Politics: The social cost of violence and insecurity
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s refusal to meet on January 23 with the couple thousand activists and relatives of those who have been forcibly disappeared or are victims of murders committed with impunity who had marched to Mexico City to meet with him was most likely a serious political miscalculation, one that will certainly be interpreted as a rejection of their cause by many of the roughly 400,000 families with at least one member who have been victims of such violence. Many of the organizations fighting for an end to the violence and in defense of those who have been brutalized clearly sympathized with AMLO’s presidential campaign, during which he had repeatedly insisted that the victims of violence would be at the heart of his pacification policy, and he continued to affirm that commitment even after becoming President-elect. But since then he has done little to back up those claims.
Javier Sicilia, one of the main organizers of the three-day march from Morelos to meet with the president, along with representatives of other organizations, handed him a proposal on these issues during the transition period, but there is no sign officials ever gave the proposal any serious consideration. Since taking office, AMLO has taken an axe to the budgets of criminal justice institutions, and commissions created as a result of 2013 reforms to attend to the victims and to search for those who have been forcibly disappeared remain woefully underfunded.
AMLO announced well in advance that he had decided not to meet with the marchers but offered an excuse so bizarre as to beg credulity: he didn’t want the victims to turn an interview into a “show” that would detract from his presidential investiture.
In the 14 years of unrelenting violence that followed the government’s decision to launch what was supposed to be an all-out offensive against criminal cartels, 327,609 people have been killed, 61,637 disappeared, and 338,000 displaced from their communities. In a country in which roughly 90% of murders go unpunished, there is yet to be evidence to suggest that we might see in the foreseeable future any reprieve from this bleak landscape and lack of criminal justice.
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