Violence in Mexico emerges as the thorniest issue for presidential aspirations

The thousands of people who end up underground in Mexico every year, whether with a grave or without, make it impossible to look the other way. There is also no way to hide the reality that hits the country the hardest and that only intensifies during election time. .

That will be the most controversial matter in the campaign that the two presidential candidates with the possibility of winning the chair will maintain.

Both appear weighed down by past policies. If the candidate on the right, the security disaster that this six-year term has entailed and the militarization that comes with it.

In the absence of specifying the electoral programs to combat violence, there are already signs of how the opposition will attack from that flank and some signs of the possible escape that the ruling team will use.

Security will be the great offensive of Gálvez, who frequently comments on the levels of violence in the country, also when he travels outside of it, such as on his tour of the United States and Spain, where he asserts the urgency of reversing this tragedy not only by logic. humanity, so many corpses, but for the need to offer the business community a territory without conflicts.

The insinuations of drug traffickers' support for former López Obrador campaigns published in the press and other manifestations of organized crime against the president also contribute to the limited strength that the opposition still shows at the starting line of the presidential race.

Gálvez's team, who champions the alliance between the PAN, PRI and PRD for the June 2 polls, therefore has ground to hit.

It is more complicated to see how Sheinbaum will organize his defense strategy.

The candidate embraces the continuity of this six-year term, but in terms of security she will be forced to distance herself in some way and there are already signs of this.

The figure of Omar García Harfuch comes to the fore.

The former Secretary of Security of Mexico City stands as a symbol of civil versus military and the person who exemplifies the successes against crime and delinquency in the Sheinbaum Administration in the Mexican capital.

Harfuch is in charge of the candidate's team for this matter, the one who will draw the lines to follow and the image of him disputes close-ups of Sheinbaum herself in some of her campaign events.

Nothing is coincidental in politics.

This week, Harfuch outlined in a conference with businessmen the idea that permeates the electoral headquarters of the official candidate to combat crime, organized or not.

He spoke of strengthening local and state police and prosecutors and giving the National Guard greater investigative capacity.

A “preventive model with research,” he said.

But it will not be easy to separate ourselves from the militarization prevailing in this six-year term.

Neither for Sheinbaum nor for Gálvez, according to analysts.

“The next president inherits a kind of deterministic prison in terms of security based on a transexennial arrangement that will limit the capacity for action,” says the historian of the College of Mexico Humberto Beck.

“Despite the legal dispute that persists, in fact the National Guard functions as a branch of the Armed Forces and the Army is involved in Security tasks, and in many others.

The strange thing is that there are not more soldiers in ministries that are not those of National Defense or the Navy,” he says.

She believes that reversing that process is complicated.

Elements of the Army work together with municipal police in Tijuana (State of Baja California), in January 2023.Omar Martínez Noyola (Cuartoscuro)

Beck maintains that three powers co-govern in the country, the civil, the military and the criminal, which has gained strength alarmingly in some territories.

“Sheinbaum's best card is to showcase Harfuch's supposed achievements at the head of the capital's police, because at the federal level there is nothing on that side.”

The symbol of the police officer “gives him the ability to argue that his project is different from that of López Obrador,” adds Beck.

“But it is disconcerting that both candidates will have to defend changes in this matter when the horizon of both refers to previous circumstances.

With Xóchitl Gálvez it continues to be the disaster of [Felipe] Calderón and with Sheinbaum, Harfuch's biography and training is related to characters like García Luna [who was Calderón's Secretary of Security, today imprisoned in the United States],” he warns.

“Of course, security is the great issue to be resolved in this country and it is the best weapon for the opposition, because not only has the fight against violence not improved in this six-year term, but it will be the one with the most deaths,” says the political analyst Paula Sofía Vásquez Sánchez.

The electoral campaign itself will be full of blood, as is already being seen before it begins, with the murdered candidates and officials in their twenties.

“It will be interesting to see how many candidacies are unique, without contenders, because that will measure the places co-opted by crime,” she adds.

She understands that Sheinbaum exhibits Harfuch as a model against crime, “perhaps for the same reason that the police officer was also his first bet for the Mexico City candidacy.

He gives her a framework for the national campaign, but Claudia has to reckon with militarization.

What is going to happen to the work of the armed forces in terms of security,” Vásquez Sánchez asks.

She believes that she has no choice but to “throw Harfuch forward to mask that militarized security.

The way the country is, a police officer is a better card than a soldier,” she says.

Capitalizing on the country's insecurity on votes entails risks.

An unfortunate slip on the part of the opposition could hit back: you don't do politics with the dead, some would say.

A simple photo of Xóchitl Gálvez with Felipe Calderón in Spain has been enough for criticism of the candidate to intensify regarding her political security program.

“I don't know what the opposition's strategies are in this matter, but I suppose they will have to focus on the entities.

In Guerrero it is the hottest issue, but there are many other States that are seeing how they lose governability and enter criminal logic, such as Chiapas, Morelos, Guanajuato or Zacatecas,” says the analyst.

Taking advantage of the violence in the campaign will depend a lot on the opposition in these places, maintains Vásquez Sánchez.

This campaign will be measured by the attacks on security and by the defense of this by the president's successor, but in this matter, there are those who believe that the most sensible thing will be to distance oneself from the results presented by the López Obrador Administration. .

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