At the height of the security crisis in Mexico, worsened by the murders that have rocked Michoacán in recent weeks, former president Felipe Calderón has added fuel to the fire of social discontent. From the ABECEB forum held in Buenos Aires this weekend, Calderón defended his fight against organized crime and stressed that, since his exit from power, governments have abandoned the country to drug traffickers, leaving entire states like Michoacán at their mercy. “When I left, criminals were able to grow again and take control of the state,” he noted, adding that crime had taken control of several countries in the region. “It is a very serious problem for Latin America, the most serious of Mexico, the most serious of many countries and we do not have the certainty, nor the sanity, nor the spirit of the state to overcome it,” he said.
Calderón, who led Mexico under the PAN flag from 2006 to 2012 and now lives in Spain, once again attacked the Morena government’s security strategy. During his speech at the Forum, he criticized the fact that the only power that resisted the corruption of the administrations and faced the regime of terror of the armed groups were the judges before they were replaced by the judicial reform promoted by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and completed by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. “(Now) they are lists authorized by the ruling party, pure militants who support Morena, where there is everything. There are capable people and the vast majority are unprepared people, some corrupt and even the lawyers of drug traffickers have managed to become judges”, indicated the former president.
In his speech he underlined that insecurity resulting from drug trafficking is a general crisis affecting Latin America. “The problem for me is not the drugs themselves, it’s not the consumption, it’s obviously a fundamental variable of the problem. The problem is that criminal gangs in Latin America are taking over the state and are replacing or attempting to replace the key functions of the state that were monopolistic,” he said, referring to the legislative, judicial and fiscal functions in Mexico.
In the cartels’ struggle to control not only routes, but also large swaths of territory for other business, such as control over businesses, the state has lost control of the network of bribes to Mexican officials involved in the crime, according to Calderón. “We must make a state much more capable, much more reliable, much more effective. Prosecutors, judges, police, much more effective against this new plague of Latin America,” he urged.
The former president also referred to the impotence experienced by the state of Michoacán in the face of extortion, which according to him should be one of the government’s major concerns. “The criminal who already dominates that corner asks the prostitute, he asks the street trader, the migrant, he asks for compensation. Now, when this criminal business is allowed to advance and conquer the entire state, the victims of an illegal business cannot ask for the protection of the state. No one can ask for it because the criminals are the state. This is the tragedy that is taking place in Michoacán,” he said of the taxes charged to the state’s agricultural producers.
“I actually launched an offensive against organized crime to expel criminal organizations from the state. To a large extent we succeeded despite the sabotage of local governments,” he recalled. However, he accuses his successors of abandoning that policy and the resulting security crisis that resulted, using Michoacán as an example. “The leader of the lemons, victim of extortion by organized crime, organized himself and asked for state protection. The government then did not support him and they killed him. 11 years later, his son did the same. And 15 days ago they killed him too. And on Saturday the mayor”, he listed regarding the latest murders that occurred in the agricultural countryside of Michoacan. “My warning is this: the greatest threat to our people is organized crime and we must rebuild it with real state policy, bringing our security and justice institutions to other dimensions capable of tackling this evil,” he concluded.
