Mexico’s new President has a daunting job: Stop the blood bath

In a village in the hills of Guerrero State, residents ran from their homes as drones flew overhead, dropping makeshift bombs. For months, drug cartel operatives had been deploying the commercial devices to drop explosives packed into metal casings, setting homes ablaze, tearing holes in walls and sending piercing hot shrapnel into people’s flesh.

Traveling to the state, in southern Mexico, in March, I visited some of those villages and met people who had packed their possessions into pickup trucks and fled the terror. And while the drone attacks are a dark new advance, they are just one example of the violence that has raged across Mexico every day for almost two decades of intense cartel warfare, leaving hundreds of thousands of Mexicans displaced, murdered or disappeared.

This violence is the most formidable challenge that Claudia Sheinbaum, whom the nation has just elected by a huge margin to be its first female president, will have to confront when she takes power in October.

And yet she has not laid out a clear strategy to govern a country that is bathed in blood, scarred with mass graves in cow fields and garbage dumps. Ms. Sheinbaum will be in charge of a nation plagued by over 30,000 murders a year, 90 percent of which go unsolved, and she will have to face the powerful cartels behind those numbers, which are now networks of paramilitary organized crime and deeply embedded in communities. Today, these groups not only traffic drugs like fentanyl but also run a portfolio of crimes from human smuggling to widespread extortion.

The run-up to the election was one of the most violent campaigns in Mexico’s recent history. Dozens of candidates were killed; a gunman shot a contender for mayor as he shook hands with supporters on a basketball court. Ms. Sheinbaum did not put this bloodshed at the core of her campaign. A 61-year-old environmental engineer and a member of the governing Morena party, Ms. Sheinbaum won the vote on promises to continue social programs of the current president, her mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO. She floated interesting proposals on renewable energy and confronting water shortages.

Her lack of a strong public vision for Mexico’s security is concerning, given that her three predecessors all failed on this front. Felipe Calderón took power in 2006 and headed a military crackdown on cartels, but violence only escalated; his security secretary was later convicted in New York of cocaine trafficking.

From 2012 to 2018, Enrique Peña Nieto tried to change the narrative and talk about Mexico’s economic potential, but violence also worsened on his watch. During his tenure, 43 students disappeared while in the custody of police officers linked to a cartel. And AMLO has been mocked for his call to deal with cartels through “hugs, not bullets,” while presiding over the most violent period in Mexico’s recent history.

All that said, Ms. Sheinbaum has shown she can take a pragmatic approach to crime. As mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, she flooded the city with security cameras and deployed the police in certain high-crime areas. Murders dropped by about half in the city during her tenure, according to official statistics. The opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez has claimed Ms. Sheinbaum manipulated those figures to hide homicides, and there is a legitimate debate on the true death toll of cartel violence across Mexico. But today, people in the capital feel markedly safer.

Of course, controlling crime levels in a single city is different from facing the sprawling national crisis that in some states resembles a full-blown war. In states like Zacatecas and Michoacán, squads of cartel gunmen roll though towns in convoys flashing their Kalashnikovs, blocking roads and using improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades. Hidden graves dot the country, hiding victims ranging from cartel operatives killed by rivals to innocent people who crossed the wrong gangsters. Most likely the largest mass grave discovered so far, found in 2016 in the southeastern state of Veracruz, contained almost 300 skulls.

Most people would love to end this war, stop the impunity with which the cartels operate and fix the endemic corruption in the security forces. These are herculean problems that will take years to overcome. Ms. Sheinbaum should take the same practical approach she used in Mexico City: pursuing concrete goals that could at least reduce the violence and turn a national security crisis into a more manageable problem of public safety.

To do so, the new president should prioritize going after the most violent players, including certain cartel commanders and squads of killers in the most homicidal areas of the country. Mexican security forces cannot take down all cartels at once, and major drug traffickers are easily replaced by others hungry for the huge profits. But consistently targeting the most lethal players could reduce the body count and make other traffickers less keen to unleash mass murder.

Ms. Sheinbaum also needs a strong campaign to fight the rampant extortion that is ravaging the lives of many hardworking Mexicans. If she targets extortion, she will win support from businesses large and small, and it will help the economy.

Finally, Ms. Sheinbaum needs to create an effective prevention program aimed at the young people recruited by cartels. As I wrote in my book in 2021, a veteran with the infamous Barrio Azteca gang, which operates in Ciudad Juárez, told me back in 2017 how his gang looked for angry, abandoned youths to join the organization. “The kids who have been mistreated by their parents, they have a cold look, and those are people that are useful for the job,” he said. “They make for the good bad guys.” Both Mr. Peña Nieto and AMLO talked about this idea but failed to devise any truly effective policy.

AMLO’s scholarship program for high school students, which aims to keep teenagers in education, is a good start, but it can miss the young people who are most likely to join the cartels. A more constructive program has to be more laser-focused on the most troubled youths in the most violent areas. Mexico already has gifted social workers on the ground who could do this work if they had the resources.

Even incremental progress would go a long way. If Ms. Sheinbaum’s government can slash the level of murders by even a third, people can start to feel safer. If there are fewer homicides, investigators will be less flooded by cases, and more can be solved. If more people denounce extortion, others may be emboldened to do so.

On the other hand, judging from the violence in Mexico over the past two decades, things could easily get worse. And if Mexico’s reformist presidents continue to fail to fight crime, a more radical contender could come along, promising security at a very high cost, including a total decimation of human rights.

Ioan Grillo is a writer based in Mexico who investigates drug trafficking, violence and organized crime in Latin America