They were images familiar from the civil wars in the Middle East: dozens of pickup trucks, many with machine guns planted, raced through the streets of Culiacan, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Masked gunmen fired from the cars, they set up roadblocks, controlled the main arterial roads and access to the airport, which was temporarily closed. Local residents panicked or sought refuge in homes and businesses. The gangsters set buses and trucks on fire, smoke columns rose above the 700,000-inhabitant metropolis. Dozens of prisoners took advantage of the chaos to escape from the city's jail.
Guzmán López is wanted for drug trafficking and money laundering
For several hours, the militias of the powerful Sinaloa cartel of US-arrested drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" besieged Guzmán, the city near the Pacific coast. They had come from the surrounding mountains where "El Chapo" and his family were at home and where probably Ismael Zambada García, called "El Mayo Zambada", has his headquarters, the dreaded boss of the cartel. He was considered in El Chapo's time as the actual Strippenzieher the organization.
"El Mayo Zambada" had sent his assassins to Culiacán to rescue Ovidio Guzmán López, one of the sons of "El Chapo". He had recently been arrested by a military patrol in a suburb of Culiacán with four other cronies. The gangster is wanted for drug trafficking and money laundering.
But his arrest was short-lived: the militias of the Sinaloa cartel apparently surrounded the government troops, they were far more numerous and better armed than the soldiers. In order to avoid a bloodbath, the soldiers let the gangster and his cronies run again on the orders of their superiors. Then the killer squads of the cartel stopped the fire and withdrew.
"The situation was very difficult because many people's lives were at stake", President Andrés Manuel López Obrador justified the decision on Friday morning. "The arrest of a criminal can not be more valuable than the lives of the people".
STR / EPA EFE / REX
Burning cars after battle between security forces and drug militias
Mexico looks back on days of violence
Edgar Buscaglia, a security expert at Columbia University in the US, agrees with the head of state: If the enemy is overpowering, "every soldier in the world" would release a gangster boss to "avoid a massacre." The state had "capitulated" to the criminals, criticized the columnist Salvador García Soto in the newspaper "El Universal".
There is only one thing the experts agree on: how the government will respond to this week's events will be crucial for the future of the left-wing government project López Obrador. For the events of Sinaloa are the culmination of a wave of violence that questions the entire security policy of the government.
- On Monday, gunmen massacred 13 partially young Policemen in the state of Michoacán, who were supposed to escort a witness to a court date. In the burned out and shot up. Police cars left the killers with posters claiming to be the killers of the Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) cartel, the most powerful criminal organization in Mexico, alongside the Sinaloa cartel.
- Two days later, in Guerrero state, there was a shoot-out between the police and gunmen, leaving 15 civilians and one policeman dead.
If things continue this way, Lopez Obrador's first year in office will be the bloodiest since the beginning of the drug war in 2006.
So far, the president has blamed his predecessors for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the drug war. Conservative Felipe Calderón, who ruled from 2006 to 2012, has launched an epoch of violence that is still going on. Calderón had sent the military into the fight against the cartels, then the violence in the country had exploded.
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Lethal force: crime scene MexicoLópez Obrador follows an opposite line: "Fire should not be fought with fire," he proclaims again and again. He travels the country as a peace apostle, "Hugs instead of shootings" is his motto. With social and educational programs, he wants to offer unemployed young people an alternative to the material lure of the criminal gangs. There is also an amnesty for small criminals.
Criminal cartels are always more skilled
To fight crime, López Obrador has set up a new force, the National Guard. It essentially consists of soldiers and former police officers. Instead of taking action against the mafia, however, the government sent many National Guardsmen to the limits: they should fight illegal migration to the United States.
Even people sympathetic to López Obrador consider his security policy undecided and naïve. But what alternatives are there?
All recipes to combat drug violence have failed so far. Despite the arrest and extradition of "El Chapo," the Sinaloa cartel appears to be more powerful than ever. According to journalist Anabel Hernández, author of several books on drug cartels, she has grown into an international organization with spinoffs in over 70 countries. At least as powerful are its competitors from the CJNG cartel, which has its headquarters in the state of Jalisco.
Like multinational corporations, the Mexican criminal cartels have diversified their activities by funding extortion and kidnapping, operating illegal mines and controlling synthetic drug trafficking, which generates far more money than marijuana or cocaine.
The government has little to counter these octopi of crime: The cartels have long since infiltrated police and authorities, they are better armed than the security forces of the government. In many rural areas of the country, they have established a kind of parallel regime.
In addition, the various security agencies often compete with each other and act dilettantisch. The arrest of the son of "El Chapo" had been "premature" and "badly planned," confessed the Presidential Security Cabinet.
The arrest was made under pressure from the American drug agency DEA, writes the usually well-informed journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio in the newspaper "El Financiero", DEA agents were also involved in the action.
That should fuel the discussion about the influence of the Americans on Mexico's drug war. And it will rekindle a topic that is even more and more popular even with its large neighbor in the north: the demand for the controlled release of narcotic drugs.