As Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) nears the end of his six-year presidency, his legacy will be the highest number of murders recorded during a presidential term since the Mexican Revolution. The 191,600 murders recorded during his term highlight the devastating impact of the “Abrazos, no fire” or “hugs, not bullets” policy he adopted to deal with the violent drug cartels operating across the country.
According to TResearch, a private research group based in Mexico, the daily murder rate under AMLO’s administration is nearly three times that of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gothari, who served from 1988 to 1994. The current daily murder rate of about 95 murders is nearly double that of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who publicly declared war on violent drug cartels in 2006, just 10 days after taking office. During Calderon’s rule, from 2006 to 2012, more than 120,000 people were murdered in Mexico.
Under Calderon’s successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, AMLO led a major shift in his administration’s policy away from a “non-interference” stance that resulted in the murder of 156,000 Mexicans between 2012 and 2018. AMLO pledged peace and national reconciliation and vowed to end the Mexican government’s decade-long war against the drug cartels. AMLO promised to reduce the death toll suffered by Mexicans in the years of conflict between the Mexican government and the bloody cartels.
AMLO broke with his predecessor’s idea that drug cartels must be fought and eradicated, choosing instead to address the root causes of violence through social programs to fight poverty. AMLO also vowed to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in Mexico’s prisons. Despite a vision in stark contrast to his predecessor, AMLO’s legacy will be a level of violence not seen in Mexico’s modern history. Statistics clearly show that the embrace did not work.
Conversely, one could argue that AMLO’s “hugs, not bullets” strategy and new social programs designed to lure criminals away from the cartels have only strengthened criminal organizations. report Under the watch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Mexico’s notorious drug cartels have grown and diversified.
The report describes the two cartels as follows:
The Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels are not simply drug manufacturers and traffickers, but organized crime groups involved in arms trafficking, money laundering, migrant smuggling, sex trafficking, bribery, extortion and many other crimes, and are referred to as “transnational criminal organizations” because of their global reach, which extends to strategic shipping zones and lucrative drug markets in Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
There is no doubt that AMLO’s disastrous policies have had a devastating impact on the lives of the families of the more than 191,000 people killed during his term in office. The impact of his failed “hugs, not bullets” policy has been felt even within the U.S. Under AMLO, Mexican drug cartels have grown and strengthened, leading to an increase in the trafficking of deadly fentanyl far from the Mexican border.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, when AMLO took office in 2018, U.S. law enforcement officials seized 290,000 fentanyl pills. In 2023, the amount of fentanyl pills seized in the U.S. is expected to reach more than 115 million pills, a staggering increase of more than 300,000 percent.
In October, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo will become Mexico’s first female president. Sheinbaum, a close aide and member of AMLO’s Morena party, is likely to continue fighting the cartels with social programs to combat extreme poverty, rather than fighting the cartels directly. On Thursday, Sheinbaum said Announced Omar Garcia-Halfch will be security chief, and he will be Sheinbaum’s direct adviser in his efforts to reduce the drug cartel violence that has plagued the country.
Garcia-Halfkhuk, who served under Scheinbaum as Mexico City’s police chief, has pledged to develop a strategy to combat violent crime that focuses on investigation and intelligence rather than all-out physical combat with the cartels. “Instead of starting all-out wars, our goal will be to disrupt the sources of violence through intelligence and investigation,” Garcia-Halfkhuk said in a statement announcing his appointment as security chief.
García Halffuch’s comments suggest that the “Hugs, Not Bullets” campaign could continue for another six years, likely leading to an increase in Mexico’s murder rate.
Randy Clark Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as Chief of the Law Enforcement Operations Division, where he led operations for nine Border Patrol stations in the Del Rio Sector, Texas. Follow him on Twitter: @RandyClarkBBTX.
