Jacobin | At four o’clock in the afternoon on October 17, 2019, the Mexican city
of Culiacán, capital of the northeastern state of Sinaloa, erupted in
gunfire. Minutes before, in the exclusive Tres Ríos district, members of
the army and National Guard had arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, son of
the jailed former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán (“El
Chapo”), and one of the organization’s new generation of leaders.
The response was immediate: taking to the streets, cartel members
fired rounds of automatic weapons from trucks and blocked intersections
with burning vehicles, all in a bid to sow chaos. Surrounding the armed forces involved in the raid, they cut off access on the three bridges leading out of the area.
Over the radio frequencies used by the police and the army, the
cartel proceeded to announce that, if Guzmán was not freed, it would
take revenge against both the family members of those participating and
the general public. Following hasty deliberations, the federal security
cabinet decided to go ahead and release Guzmán, a decision approved by
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
The response from the Mexican right was equally apoplectic and
hypocritical. With no apparent irony, Marko Cortés, leader of the
National Action Party (PAN), came to the remarkable conclusion
that Mexico is a “failed state” that is “experiencing one of its worst
episodes in the combat against delinquency.” While stating his party’s
intention to sue AMLO for freeing Guzmán, Cortés stated that “the
Mexican State was subdued, brought to its knees, humiliated by organized
crime.”
Not to be outdone, elements of the military also got in on
the game: in a case of rank insubordination, General Carlos Demetrio
Gaytán Ochoa declared:
“We feel insulted as Mexicans and offended as soldiers.” Going on to
question the “strategic decisions” of the president, Gaytán Ochoa
stated: “We are currently living in a politically polarized society
because the dominant ideology . . . is based on currents from the
so-called left, which accumulated a large amount of resentment over the
years.”
Conveniently omitted from such vociferations were several key points.
First, that President Felipe Calderón was the one who launched his
homicidal, so-called war on drugs in the first place, which saw over 121,000 killed in his administration alone. Second, that Calderón himself oversaw the freeing
of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the Jalisco New
Generation Cartel, under similar siege circumstances in 2012. And third,
according to investigative journalist Anabel Hernández, Calderón’s
government was in fact an active supporter of the Sinaloa Cartel by means of his all-powerful federal police force.
But history hardly matters when the goal is to make AMLO look weak in
the fight against organized crime, the captain of a nation that is
slipping out of his control.
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