operations. Better data are helping, he says. After it became clear that more murders were happening during officers’ meal breaks, schedules were adjusted to provide constant cover. Vetting of municipal police is under way: around a third of officers have been reviewed so far, with 35-40% failing to meet standards. They will be asked to leave the force.

In Sinaloa province, Mexican troops have largely contained an ongoing war between two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. The border is less porous, says someone involved in the fentanyl trade there. It has been challenging to make “arrangements” with officials, he says.

It is too soon to see the impact of Ms Sheinbaum’s policies in the crime statistics. The official murder rate has been falling since 2018, when it peaked at 30 per 100,000 people; last year it was 19 per 100,000. Some of this fall is probably illusory; there has been a sharp rise in disappearances, mostly murders without a body. And on nearly every other measure, from extortion to robbery, crime has risen. On May 20th two government officials were shot dead in Mexico City, a highly unusual crime in the capital. Although the amount of fentanyl seized at the border has gone down, drug seizures in general doubled between February and April, suggesting the gangs may be turning to other products to offset the fentanyl crackdown.

Security, fast and slow

Tackling these problems involves much more than fighting crime: it would appear to entail restructuring Mexican society. The gangs no longer simply run drugs and smuggle migrants into the United States. They also control or take a cut of legitimate businesses, such as avocado-growing, fishing or stalls selling tortillas. This merger of crime with the legal economy goes hand in hand with deep corruption. Mr Trump’s claim of an “intolerable alliance” between Mexico’s federal officials and its gangs is an exaggeration. But Crisis Group, a think-tank based in Brussels, has documented local-government officials’ collusion with gangsters. So far Ms Sheinbaum seems either unwilling or unable to pursue crooked officials.

As the slow work of excising organised crime from society continues, the administration in Washington is stepping up the pressure. Once made in private, calls by hawks in the MAGA camp for military intervention have grown louder. The Pentagon has tripled the number of active-duty troops on the border and has deployed drones, spy-planes and armoured cars. “If you take [Trump] at his word—as we do—it’s a real threat,” says a Mexican official.

Mr Trump may be losing patience. In April Ms Sheinbaum refused his offer to send troops into Mexico. In response he said: “She is so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.” Military action by the United States would be expensive, and not necessarily effective. If some big gangs were clobbered by American strikes, those left unscathed would probably expand, triggering more brutal turf wars. “Anyone who understands the details knows how unviable [intervention] is,” says another Mexican official.

Ms Sheinbaum’s plan could certainly be improved, for instance through a greater focus on dismantling the financial networks behind the gangsters, says Francisco Rivas of the National Citizen Observatory, a Mexican think-tank. A shortage of money is another problem. Mexico’s spending on security was already the lowest relative to GDP of any country in the OECD, a group of mainly rich countries, when Ms Sheinbaum cut it by 36%. An economy shaken by Mr Trump’s trade attacks and a political system that favours handouts and nationalistic projects will make it hard to find more cash. Her plan may keep Mr Trump’s drones at bay. Eliminating Mexico’s gangsters will be harder.

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