Mexico’s New President Has a Daunting Job: Stop the Blood Bath
In a village in the hills of Guerrero State, residents ran from their homes as drones flew overhead, dropping makeshift bombs. For months, drug cartel operatives had been deploying the commercial devices to drop explosives packed into metal casings, setting homes ablaze, tearing holes in walls and sending piercing hot shrapnel into people’s flesh.
Traveling to the state, in southern Mexico, in March, I visited some of those villages and met people who had packed their possessions into pickup trucks and fled the terror. And while the drone attacks are a dark new advance, they are just one example of the violence that has raged across Mexico every day for almost two decades of intense cartel warfare, leaving hundreds of thousands of Mexicans displaced, murdered or disappeared.
This violence is the most formidable challenge that Claudia Sheinbaum, whom the nation has just elected by a huge margin to be its first female president, will have to confront when she takes power in October. And yet she has not laid out a clear strategy to govern a country that is bathed in blood, scarred with mass graves in cow fields and garbage dumps. Ms. Sheinbaum will be in charge of a nation plagued by over 30,000 murders a year, 90 percent of which go unsolved, and she will have to face the powerful cartels behind those numbers, which are now networks of paramilitary organized crime and deeply embedded in communities. Today, these groups not only traffic drugs like fentanyl but also run a portfolio of crimes from human smuggling to widespread extortion.
The run-up to the election was one of the most violent campaigns in Mexico’s recent history. Dozens of candidates were killed; a gunman shot a contender for mayor as he shook hands with supporters on a basketball court. Ms. Sheinbaum did not put this bloodshed at the core of her campaign. A 61-year-old environmental engineer and a member of the governing Morena party, Ms. Sheinbaum won the vote on promises to continue social programs of the current president, her mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO. She floated interesting proposals on renewable energy and confronting water shortages.
Her lack of a strong public vision for Mexico’s security is concerning, given that her three predecessors all failed on this front. Felipe Calderón took power in 2006 and headed a military crackdown on cartels, but violence only escalated; his security secretary was later convicted in New York of cocaine trafficking. From 2012 to 2018, Enrique Peña Nieto tried to change the narrative and talk about Mexico’s economic potential, but violence also worsened on his watch. During his tenure, 43 students disappeared while in the custody of police officers linked to a cartel. And AMLO has been mocked for his call to deal with cartels through “hugs, not bullets,” while presiding over the most violent period in Mexico’s recent history.
All that said, Ms. Sheinbaum has shown she can take a pragmatic approach to crime. As mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, she flooded the city with security cameras and deployed the police in certain high-crime areas. Murders dropped by about half in the city during her tenure, according to official statistics. The opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez has claimed Ms. Sheinbaum manipulated those figures to hide homicides, and there is a legitimate debate on the true death toll of cartel violence across Mexico. But today, people in the capital feel markedly safer.
