Michoacán returns to the center of the dispute between President Claudia Sheinbaum and former President Felipe Calderón, who occasionally highlight their respective failures to end Mexico’s greatest burden, violence and impunity. The murder of the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, has awakened a hornet’s nest and dealt a severe blow to the triumphalist discourse with which the Morenoist government presented its triumphs in the matter. On Tuesday, however, the head of the executive showed them off once again and responded to the appeal of the former president of the PAN, who the day before at a forum in Buenos Aires had reproached that, after his mandate, “the criminals were able to grow again and take over the state”. Sheinbaum reciprocated the push in his morning lecture: “He decided on a war strategy, and he himself talked about how it didn’t matter that there were collateral victims: civilians, boys, girls, who in a confrontation could be hit by a bullet. Who declares war in their own country?”
The disagreement is another of an endless list that began in the previous six years, during the government of the Morenoist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This comes, however, at a delicate moment for the Executive, which has seen how the brutal assassination during a public event of a popular and beloved municipal president has opened a gap in a strategy that has left a trail of impressive favorable figures. But the general progress was not enough to avoid the murder, the third of a mayor in Michoacán this year and the seventh in the entire territory, which has its councilors as the first line of fire against organized crime.
Michoacán is also the state where Calderón founded the famous war on drugs, the ideal place for the ruling party and the opposition to air their disagreements. “He decided for extrajudicial executions, which means that an alleged criminal was executed for the simple fact of not having been tried, and there are many examples in that period. But not only that, but he put on the front lines of that war a person who is now in prison in the United States for having facilitated a criminal group. How to defend that action,” Sheinbaum continued, referring to Calderón’s security czar, Genaro García Luna, who is serving a sentence of 38 years old. prison on the other side of the border for drug trafficking and organized crime.
“Moreover,” the president added, “(that strategy) has not yielded results.” Even before a journalist asked her to explain, Sheinbaum showed a table with the evolution of daily intentional homicides in the country during each six-year term, highlighting the increase during conservative governments and the decrease, in percentage, during morenists. The absolute figures, however, illustrated the six-year mandate of López Obrador – who launched the motto “hugs, not bullets” – as the most brutal, with between 100 and 90 crimes per day during his term, falling to only 66 with the arrival of the new president: 28% less. This weekend the Cabinet inaugurated a Michoacán pacification plan, which dethroned Sinaloa as a priority in the presidential strategy. For now, however, it continues to be the state in which no strategy has managed to materialize.
