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MEXICO CITY – While successfully
campaigning across the country last
year, Mexican President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador coined catchy slogans
for solving the country’s security situa-
tions. “Hugs, not bullets,” he repeated
often. “You can’t fight fire with fire!” he
would say. “Scholarship students, not
sicarios!”
The slogans spoke to López Obra-
dor’s call for moral renewal and combat-
ing what he considers the root cause of
crime and violence: corruption and pov-
erty. Eleven months into his administra-
tion, however, Mexico’s homicide rate
has continued racing to record levels.
The ambush of three carloads of women
and children in northern Sonora state
marked the most recent spasm of vio-
lence.
In the wake of the Sonora slayings –
which claimed the lives of three women
and six children– López Obrador has
doubled down on his discourse of
changing security strategies, while pin-
ning Mexico’s problems with violence
on his unpopular predecessors.
“These are issues that come from a
long way back,” he said at a news con-
ference Wednesday, “which were wors-
ened by a strategy of wanting to resolve
things only with the use of force.”
An austere figure with a slow-speak-
ing style who works 16-hour days and
tours the country tirelessly – taking
commercial flights – the man commonly
called “AMLO” has proved popular. His
approval rating hovers around 65%. He
speaks of inheriting “a country in
flames” and often reminds Mexicans of
his unpopular predecessors, casually
comparing them to organized crime –
“the Mafia in power,” he previously
called them – and speaking of his politi-
cal opponents as doing more damage to
Mexico than drug cartels.
His message found a receptive audi-
ence in Mexico, where inequality is rife
and fatigue with corruption and the
elite’s excesses fueled López Obrador’s
electoral success. In interviews in the
western state of Jalisco, organized
crime expert Edgardo Buscaglia says he
has found people in crime-ridden areas
who essentially confess, “We know the
Jalisco cartel does damage, but it
doesn’t do worse damage than corrupt
politicians and businessmen who are
with the government.”
Vast stretches of the country seem-
ingly exist on the periphery of Mexican
society and see a scant state presence –
including the fundamentalist commu-
nities in the foothills of the Sierra Madre
mountains near the U.S. border with Ar-
izona and New Mexico that were found-
ed by offshoots of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Residents of the fundamentalist
community of Colonia LeBarón donated
a building and land for a Federal Police
base – and help pay the officers’ salaries

• after an anti-crime activist, Benjamín
  LeBarón, was murdered in 2009, said
  Brent LeBarón, a relative of the victim.
  They also learned to live alongside
  warring drug cartels: identifying them-
  selves to gunmen at checkpoints, stay-
  ing off lonely roads at night and steering
  clear of shootouts.
  “Obviously, they’re fighting over turf
  and access to roads and getting their
  drugs to the border,” LeBarón told USA
  TODAY.
  But LeBarón cited another factor
  driving the violence: a strategy of killing
  or capturing cartel kingpins.
  “When a head man gets caught or
  killed or someone else replaces him,” he
  said, “that’s when they see a weak point
  and try to take over turf.”
  Such internal squabbling erupted in
  western Sinaloa state after the 2016 ar-
  rest of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El
  Chapo” Guzmán, who now sits in a U.S.
  prison cell.
  But Mexico’s weakness and the ap-
  parent lack of a security strategy was
  shown last month.
  Soldiers nabbed El Chapo’s son, Ovi-
  dio Guzmán Lopez, but were forced to
  release him after sicarios blocked roads
  in the city of Culiacán with burning ve-
  hicles and unleashed chaos. Critics ac-
  cused López Obrador of allowing crimi-
  nals to cow the state, but he insisted he
  avoided a bloodbath.

“There’s no longer a war against nar-

cotics traffickers,” he told reporters Oct.

