Politics: High profile attacks by cartels underscore the importance of the National Guard debate
Organized crime groups mounted extremely violent attacks in four states on August 9-14 that included multiple roadblocks of major thoroughfares and highways and the torching of dozens of cars, trucks, passenger buses and businesses, leaving scores of people dead or wounded as gunmen murdered innocent bystanders. Although such violence is nothing new, the most recent attacks stood out for their geographic extension and simultaneity. With officials providing little information, conspiracy theories abounded, while more serious observers discussed whether by conducting indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population for the purpose of stoking panic, criminal organizations had intensified their actions as a form of terrorism, or engaged in a more limited borrowing of "terrorist tactics" or forms of "quasi-terrorism". Beyond the proper terms for classifying such actions and the immediate motivations for each cartel's participation in the spree, they all seem determined to display their force with such impudence in the face of an essentially passive federal government and a society increasingly fearful of the defenselessness in which it lives.
These events highlight the gaping holes in the current government’s anti-crime strategies (or lack thereof), and the structural weakness in Mexico’s security system. Moreover, the current presidential administration has adopted an increasingly militarized scheme that makes reducing insecurity and violence all the more difficult, especially considering omissions that have essentially left municipal and state police forces to wither.
Authorities at all three levels of government lack rapid and effective reaction protocols for containing such organized violence. A case in point is the National Guard, an ostensibly civil force that doesn’t even have response manuals for these sorts of events and that President López Obrador intends to make part of the country’s military.
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