Mexico has suffered terribly from crime and corruption for nearly all of its history as a modern democratic country. Poverty, low state capacity, and accidents of geography (e.g. its position between the cocaine-producing regions of South America and the massive consumer market of the United States) have allowed the brutal Mexican drug cartels to flourish, frustrating all strategies, both violent and nonviolent, to root them out.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, however, believes she has hit upon the way to shut down Mexican organized crime for good. Sheinbaum’s new security strategy, a sweeping reorganization of the government’s national security infrastructure, sailed through Mexico’s congress into law in early July, setting the stage for what Sheinbaum no doubt hopes will be a major turning point in the country’s history.
The decision comes in the nick of time. The Mexican populace has grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress on curtailing cartel violence, and with President Donald Trump in the White House strongly pressing Sheinbaum to secure the border or risk devastating tariffs, the need for decisive, successful measures to stamp out the cartels has rarely been more acute.
Reining in cartel violence is a stiff challenge. Sheinbaum is well aware of the failed attempts of her predecessors to accomplish the same goal. The first serious attempt to deal with the cartels was the disastrous Mexican War on Drugs, during which Felipe Calderón attempted to wipe the cartels out by force. The Mexican Army blanketed cartel territory with troops, captured dozens of drug kingpins, and opened a drawn-out shooting conflict that left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead, the Army riddled with corruption, and the now-militarized cartels stronger and far more violent than they had been before.
Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, attempted the opposite strategy—to end cartel violence by solving the “root causes” of organized crime, which he believed were poverty, youth unemployment, and economic inequality. This conveniently allowed his welfare programs to serve double duty as anti-cartel programs. While this approach avoided the catastrophic consequences of Calderón’s drug war, it was not successful at reducing cartel violence. Over López Obrador’s six-year term, homicide rates fell slightly, while the number of missing persons increased significantly.
Sheinbaum has promised to retain López Obrador’s program to eliminate the “root causes” of organized crime as a plank in her approach to domestic security. But the real meat of her plan to confront the cartels lies in the remainder of her security strategy. This consists of three key components: a reorganization of the Mexican National Guard, which will see it merge into the Armed Forces and gain an investigative arm; a renovation of the National System of Public Security, which includes the establishment of a singular centralized intelligence database; and the establishment of a National System of Investigation and Intelligence, which will integrate the intelligence and law enforcement data and serve as the locus for proactive policing—analyzing data to anticipate and preempt cartel activity, rather than being forced to respond to it after the fact.
The substance of this desperately needed reform thus consists principally of building up the institutional capacity of the Mexican state, as opposed to intensifying the use of existing state resources (either in the form of the Mexican Army or the welfare state). This is a characteristic approach for Sheinbaum, whose technocratic approach to governance stood her in good stead during her time as mayor of Mexico City, where she successfully used a similar strategy to reform the local police and reduce homicides in the capital.
The first component, the transfer of the Mexican National Guard into the Armed Forces (thus placing it under the command of the Secretariat of National Defense, rather than that of Public Security) is actually another holdover from López Obrador’s administration. López Obrador, indeed, already attempted the transfer, but found himself blocked by the Mexican Supreme Court. Now, however, there will be no opposition—Sheinbaum has been careful to make the move in such a way that there will be no objection from the now entirely tamed Supreme Court.
Placing the National Guard into the same command-and-control structure as the Mexican Army has a number of benefits. López Obrador argued that the principal reason for the transfer was to increase the training and professionalism of National Guard members: “If [the National Guard] is accountable to a secretary like that of National Defense, which has a tradition of training its members, it will have schools, professionalism, discipline.” It also facilitates cooperation between the National Guard and the Army and between the National Guard and training elements from the United States that work with the Mexican Armed Forces.
The departure of the National Guard also simplifies much of the work of the Secretariat of Public Security, which needed to maintain quasi-military training and logistics elements for the National Guard.
