Injustice and violence: The challenge facing the president

Once she takes over the presidential belt on September 1, Claudia Sheinbaum will face huge problems and challenges left by previous presidents, including Andrés Manuel López Obrador: injustice and violence that have left thousands of deaths, disappearances, displacement of towns and cities, and extrajudicial killings.

This problem is not new, but it has been intensifying over the past six years. While the spiral of violence began during the Vicente Fox government, with 60,280 murders, and doubled under Felipe Calderón to 120,463, it continued to expand during the Enrique Peña government until it reached 156,066 homicides.

But the increase was so impressive that violence hit its highest level in six years under López Obrador, in the fourth quarter of his administration. By the end of his six-year term, the number of murders would reach 190,000.

This is the great challenge facing the next government led by Claudia Sheinbaum, whose main collaborator on this issue will be Omar García Harfuch, whose credentials in public safety in Mexico City leave much to be desired.

Looking back at the fact that violence has increased, we can trace its beginning back to the year 2000, when we Mexicans were surprised by the fall of the hegemonic party that had ruled the country almost absolutely throughout the 20th century. Vicente Fox, the presidential candidate of the National Action Party, won the elections, defeating Francisco Labastida of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Party (PRD), shattering hopes for a democratic transition that never materialized.

The defeat of the PRI brought with it the collapse of government structures built over decades and the breakdown of alliances with power groups that no longer exist, generating power vacuums that were quickly filled by new players that remain effective today: converted governors in viceroyalties, media companies with the ability to influence government decisions and organized crime groups that quickly took control of parts of the state territory through collusion with the government, police and military authorities.

As these new power groups acted together with old power groups, including political parties, control of the three levels of government became fragmented, violence and social injustice increased, and in some cases reached ungovernability.

If we count the homicides that occurred during the last three six-year governments, we find that 526,809 Mexicans were murdered, a figure that exceeds the last period of state violence, the Cristero War, which lasted from 1926 to 1929 and in which, according to an article published by the CNDH, 250,000 people died.

In other words, we are facing the most violent era of society in the last century.

In contrast to the spiral of violence, which is also reflected in the disappearance of more than 100,000 people, we believe that justice is a black hole in the field of social needs, through which complaints, trials and verdicts disappear.

In its 2023 World Report, Human Rights Watch noted that “about 90% of crimes are never reported, a third of reported crimes are never investigated, and less than 16% of investigations are ‘resolved’ (in judicial terms, through mediation or some form of compensation), meaning that authorities resolved just over 1% of all crimes in 2021.

Faced with this situation of crisis of government, insecurity and justice, society has developed two responses: vigilante groups and lynching.

On February 24, 2013, in the towns of Tepalcatepec and La Ruana, in the Caliente region of Michoacan, the first armed self-defense groups emerged as part of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign to combat the Michoacan families that have taken control of 70% of the state’s municipalities.

The ranchers of the area, tired of extortion, murders, disappearances, and most importantly, having their wives and daughters taken away, rebelled with high-powered weapons provided by the army, and in a year’s time they achieved what the army and the police had failed to achieve in wresting control of the government from the Templars.

Other entities in the country followed suit, and by mid-2014 there were 50 self-defense groups in 16 states. On May 14 of that year, the founder of the Michoacán Self-Defense Group, Dr. José Manuel Mireles, launched a proposal to create a National Self-Defense Front, which ultimately failed. However, armed civilian groups continue to emerge across the country to fight organized crime, fed up with the lack of response from the three levels of government.

This satiety gave rise to another social phenomenon: lynching.

The article “On Lynching (and Acts of Self-Defense): Reflections on Violence in Mexico” was published in issue 237 of the magazine. daily Raúl Rodríguez Guillén and Norma Ilse Veloz Ávila, experts from the Social Sciences and Humanities Department of Azcapotzalco, the Urban Autonomous University (UAM), point out that between 2016 and 2022, 1,423 cases of this type of social breakdown were registered, 196 in the form of lynching and 196 at the attempted level, for a total of 1,619.

Vigilante groups and lynchings are two of the strongest and most violent forms of expression adopted by the most affected social groups in the face of the violence and injustices that the country has endured in recent decades.

Clearly, there is an urgent need for better conditions of peace, justice and dignity across the country. These conditions cannot be achieved if the same militarized strategy that has been in place since 2006 is maintained and social demands to end this long period of violence and injustice are not addressed.

By the way … Among the hundred promises made by President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, there appeared a section on peace, security and justice, in which the same lines of Obrador were followed, leading to the results we suffer today: reforming the judiciary, strengthening the National Guard, the Secretariat of Citizen Security and social programs.