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The eternal pain of Tamaulipas

2023-03-21T10:40:31.118Z


The State of the Gulf of Mexico appears in the upper part of two disastrous records: the one with the highest number of military shootings with civilians and the one with the rate of disappeared persons in relation to the population.


Tamaulipas is burning and questions are growing as to why what has happened these weeks has happened.

Ignored by small fires of apparently local scope, the governments of Mexico and the United States are now looking at the Gulf region as they haven't in years.

The massacre at the hands of the military of five boys in Nuevo Laredo, at the end of February, and the kidnapping of four US citizens in Matamoros, at the beginning of March, have put the State in the crosshairs.

The bad news is that both events actually respond to the normality that has prevailed in the area in recent years.

Tamaulipas is one of the regions of the country where more people disappear, in general and in relation to its population.

A prisoner of corruption and the closeness of criminal groups to the political and security apparatus, the State has suffered brutal spikes in violence, explained by disputes between criminal groups, first between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, and then between factions of both groups, all with their eyes on the border and smuggling.

We must add the Armed Forces to the equation, particularly the Army, the de facto police force in the region.

From 2007 to 2022, the military have had almost as many confrontations with alleged attackers in Tamaulipas, 45%, as in the rest of the states combined.

The disappearance of people in Mexico has been a constant since late 2006, when the federal government declared war on organized crime.

In few places has this situation been felt as in Tamaulipas, which has 11,680 disappeared persons, according to the registry of the Ministry of the Interior, of which remains of 527 have appeared. With a population of 3.5 million, the rate of disappearances due to every 100,000 inhabitants in the State is one of the highest in the country.

All this without counting the cases not reported, due to fear, threats... It is impossible to know how many disappeared are not included in the official count, which last year exceeded 100,000 throughout the country.

Clothing and personal belongings found by the state prosecutor's office during a search operation in 2021. Monica Gonzalez

With 17 border bridges that cross into the United States, Tamaulipas is also a haven for an enormous number of extermination centers, pieces of land where criminals destroy bodies to make the work of the authorities difficult.

This is the case of the one found a year and a half ago in Nuevo Laredo, from which the experts have barely been able to recover a few hundred pieces of bone.

Or the one in La Bartolina, in Matamoros, very close to the booth where the investigators rescued the kidnapped Americans a week and a half ago.

The authorities have been removing remains from there for more than five years.

All this gives an idea of ​​the degree of violence that prevails in the entity.

It is not that all of the above does not happen in other parts of Mexico, it does, but Tamaulipas, due to its geographical position and the number of crossings to the neighboring country, is a favorite place for mafias and their institutional support networks.

What in Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo or any of the small border towns is worth 20 dollars, multiplies its value 200 meters to the north, whether they are drugs or migrants.

The reason for the attack on the four US citizens is not yet known, but there is some idea of ​​the deployment of the perpetrators.

Detected the Americans after their crossing, up to eight vehicles participated in their follow-up, the shooting and the kidnapping.

The theory of confusion, raised by the state prosecutor, Irving Barrios, appears as a valid hypothesis.

The leak of the criminal records of the victims suggests other possibilities, which the Mexican authorities have not commented on at the moment.

What is evident in the case is the ability of crime to mobilize in the region, expressed in these years also in its continuous clashes with the security forces, particularly the Army, which has replaced the police at the border.

Nowhere else in Mexico has the military staged more shootouts with suspected criminals than here.

The recurring nature of the confrontations, the ease with which to pull the trigger, hides, however, a chain of errors, in the best of cases, negligence and crimes, in the worst, which points to the very origin of the strategy.

Soldiers outside the Forensic Medical Service of Matamoros, on March 7, after the kidnapping and murder of US citizens. DANIEL BECERRIL (REUTERS)

The story is well known.

In December 2006, the newly arrived government of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) devised a strategy to combat organized crime, which consisted of sending the Army to the streets, a plan that his successors have inherited to this day, already with Andrés Manuel López. Worker in the presidency.

Over the years, the idea spread that Calderón's movement stirred up a hornet's nest full of hysterical insects, which honed his capabilities.

And not only that.

The police experience of the military showed its limits, with continuous complaints against soldiers for torture, forced disappearance and murder.

The Nuevo Laredo case is the best example of the above.

The attack by a military convoy on a group of unarmed boys, who were leaving to spend the night in a disco, questions the security strategies of the last three governments, starting with Calderón, passing through Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and now with Lopez Obrador.

With a greater or lesser incidence, the three administrations have recorded similar situations, soldiers using their weapons without any prior aggression.

From January 2007 to the end of 2022, the military clashed with civilians in Mexico on 5,229 occasions, according to data from the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena), compiled, ordered and interpreted by Samuel Storr, who is part of the Citizen Security Program. from the Iberoamerican University.

Of those 5,229 confrontations, 45%, 2,494, occurred in Tamaulipas.

Most of those clashes also occurred in the large border cities, Matamoros, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo.

Cases like the five boys massacred in February do not appear in these statistics.

Or they shouldn't, since the dead guys never shot.

In a city like Nuevo Laredo, which in recent years has registered 600 alleged confrontations between the military and civilians alone -in addition to those registered by the Navy, the National Guard or the state police-, the attitude of the soldiers who shot at the boys It is explained from what has happened before.

And it raises other questions that are difficult to answer.

Cristina, mother of Heidi Mariana Pérez, a girl killed by stray bullets from the Army in Tamaulipas, during a protest in Mexico City in September 2022. Rodrigo Oropeza

How do you know if among the 2,494 alleged confrontations registered in Tamaulipas these years there are more cases like the one in Nuevo Laredo?

To questions like this, Storr points to the fatality rate, a tool that helps mark events of this type for possible irregularities.

The fatality rate measures the relationship between civilian injuries and deaths in confrontations with security forces.

Experts who developed the idea suggest that it is normal for the relationship to be one to one: one dead, one wounded, two and two, etc.

As the dead outnumber the wounded, suspicion grows.

“Something is happening in Tamaulipas that hardly happens in the rest of the country,” explains Storr.

The academic refers to the number of events in which the fatality rate is not even in the State.

“Of the 2,494 confrontations registered in the State, many more than in any other, in 384 there were more than three civilian deaths.

And of those, in 335 there were no injuries or arrests, ”he adds.

This does not mean that in those 335 cases there have been murders, but it does not mean that the possibility of it occurring is ruled out.

The lack of capacity of the prosecutor's offices, both state and federal, prevent thorough investigations from being carried out.

Only when what happened reaches the national press does the federal government intervene.

His appearance does not ensure that there is justice, but it is at least a start.

The data shows an acceleration of the trend in the years of López Obrador in the presidency.

With him at the head of the Government, the number of confrontations with more than three civilian deaths and no detainees or injuries grows, making up percentages of the total that are higher than those registered with Peña Nieto or Calderón.

Thus, from December 2018 to December 2022, Mexico registered 85 confrontations that ended with more than three civilian deaths, without injuries or arrests.

Of those 85.62 occurred in Tamaulipas, 73% of the total.

In the years of Peña Neto the percentage drops to 59% and in Calderón's time, to 45%.

During the current administration, in addition, the lethality of the Army in Tamaulipas is more than nine, more than double the national average, far exceeding what happened in the two previous governments.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-21

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