MEXICO CITY — The notoriously violent Jalisco cartel has responded to Mexico’s “hugs, not bullets” policy with a policy of its own: The cartel kidnapped several members of an elite police force in the state of Guanajuato, tortured them to obtain names and addresses of fellow officers and is now hunting down and killing police at their homes, on their days off, in front of their families.
It is a
type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most gang-plagued
nations of Central America and poses the most direct challenge yet to President
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of avoiding violence and rejecting any war
on the cartels.
But the
cartel has already declared war on the government, aiming to eradicate an elite
state force known as the Tactical Group which the gang accuses of treating its
members unfairly.
“If you
want war, you’ll get a war. We have already shown that we know where you are.
We are coming for all of you,” reads a professionally printed banner signed by
the cartel and hung on a building in Guanajuato in May.
“For
each member of our firm (CJNG) that you arrest, we are going to kill two of
your Tacticals, wherever they are, at their homes, in their patrol vehicles,”
the banner read, referring to the cartel by its Spanish initials.
Officials
in Guanajuato — Mexico’s most violent state, where Jalisco is fighting local
gangs backed by the rival Sinaloa cartel — refused to comment on how many
members of the elite group have been murdered so far.
But
state police publicly acknowledged the latest case, an officer who was
kidnapped from his home on Thursday, killed and his body dumped on a highway.
Guanajuato-based
security analyst David Saucedo said there have been many cases.
“A lot
of them (officers) have decided to desert. They took their families, abandoned
their homes and they are fleeing and in hiding,” Saucedo said. “The CJNG is
hunting the elite police force of Guanajuato.”
Numbers
of victims are hard to come by, but Poplab, a news cooperative in Guanajuato,
said at least seven police officers have been killed on their days off so far
this year. In January, gunmen went to the home of a female state police
officer, killed her husband, dragged her away, tortured her and dumped her
bullet-ridden body.
Guanajuato
has had the highest number of police killed of any Mexican state since at least
2018, according to Poplab. Between 2018 and May 12, a total of 262 police have
been killed, or an average of about 75 officers each year — more than are
killed by gunfire or other assaults on average each year in the entire United
States, which has 50 times Guanajuato’s population.
The
problem in Guanajuato has gotten so bad that the state government published a
special decree on May 17 to provide an unspecified amount of funding for
protection mechanisms for police and prison officials.
“Unfortunately,
organized crime groups have shown up at the homes of police officers, which
poses a threat and a greater risk of loss of life, not just for them, but for
members of their families,” according to the decree.
“They
have been forced to quickly leave their homes and move, so that organized
crimes groups cannot find them,” it reads.
State
officials refused to describe the protection measures, or comment on whether
officers were to be paid to rent new homes, or if there were plans to construct
special secure housing compounds for them and their families.
“This is
an open war against the security forces of the state government,” Saucedo
noted.
López
Obrador campaigned on trying to deescalate the drug conflict, describing a
“hugs, not bullets” approach to tackle the root causes of crime. Since taking
office in late 2018, he has avoided openly confronting cartels, and even
released one capo to avoid bloodshed, saying he preferred a long-range policy
of addressing social problems like youth unemployment that contribute to gang
membership.
But
former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau said in April that López Obrador
views the fight against drug cartels “as a distraction ... So he has basically
adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is
pretty troubling to our government, obviously.”