Politics: Embedded and emboldened organized crime groups with links to the government are a major problem for Sheinbaum
The most striking feature of most balance sheets of security under López Obrador's government was the level of violence. Despite official statistics registering a downtrend in homicides in the past two years, for AMLO’s entire six years in office there were close to 200,000 murders and more than 50,000 missing persons, by far the most violent of the last three presidential administrations. That is an important part of the legacy he bequeathed to Claudia Sheinbaum, along with an entirely new level of links between drug trafficking and politics and the myriad ways in which those links have allowed organized crime to expand their their reach throughout the country at all levels of society, and into an ever growing pallet of businesses, in what could well be called the hyper-diversification of criminal rents.
The complicated start to Sheinbaum's administration is by no means limited to the current cartel war in Sinaloa. There are at least four other states in a critical situation where violence seems to be out of control either as a consequence of the conflict in Sinaloa, the clashes between the CJNG and Sinaloa cartels or other local issues.
Both López Obrador in September, and Claudia Sheinbaum as of October 1, have minimized the problem despite “it” being a conflict of important repercussions of diverse types. But as we show in this week’s Political Outlook, the main violent events in the first 30 days of Claudia Sheinbaum's administration provide an idea of the dimension of the challenge she will face in the next six years: a much more powerful and violent organized crime that openly challenges the State, unwilling to abandon the territories it now controls that serve as the basis of their economic hyper diversification. And so far, the security strategy announced by the president falls far short of addressing the magnitude of the problem.
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