Last Tuesday, as Claudia Sheinbaum became the first woman president of Mexico, prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa reported three homicides. That added to seven they reported the day before and 21 in the three days before that. Over 100 people have been killed in the past three weeks in a bloody war between two rival factions of the Sinaloa criminal cartel, writes columnist Eduardo Porter in a Washington Post opinion piece. The security forces are powerless. Asked about the violence, the army’s top commander in the state answered that it was up to the criminal organizations to stop it. When Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, visited Sinaloa last week, an anonymous caller reported a van packed with a handful of dead bodies in the state capital, its doors wide open, spray-painted with the words “Welcome to Culiacán.” Sinaloa isn’t even Mexico’s deadliest state. In September it ranked in 8th place. What’s going on there is only the latest outburst in what has become Mexico’s bloody new normal, in which powerful criminal organizations have grown to occupy huge swaths of Mexico’s territory and economy, spreading violence and encroaching on a seemingly powerless government.
It doesn’t seem to matter much to Washington. It should, and not just because of the fentanyl flowing across the border, or even because of organized crime’s role shepherding migrants to the U.S., Porter contends. A couple of decades ago, bilateral relations were driven by a hope that Mexico would integrate into North America as another prosperous liberal market democracy. The way things are going, it looks more likely to become a failed state. The United States’ single-minded focus on combating the illegal drug trade — hoping, naively, that catching and imprisoning narco kingpins can stop the flow of narcotics — has failed to curb the power of organized crime. The strategy has exacerbated the violence, splintering criminal groups into factions all too willing to kill each other to gain or maintain control over territories and markets. Guillermo Valdés, who drove the public security strategy during the administration of Felipe Calderón from 2007 to 2011 as head of the Center of Investigation & National Security, noted that Mexico and the United States “must make a joint assessment of the problem because they have different visions that lead to different objectives.”
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