Mexico Update

We haven’t had a Mexico update in a hot minute, and a lot is going on down South. This has a US connection, read to the end to find out.

First, on Tuesday, Claudia Sheinbaum was walking between the National Palace and the Education Ministry and was groped/assaulted by a drunk man. She was, as usual, greeting and taking selfies with people on the street when the man approached her, tried to put his arm around her, perhaps tried to kiss her, and was stopped by one of her staff.

In her press conference yesterday, Claudia said that she didn’t realize what had happened until she reviewed the video. You can watch the video here, and she’s very close to the people on the street, as usual, so it’s understandable that exactly what happened wasn’t clear to her. The guy who groped her was obviously drunk and/or high, and he reportedly assaulted at least two other women the same day.

In yesterday’s press conference, she announced that she’s pressing charges as a private citizen with the Attorney General of Mexico City. She also has instructed her Minister of Women (if only the US had one of those) to do a through investigation of why being groped on the street is not a crime in all Mexican states. It’s a crime in Mexico City. She said that to ignore what happened would be to ignore what women in Mexico go through every day, especially young women.

She also excoriated the newspaper Reforma, which had apparently published photos of the encounter from many angles, calling it a “re-victimization”.

This may surprise you, but Claudia has no dedicated security staff. There’s no Mexican equivalent of the Secret Service — AMLO disbanded them after he took office. She has a dozen staffers dedicated to assisting her, and one of their jobs is security, though they’re not necessarily security professionals. One of those staff members, a big beefy guy, intervened and pretty gently pushed her assailant away from her a few seconds after the encounter began. In her press conference, Claudia said she won’t change anything about her security arrangements, noting that she wants to be near the people.

All of this happened three days after the mayor of Urupan, Michoacán, Carlos Manzo, was killed by cartel gunmen on Saturday during a Day of the Dead celebration in his town. Manzo was an outspoken anti-cartel warrior. He would attend raids on cartel operations, wearing a bulletproof vest.

According to Security Minister Gabriel Harfuch, who himself was a target of a cartel assasination attempt when he was Head of Security for Mexico City, Manzo had a dozen federal officers and some trusted municipal officers as a security detail. So, of course, the cartel targeted Manzo during a very public, crowded ceremony.

The states of Michoacán and Jalisco are two major avocado-producing regions where the cartels control their production. In her news conference yesterday, Claudia noted that the cartels control the avocado trade in many ways: first, by oppressing agricultural workers, making them work long hours and paying them under the table so they don’t get social benefits. Then they extort the landowners, the distributors and the rest of the supply chain, demanding a cut of the profits. It isn’t only avocados — the President of the Lime Growers Association in Michoacán was murdered by cartels last year after complaining about extortion.

To respond to the muder of Manzo, Claudia has called for the creation of a Plan Michoacán, where stakeholders work together to come up with a comprehensive strategy that includes security as well as better education for children in the area, and addressing social justice issues. In her Wednesday press conference, she specifically rejected a major security action. This “war on drugs” was tried in the area during the administration of Felipe Calderon, and it was a failure. She also pointed out that the war on drugs was essentially lawless — people were being killed without any due process, and even if they were “bad people”, they deserved due process as does any other Mexican citizen.

This brings us to the rumor going around that the US is going to send troops into Mexico to fight the cartels directly. Claudia has categorically denied that this is going to happen. In the past, and probably currently, Mexico has quietly accepted help from the US for drone overflights to help fighting cartels. And certainly there’s been cooperation, advisors, etc. But if there was some kind of incursion by CIA and/or special forces, this would be a breaking point in US/Mexican relations.

The bet that the Sheinbaum administration is making is that a vibrant economy, with more good paying jobs, and better educational opportunities will deprive the cartels of their labor force in the long run. This is clearly the only strategy that will work, long term. But it is incredibly frustrating to the families of those murdered by cartels, and those being extorted by therm. And the more that she challenges the cartels, the more danger she’s in, personally.

This is a very long post, but one more interesting detail. In a recent post, I’d written briefly about Mexico Te Abrazo — Mexico Embraces You — a program by the Sheinbaum government to welcome back immigrants who are deported from the US. In Tuesday’s press conference, the case of a couple whose daughter was born at 27 weeks with a diaphragmatic hernia (guts push up into the chest cavity). The father was deported, and due to the Mexico te Abrazo program, had a social security card issued. The mother was with the baby in a hospital in the US, a virtual prisoner because she was afraid of being deported, and the daughter was not getting the surgical repair she needed. So the Mexican government flew the baby to a specialty hospital in Mexico, where the baby received the operations she needed, for free, because the father got his social security card. The child is still quite sick and has a long road ahead of her, but the parents and the child are much better off in Mexico than they would have been in the US. This is what I mean when I say that a lot of Mexicans in the US are going to leave and not come back: Mexico is offering them a real, compelling option for them and their families.