The War that is Still Being Won by El Narco

El Fuerte has had the worst mayors in recent years, some of them with pending lawsuits for corruption. El Rosario, too. Now Mocorito, with a government of opposition to the PRI (PRI had governed that municipality all of its life), the choice of Sinaloan Party (PAS), is being debated amid the violence.

This existed yesterday and it exists today, during the previous administration and in this one, with Malova, Mario Lopez Valdez, former PAN governor of Sinaloa and Quirino, Quirino Ordaz Coppel, the current PRI governor, who was elected in Jan 2017. There is no difference. What did the governor sell us then? What did he offer in terms of security that he is not fulfilling now? Sinaloa today, in terms of security, is worse than yesterday. And if the government of Mario López Valdez was complicit and ineffective, the current government is a horror.

The month of May was the last straw. Almost 190 homicides in its 31 days is a figure that should force the governor to stop and look in the mirror. He can not boast that all is well in Sinaloa with these figures. The crime of journalist Javier Valdez on May 15 was one of the highest impact crimes in the history of this country of Mexico, the state of Sinaloa, with reverberations felt around the world.  The blame goes to them; and the government can take the credit.

If Gov Quirino intended to discourage the violence by militarizing the commands of the police corporations, he was wrong. If he believed that filling the municipal and state patrols with      soldiers would intimidate the criminals, he made a mistake. In cities like Culiacán, Navolato, Guamúchil, Los Mochis and Mazatlán, the underworld has more armed men than those who can be deployed by the Army and Navy together. The criminal gunmen have more money and are more willing to die than the soldiers and marines. If the war is pursued blindly, this war will be won by El Narco, it has already been winning it.

The government has conventional armed forces, but 90 percent of its potential – including men, equipment and weapons – can not be used because they are not designed for guerilla style warfare in which the criminals wear bulletproof vests. In addition, El Narco’s warriors fight guerilla style: they strike and they go away. They live in hiding. As in every war, they win and lose battles; but, in the end, they have been growing in every way: in men, in arms, in money, in logistics and infrastructure, in bases of support, in cultural penetration.

If you follow the record of violent events, seizures and confiscations, often the criminal commandos suddenly run into Military convoys, but not because of intelligence actions by the Military. After clashes between rival gangs, crime scenes are reported after bodies are removed  and vehicles and weapons abandoned. There is no intelligence work and if it exists it is not applied in strategies to combat the criminal organizations; there is only data that is recorded and archived.

 Ball and chain

Black smoke