It doesn’t matter how many times the president displays crime statistics showing a decrease on a screen. All her efforts, and those of her police, will be like bowling pins that will remain neatly arranged until a criminal blow knocks them down endlessly.
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Last week, Claudia Sheinbaum’s government insisted that four out of ten homicides committed daily until September 2024 are now a non-event: from eighty-something to fifty a day. A dizzying drop, even for Ripley.
That presidential method has a blind spot. The arrow of criminal incidence may indicate that the floor is the limit, that we are heading towards a low not seen in decades… unless every week one or more criminal acts unplug optimism.
These days, let’s say Taxco or Malinalco, towns widely recognizable nationwide, are the new points on the media map that remind Mexicans who is in charge and how impenetrable the dominion of those who rule, the criminals, is in their strongholds.
Every time the National Palace maintains that homicides are decreasing, such a statement will clash with the deaf reality like that of Taxco, where the municipal president and his father were kidnapped, and then released amidst official silence and a whiff of impunity.
There are kidnappings and kidnappings in Mexico, and for that matter, forced disappearances and forced disappearances. What happened in Taxco is precision clockwork. Criminals take the mayor’s father, and then the mayor himself. And two days later, these criminals spare their lives.
Mayor Juan Andrés Vega returned from the dead along with his father on April 13 after being removed from the world for forty-eight hours by those who decide everything in the region. Just as they left, they returned. And the police can only congratulate themselves.
Good news that the Government has one less crisis. The Federation can return to its declining crime count, back to the happy routine. Who needs explanations or arrests for such a singular abduction? Better to surrender unreservedly to the return to normalcy of declining figures.
Unfortunately for the Mexican authorities, the country insists on giving them no respite. On April 15, 80 kilometers from Taxco, Malinalco’s water official, from a luxury resort for people from Mexico State and the capital, disappeared.
Besides the fact that fortunately the official from the Mexico State municipality returned alive after a couple of days during which his whereabouts were a mystery, the other coincidence between both cases is that their captors are the masters of the situation.
Because the declining incidence does not seem to offend the gangs. And if we go by that, they should even be grateful for the Government’s anger with the UN over forced disappearances: the Administration taking national and international weight off organized crime, what could go wrong?
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Why would the Palace’s triumphalism bother them when they can arrange for the mayor of a colonial city, a power in silver and tourism, to go wherever they indicate, since true authority does not reside in citizens who cast votes, but in cannons that spit bullets.
What clearer sign of power than, in the six-year term in which the entire water scheme is promised to be changed, criminals have their own way of bringing the Malinalco water official to the negotiating table, a municipality where the country’s rich people take a dip.
Triple strike in a matter of days: the death of a young girl in Benito Juárez, a jewel of PANism, exposes the capital’s prosecutor’s office; eight die in a bar in Ayala, Morelos, a town where Sheinbaum recently visited; and the nephew of Oaxaca’s Secretary of Government is murdered. And we would have to add, at least, the executions of environmental activists in Michoacán.
Many “mañaneras” (morning press conferences) will be needed, perhaps too many, for the percentages of executions that plummet from double digit to double digit, to make the people see in those numbers something that threatens those who control territories and kill with impunity.
Not a few politicians are “invited” to meet with “the lord” who owns the plaza. Some go on their own and return in a matter of hours. Others are dragged with threats or with the retention of a family member, as in Taxco; others are taken at gunpoint.
That is why the cases of Malinalco and Taxco are doubly special. Because public opinion learned of the absence, and because these are places that seem close to us because, to begin with, they have the designation of “magical town”.
And technically, the pre-campaigns have not yet begun. So, without anticipating events, we can assume that the narrative of declining violence that the president seeks to build is just about to fight its worst battle, that of a new cycle of political violence.
For now, it’s good that in Taxco and Malinalco two families were able to embrace their loved ones back, and it’s bad that the fright and trauma will not be able to heal until the Government is able to guarantee that these criminals will not kidnap or threaten again.
As long as poor and rich, people in power or in the most diverse professions know that criminals rule in the towns, the bi-weekly figures in the National Palace are at most a drop that warns of a summer of peace and security that simply does not materialize.
