Dear Presidenta Sheinbaum. Mexico Is Stained With Blood. It's Time to Stop This Catastrophe

Dear Presidenta Sheinbaum,

You have won power with a massive mandate to govern Mexico as the nation’s first female president. You have many positive developments on the agenda from expanding social programs to increasing renewable energy to alleviating the water shortage. But you will also have to confront the cartel violence that ravages this great country.

The bloodshed does not alone define Mexico or mean it is a failed state; Mexico grows and develops despite it and attracts record numbers of tourists and foreign residents. But the cartel crimes and killing cannot be ignored.

I have covered this violence as a journalist for more than two decades and witnessed the cartels rise up from the U.S. border to the Sierra Madre mountains to the southern jungles of Chiapas. I believe this conflict is a hybrid between crime and war but it has seen more deaths than many official wars. There have been more than 400,000 murders since 2006 and two-thirds could be at the hands of the cartels or the security forces fighting them.

Mexico is stained with blood, its earth filled with mass graves containing hundreds of skulls near family homes where children play. Mothers search tirelessly for years for their loved ones who were dragged away by men in masks with Kalashnikovs. Villagers flee their ramshackle homes after cartel militias drop makeshift bombs from drones. Residents of border cities huddle in their bedrooms as the rattle of gunfire echoes in the streets.

The cartels have long expanded from just trafficking drugs to every business they can get their hands on, from human smuggling to oil theft. Hardworking farmers and even tortilla sellers now have to pay their hard-earned income to these extortionists.

Families cry. And some who have lost loved ones cannot even cry anymore. They just block it out and carry on. Like much of Mexican society has blocked it out. And let it become normalized. Another massacre. Another assassination. Another disappearance. It’s only news as usual.

There is a danger you will just administer this bloodbath and oversee tens of thousands more murders every year. The last three presidents of Mexico failed on security. It would be easy to carry on this failure.

Felipe Calderónled a military crackdown on cartels. He dressed in an army jacket to address soldiers and claimed “we will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.” Mass murderers were displayed on television confessing their horrific crimes. Soldiers shot dead or captured capos.

Yet the offensive only threw oil on the fire and the body count soared. And last year, his former public security secretary Genaro García Luna was himself convicted in New York of working with cocaine traffickers. A witness against García Luna described how after the biggest-ever bust, of 23 tons of cocaine, the cartel repurchased much of its powder. We journalists were covering a simulation of a war on drugs.

Enrique Peña Nieto tried to change the conversation. People should not read about Mexico as a country of narcos and sicarios, his aides instructed, but about its huge oil reserves and potential for China-like growth. Captured kingpins were no longer paraded on TV and officials were told not to mention drugs and murder.

Major news magazines bought the narrative of Peña Nieto “Saving Mexico.” Yet the violence came back with a vengeance with the disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, and homicides rose to new highs. This problem is real and cannot be solved by manipulating the narrative.

Finally, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, your mentor, came in with a promise of change. The war would be over and there would be “hugs not bullets.” Youths would get scholarships and would not need to become sicarios. A revived National Guard would keep the peace.

Yet the hard reality is that the war rages; it has been the most murderous term in Mexico’s recent history. Gangsters have become bolder in their extortion and political assassination. Chunks of the country suffer a clear duopoly of power between government and cartels, who can effectively choose mayors and collect their own taxes.

How then, Presidenta, can you avoid a repetition of this catastrophe?

I think you need to be realistic and pragmatic. Pundits will urge you to stop the impunity of murder (at a terrible level of about 93 percent) and “end the war.” These are worthy calls, but they are Herculean tasks that will take years if not decades. You need concrete goals on a few core issues to make progress in the short term and move towards these objectives. You need to show a real improvement that can mean cartel violence in Mexico goes from an existential national security problem to a manageable public security one.

You showed a pragmatic approach when you ruled as mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, which gives hope. Your administration massively increased the number of security cameras and sent police strategically into high-crime areas. The official numbers show murders went down by about half in this period. There is a worthy debate about how many homicides are hidden across all of Mexico, but the perception of security in the capital also improved.

The problems of violence in states such as Guerrero, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas is very different from Mexico City. It really resembles a hot war in many places with convoys of cartel hit men driving through towns in armored vehicles known as “monsters,” wielding grenade launchers and setting off improvised explosive devices. Security cameras wouldn’t work in these areas of conflict; they stretch across vast terrains and gangsters could just ignore them or tear them down.

The first strategy should be to go after the most murderous players. Cartels currently use violence as their first resort and show off their capacity for killing with propaganda videos and public displays of victims. They are not irrational sadists but see this tactic as being the best for their business.

Mexican police and security forces are overwhelmed with literally millions of unsolved crimes on the books so they have to make priorities. They need to use intelligence to see who is dropping the most bodies. This means looking at the distinct cartel death squads and their commanders and seeing who is leaving the worst trail of destruction. It means seeing which cities, towns, and barrios are suffering the most murders and focusing forces there. It means consistently taking down the most prolific killers. The goal is to make cartels see that there is a higher cost to unleashing so much murder and to alter their practices in response.

A second strategy should be to launch a campaign against extortion. Shakedowns have grown to epidemic levels on everyone from bars and clubs to avocado and lime farmers to miners and chicken factories. This has a grave economic cost and psychological impact in showing the power of crime and the weakness of the government. It could provoke people to rise up in arms as they did in Michoacán and Guerrero from 2013 to 2014.

A campaign against extortion needs to bring in businesses large and small that would support it with enthusiasm. Extortion-free zones need to be created where businesses can all refuse to pay and work with authorities without fear of repercussions from the cartels. Once an area is secured it can be expanded. This would be an immensely popular policy.

A third strategy would be to launch a genuine prevention program. Youngsters are recruited into the cartels as young teenagers. They often work first as lookouts, or “hawks,” and then rise in the ranks, committing multiple murders before they are adults and effectively being child soldiers. A brutal example was a young sicario known as “Juanito Pistolas” celebrated in rap songs. He was reportedly an orphan in the border city of Nuevo Laredo who took a rifle and joined the cartel at 13 only to have his head blown off by soldiers when he had just turned 17.

Broader social programs such as scholarships for high school kids are good in their own right but don’t stop cartel recruitment. The youths who become sicarios are not the kids studying and getting good grades. There needs to be focused programs that work with the most vulnerable children in the most murderous areas to steer them away from cartels.

Mexico has gifted social workers on the ground who can achieve this, but too often the resources are siphoned off by bureaucrats removed from the reality on the street. Every youth steered away from cartel recruitment saves both the potential victimizer and their potential victims.

I dearly hope you can succeed and the security failure cycle is broken. Even a moderate improvement would be a big step. If murders were to go down by a third then the perception of security would be improved. Investigators would be less overwhelmed with cases and could solve more. If people saw a fight back against extortions they would be more emboldened to denounce it.

But this positive vision of a future is not a given. After covering Mexico for the last two decades, it appears that things could easily get worse. More innocent people will almost certainly be murdered. More mass graves will be sown. Violence will be unleashed that will shake your government and will test you personally.

History has given you this heavy responsibility. Do not neglect it as so many presidents in Mexico have done before. Show that there is a better path.

Yours sincerely,

Ioan Grillo