Rejecting a renewed “war” against drug traffickers, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday unveiled her strategy to battle organized crime in a nation where each day brings word of new assassinations, gang wars, massacres and other bloodshed.
. . .
Instead, she outlined a four-point strategy that emphasized intelligence-gathering, troop deployment, improved federal-state coordination and providing opportunities to dissuade impoverished young people from joining organized crime — which is among Mexico’s major employers.
A centerpiece of the plan is doubling down on the often-criticized “hugs not bullets” strategy of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
At the end of the day this is a counter insurgency fight. Violence needs to be limited to only the absolute necessary because it’s about ideas. And if you kill someone’s brother they aren’t going to stop to ask what their brother was doing. Or worse, when civilians are caught in the crossfire.
You still need the crack raid teams and such but your goal is to make the insurgents unable to function by removing key people, shutting down income streams so they can’t pay a thousand fighters, and taking their ideological ground away by making other paths available. Like you could go hide in the desert and risk your life and freedom. Or you could go work in the new air conditioned car parts factory.
Once you’ve got all that setup it’s really just a matter of protecting it and going after corruption in a big way. That last part is where so many governments fall down in this kind of a fight. The corruption goes unchecked and the insurgents get all of their moral high ground back with funding secured by the new infrastructure you paid for.