Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum and her security Cabinet said today that the government is sending more troops to the western state of Michoacan and will invest more than $3 billion ($5.3 billion) to try to quell the state’s persistent violence.
The announcement came a week after a 17-year-old gunman shot and killed a popular mayor during Day of the Dead festivities, spurring protests in towns across the state and demands that the federal government take action.
Sheinbaum recognised the pain and indignation expressed after the assassination of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo.
“His cowardly murder hurts, not only his family and his community, but all of Michoacan and the country,” the president said at the National Palace today.
Nearly 1000 additional troops were scheduled to arrive in Michoacan Monday, bringing the total of federal forces in the state to more than 10,000, Defence Secretary Ricardo Trevilla Trejo said. Nearly half of those will be charged with a containment strategy aimed at keeping criminals from crossing state lines, a tall order in a state with multiple criminal organisations operating fluidly within and from neighbouring states like Jalisco.
Sheinbaum’s security chief Omar García Harfuch said the federal government would send additional intelligence gathering resources to the state to help develop investigations against organised crime groups. Mexico’s inability to carry out effective investigations that led to prosecutions of its drug cartels was a longstanding problem.
“Those who generate violence, those who commit crimes, those who harm Michoacan families and the Mexican people will be investigated, arrested and taken before the law,” García Harfuch said.
Sheinbaum’s administration has shown a greater willingness to pursue the country’s powerful drug cartels than her predecessor ex-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The Trump administration has applied pressure in the form of tariffs on Mexican imports since shortly after taking office in what it said was an effort to make Mexico stop the flow of drugs into the United States.
President Donald Trump has offered US help in the pursuing the cartels, but Sheinbaum has said Mexico would only accept intelligence assistance and never direct by US forces on Mexican soil.
But much of the funding for Michoacan would go to a bevy of existing government social programmes aimed at addressing what the administration said were the root causes of violence such as unemployment, poverty and healthcare. The administration would expand scholarships aimed at keeping kids in school so that organised crime appeared a less attractive option.
Sheinbaum, like López Obrador, said security problems could not be addressed only with force, and Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, present for today's announcement, was from her Morena party. He noted that his own father, a lawyer and rancher, was killed in Uruapan nearly 40 years ago.
Michoacan has long posed a security challenge for Mexican presidents. Multiple organised crime groups fought for territorial control to move drugs along highways and chemical precursors for making fentanyl and methamphetamines through the critical Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas. But they also extracted a severe price from local communities by extorting avocado and lime growers and in some places nearly anyone else with a business.
Today, Sheinbaum said she would keep the state’s progress on the national agenda by committing to addressing it every two weeks in her daily morning press briefings.
“To all Michoacan [residents] we say: you are not alone, your president and the entire Mexican government support you,” she said.
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