AMLO's 6-Year Presidential Term Has Been Mexico's Deadliest

“Socalj” for Borderland Beat

AMLO tasked the armed forces with building infrastructure and ensuring public safety. His term will end with newly constructed transport hubs, hotels and a museum, and more than 170,000 murders.

That was the headline from an April 2024 Bloomberg article. With now former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador term officially at an end, the number of murders in Mexico during his 6-year term is over 186,000; the highest of any Mexican presidents years in office.

From the day AMLO took office as president on December 1, 2018 until August 31 of this year, 186,380 Mexicans have been murdered. September has yet to be calculated and has seen a dramatic uptick in violence in several areas like Sinaloa, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Since the Revolution and the Cristero War, Mexico has never seen a government with so many murders, so much violence and so many parts of the country in the hands of criminals and drug traffickers.

While methods for counting murders during Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI administration and Felipe Calderón’s PAN regime was different from the one used by the AMLO government; the increase by over 50% from previous presidents is well beyond any variances.

From different sources, 121,683 murders occurred under Calderón and 124,478 under Peña Nieto. AMLO’s strategy, the so-called ‘Hugs not Bullets’ was based on attacking some of the causes behind the violence: poverty, a lack of jobs and opportunities. “Peace is the fruit of justice,” he would say.

While this was the rhetoric that won AMLO the highest office in Mexico, it never found its way into practice. The homicide rates year over year did begin to drop however. In 2019 there were 34,723 murders, and in 2023 the number dropped to 29,710.

Mexico last year had many more murders (29,710) than the United States (18,854), according to the Gun Violence Archive. The US population is 2.5 times bigger than Mexico’s.

During his government 47 journalists have been murdered, according to the non-government organization Articulo 19. The same number as during the Peña Nieto administration.

AMLO, who in 2010 said the army “cannot resolve the problem of the lack of security” has now militarized Mexico, put soldiers to work on civilian issues and was able to put over 10,000 members of the GN National Guard under military control after being created as a civilian led national force.

This militarization has brought many more deaths than in other 6-year terms. There were at least 5,446 femicides and there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of disappearances with clandestine graves being discovered often.

By the government’s conservative estimate, 113,000 people remain missing in Mexico, many of them victims of criminal groups, state security forces, or both.

While supporters credit AMLO with dramatic reductions in poverty through policies such as increasing the minimum wage, labour reforms, and welfare payments, critics accuse him of eroding democratic oversight and failing to address rights abuses and insecurity.

Militarized National Guard

Last Wednesday, Mexico’s Senate passed a controversial bill placing the National Guard, previously under nominal civilian control, in the hands of the military.

Anyone in the National Guard will be subject only to military justice, with their own tribunals, the military justice system’s prosecutors, and decisions and sentences that will not be made public.

The military, through its operational control of the National Guard, will likely have a certain degree of veto power over security decisions by civilian leaders.

Mexico allocates substantial resources to combat organized crime, including an annual defense budget of nearly $10 billion, and the deployment of over 200,000 military personnel for public security tasks.

Sheinbaum & Mexico’s Future

With his Morena Party securing supermajorities in Congress and Sheinbaum preparing to take his place, the outgoing president’s most enduring legacy could be the realignment of Mexican politics that has taken place under his watch.

“For about two decades before Lopez Obrador, several parties were in power and no party had complete control of Congress. Now Lopez Obrador’s party has been able to establish a supermajority,” said Piccato. “That’s something new, and a lot of people are very concerned about that.”

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was the Mayor of Mexico City, succeeding AMLO in that same position. During her tenure as mayor, she halved homicides in the capital city, in large part by relying on civilian policing, bolstering the police’s investigative capacity, incentivizing cooperation with prosecutors, and sharing intelligence with U.S. law enforcement agencies.

There are signs that she may continue these policies as President. She has appointed her Mexico City security chief, Omar García Harfuch, as security minister (albeit with decreased powers). Harfuch was the victim of an attempted assassination by CJNG gunmen. She has promised to create a new national intelligence agency and binational working groups on security issues, signaling a potential shift towards more sophisticated policing strategies and an emphasis on targeted operations.

Still, some speculate that her security stance will continue AMLO’s militarized strategy. Sheinbaum has pledged to maintain the armed forces’ prominent role in public security, indicating that she may fall into the same trap as AMLO: public rhetoric of reform but punitive policies in practice.

Additionally, deterring criminal violence requires sweeping reforms to the judicial system, which currently resolves only 1% of crimes.

Judicial Reform

“The regime of corruption and privileges each day is being left farther in the past and a true democracy and true rule of law are being built,” Sheinbaum, Lopez Obrador’s successor, said in a social media post celebrating the passage of the judicial reforms.

The most contentious by far was a constitutional change that will make judges stand for election.

Critics said the move will politicise the judiciary and erode democratic checks and balances, while supporters argued it will make judges more accountable to the people.

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