Mexico's president lays out a plan to combat cartel violence. But it looks like more of the same

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s new president laid out a plan Tuesday to combat drug cartel violence, but analysts say it appears to be largely a continuation of previous policy.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said that she plans to increase intelligence and investigative work, but her main focus will apparently remain the “hugs, not bullets” approach used by her predecessor.

Sheinbaum took over last week from her mentor, former President Andres Manuel López Obrador, who largely failed in his own plan to bring down Mexico’s homicide rate. López Obrador refused to confront the cartels, instead relying on the armed forces and appeals to gangs to keep the peace.

“There is a continuity in the militarization of public safety,” Mexican security analyst David Saucedo said. “There will also be a continuation of social programs to try to prevent youths from being recruited by organized crime.”

Sheinbaum's top security official, Omar García Harfuch, said that “we will continue with the strategy begun in the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to give priority attention to the poorest families.”

Mike Vigil, a former head of the DEA’s foreign operations, said that the new plan appears to be “more of the same.”

In 2023, Mexico had a homicide rate of about 24 per 100,000 inhabitants, more than four times higher than the U.S. rate. But officials said that they were also worried about extortion, a crime that the cartels have increasingly turned to along with migrant smuggling, to supplement their income.

Sheinbaum blamed the killings in Guanajuato, the state with the highest number of homicides in Mexico, on low wages.

“Clearly, in Guanajuato there is a development model that has failed," she said.

But Saucedo said that poverty doesn't explain it. Guanajuato is an industrial and farming hub where drug use is relatively high, but it also has rail and highway links that cartels are fighting over, because they are used to move drugs toward the border with the United States.

“According to that logic, the entire country would have the same problem, because there are low wages in the whole country,” Saucedo said.

In the last weeks of López Obrador's presidency, Mexico's Congress formally handed the National Guard over to the control of the Defense Department. The 120,000-member force was originally supposed to be under civilian command, but had already been largely trained and recruited by the army.

The shortcomings of that militarized approach is evident in provincial cities and towns, where the National Guard performs set-piece patrols and establishes security cordons like soldiers, but do little on-the-street investigative work like police, arrest relatively few people and build even fewer criminal cases.

Inhabitants of rural areas say National Guard officers often refuse to leave their bases until they get orders from headquarters, even if crimes are being committed outside. And a good part of the National Guard's force is currently assigned to rounding up migrants before they reach the U.S. border, not fighting crime.

García Harfuch pledged Tuesday to have the guard function more as a police force, though that is not their training.

He pledged to create a sort of national security academy to train law enforcement, and establish an office to integrate intelligence on the gangs gathered by the army, navy and federal investigators.

“The need is to convert the intelligence the country has, into investigations,” said García Harfuch, who formerly served as Mexico City's police chief.

Sheinbaum faces an ongoing problem, as illustrated by the killing last week of the mayor of Chilpancingo, the capital of southern Guerrero state. The mayor's head was apparently severed and left on the roof of a pickup truck in the gang-dominated city.

And violence in the northern state of Sinaloa has heated up intensely after two top Sinaloa cartel capos flew to the United States in July, where they were detained. The two capos were from different factions of the cartel, and the idea that one of the capos forced the other onto the plane has sparked infighting.

So far this year, from January to August, homicides were down 10.7% from their peak in the same period of 2018, but that year was an outlier because of cartel turf battles. The 2024 figures on homicides in the first eight months of the year were 8.6% higher than they were in 2017, under López Obrador's predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.