Critics have argued that the transfer increases what they see as a detrimental trend of the militarization of Mexico’s public security services, insulating National Guard units from accountability for misconduct. The National Guard will now, as a component of the Armed Forces, be subject to the military justice system, although the civil justice system may have jurisdiction in some circumstances. In some cases the Mexican military justice system has been accused of failing to punish soldiers for abuses and even the killing of civilians. The severe challenges confronting Mexican peace and public order, however, may well require a significantly militarized national security response. For her part, Sheinbaum has promised that she will “never give an order that violates the Constitution or human rights.”
The second portion of Sheinbaum’s security strategy is her reorganization of the National System of Public Security, which serves to coordinate the various organs of public security in Mexico. A significant portion of the reorganization seeks to increase the integration of these entities both horizontally across the Mexican federal government and vertically between the federal government and the states and municipalities. This is a sorely needed step; poor cooperation between the various levels of the Mexican government has historically been one of the major obstacles to effectively controlling organized crime in the country.
The new law requires all of the institutions that are coordinated under the National System of Public Security to standardize their processes and reporting, and to share via a centralized database all relevant information they generate on a daily basis. It also mandates the creation of a shared system for emergency alerts and anonymous tips, ensuring that time-sensitive information on criminal activity is available for all relevant law enforcement, security, and intelligence organs.
Finally, the law also mandates the creation of a universal training and evaluation system for public security services to be administered by the secretariat. This is an attempt to standardize and professionalize state police forces in particular, whose training and readiness varies widely across the country.
The third and most important portion of Sheinbaum’s design, however, is the National System of Investigation and Intelligence. This entity is intended to centralize and integrate all relevant national security information for analysis by the Mexican intelligence services. This will, in theory, allow the state to completely transform its approach to organized crime from reactive to proactive. By assembling the proper data and extracting the patterns it contains, Sheinbaum hopes that, instead of showing up after cartels commit some kind of violent crime, local police and the National Guard will be able to anticipate and disrupt the cartels in the most vulnerable phases of their operations.
If carried out correctly, this would be a major step forward for the fight against organized crime. Cartels, like more licit businesses, require a certain economic logic to function. They have expenses and operating costs that must be paid and supply chains that must remain intact for their work to proceed. When violence is necessary, for intimidation of officials or the public or to fight off competitors for a particular market or route, cartels budget for it. An effective intelligence system, however, can identify places where supply chains can be broken, and apply force in a way that is maximally costly to organized crime. When the business is unprofitable and the personal risk to participants too great, organized crime dissolves.
As promising as this innovation is, it is also the portion of Sheinbaum’s reform plan that has attracted the most criticism. The new National System of Investigation and Intelligence will include a centralized database containing all personal information, both public and private, available to the Mexican government. To complement this, Mexico also mandated an updated government ID card—one that will now include your biometric data, including your fingerprints from both hands and an iris scan. This is a measure with a grim background—it is intended to make the identification of missing persons easier, an important task in a country with nearly 130,000 missing persons (a number that grows with increasing rapidity every year). It has nevertheless made many Mexicans uneasy about the prospects of government surveillance.
The proper balance between privacy and security is a difficult question for many countries, but given the scale of cartel violence in Mexico, most citizens seem willing to accept the possibility of more government intrusion if Sheinbaum is capable of putting a significant dent into crime.
Whether that will come to pass or not remains to be seen. Sheinbaum’s efforts to increase Mexican state capacity are promising in outline, and her record as mayor of Mexico City shows that she has the executive talent to make real reforms. But this is potentially the biggest challenge she will face in government. Law enforcement in Mexico has never been good. The Mexican federal police were notoriously corrupt before they were disbanded by López Obrador; Mexican state police forces are even more dysfunctional. State and local governments are often completely ineffective or, worse, entirely under the thumb of local cartel kingpins. The cartels themselves are vicious enemies with vast funds at their disposal; they defied the whole force of the Mexican Army under Calderón and came off with a firmer grasp on the country than they began with.
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Still, if Sheinbaum can wield her new security plan effectively enough and marshall the political will to put Mexico onto the right path—to lay a foundation for a more secure society by increasing Mexico’s state capacity and alleviating the thus-far intractable difficulties of Mexican federalism—she will have secured her legacy on that basis alone.
Calderón’s bullets failed the Mexican people. So did López Obrador’s hugs. But Sheinbaum’s intelligence just might do the trick.
