Politics: Tláhuac Lays Bare Cartel in the Capital
When Marine troops killed Felipe Pérez Luna ‒ a.k.a. "Los Ojos", the boss of a criminal gang based in the Tláhuac borough and flagrantly operating throughout a considerable part of Mexico City ‒ it brought to the public’s attention just how deeply organized crime has penetrated the capital. It uncovered networks of complicity between local officials and criminal operations in a city that has long tried to paint itself as something of a refuge from the criminal violence engulfing much of the rest of the country.
Although by no means on the scale of the criminal violence in states such as Colima, Guerrero or Baja California, in the past two and a half years there has been a sustained rise in the murder rate and other crime indicators in the capital, where the rate of victimization has risen to 52,718 per 100,000 inhabitants, 49% above the national average and a level only surpassed by the neighboring State of Mexico.
Analysts and reporters have delved deeper into the Tláhuac story, and found ties between Pérez’s operation and hundreds of murders that occurred in the past four years, and evidence of direct ties to the authorities in Tláhuac (Morena) and presumably in the Mexico City government (PRD) per se. But despite such evidence, the mayor and borough officials continue to deny not only any such complicity, but also the very existence of the Tláhuac cartel.
With much of the population dependent on the shadow economy for jobs, it is easy for criminal organizations to operate through associations in such poorly regulated informal businesses, and the police and officials in even the most institutionally consolidated regions of the country have proven susceptible to the reach of the cartels. And given how readily officials turn a blind eye or engage in finger-pointing when such horrors come to light, criminal gangs may have another major opportunity to expand their webs of complicity in next year’s presidential elections, in which voters will cast ballots to fill 3,327 public offices, including the president of the republic, 628 members of the national Congress, and nine governors, as well as numerous municipal officials and state legislators.
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