30. “We’re not going to expose the lives
    of civilians, using the euphemism of
    collateral damage. That’s over.”
    Mexico’s runaway violence has in-
    creasingly captured U.S. scrutiny. And
    López Obrador’s discourse of “hugs, not
    bullets” has come under criticism, too,
    as U.S. politicians muse openly about
    military intervention.
    “Hugs, not bullets. That may work in
    a children’s fairy tale,” Sen. Tom Cotton,
    R-Ark., told Fox News this week. “But in
    the real world ... the only thing that can
    counteract bullets is more and bigger
    bullets. If the Mexican government can-
    not protect American citizens in Mexi-
    co, then the United States may have to
    take matters into our own hands.”
    President Donald Trump – who has
    lauded López Obrador as “the great new
    President of Mexico” – also weighed in,
    tweeting, “This is the time for Mexico,
    with the help of the United States, to
    wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe
    them off the face of the earth.”
    Further U.S. intervention is a non-
    starter for many in Mexico. López Obra-
    dor also dismissed the notion on Thurs-
    day, saying Mexico would act on its own.
    Analysts say the U.S. government
    has been working in Mexico for the bet-
    ter part of a decade, but the crime and
    killings continue as security strategies
    fall short and Mexico fails to strengthen
    its institutions or enforce the rule of law.
    “Those notions of stepping up mili-
    tary presence in Mexico or betting on
    military solutions stems from a com-
    plete misreading of recent history in the
    sense of it has increased violence, it has
    made things worse rather than better,”
    said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst
    for the International Crisis Group.
    The United States has been involved
    “both in designing and carrying out
    Mexican security strategy over the past
    administrations,” along with “capture
    and kill operations, extraditions – in-
    cluding ‘El Chapo’ ” – and collaborations
    between the Drug Enforcement Admini-
    stration and Mexican Navy, Ernst said.
    But they’ve “failed to build institu-
    tions in the aftermath of weakening
    criminal organizations and haven’t ad-
    dressed the most fundamental ques-
    tion, which is corruption and collusion.”
    For all of this talk of changing course
    on security and moral renewal – López
    Obrador often invokes Christianity and
    cites Scripture, practices previously
    scorned in Mexican politics – the presi-
    dent has often turned to the military.
    He created a new militarized police
    known as the National Guard, which
    was mostly staffed by soldiers and sup-
    plants the Federal Police. The guard’s
    first deployment, however, has been to
    stop Central American migrants trying
    to transit the country. Barely 4,
    guard members are assigned to Sonora
    and Chihuahua – where the fundamen-
    talists came under attack Monday –
    compared to more than 6,800 members

stationed in southern Oaxaca and Chi-

apas states, which are transited by mi-

grants.

The current approach doesn’t ade-

quately dismantle criminal structures

or address issues such as the cartels

infiltrating politics, analysts say.

“The militarization of Mexico has

been a causal factor (of the violence)

and has only tossed gasoline on the

fire,” said Buscaglia, senior research

scholar in Law and Economics at Co-

lumbia Law School and an adviser to

governments on combating organized

crime.

“Mexico has never had an anti-Ma-

fia strategy. Mexico always continued

speaking of a public security strategy,

which it also doesn’t have.”

Mexican security strategy

scrutinized after massacre

President blames rise in

violence on predecessors

David Agren
Special to USA TODAY

Members of the LeBaron family mourn Tuesday while they look at the burned

car where some of their family members were killed during an ambush by

gunmen in Bavispe, Sonora mountains, Mexico.STR AND AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

“These are issues that come

from a long way back.”

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Mexican president

PHOENIX – Ten more bodies were

discovered buried in Rocky Point, the

Attorney General’s Office in the Mex-

ican state of Sonora announced Satur-

day. The discovery brings the total

number of human remains recently

uncovered in the area to 58.

Forty-two bodies were initially dis-

covered in a mass grave near the beach

resort town approximately 200 miles

from Phoenix. Last weekend, the

group Searching Mothers of Sonora

said it discovered six additional bodies

and that armed men forced them to

abandon their search.

On Saturday, experts from the at-

torney general’s Scientific Forensic In-

telligence Lab, accompanied by staff

from the Mexican Association for Clin-

ical Research, completed the excava-

tions in five graves. The 10 newly dis-

covered sets of human remains appear

to be complete bodies.

Nine of the 18 autopsies that have

been conducted so far have been proc-

essed by an anthropologist working

with the National Commission for the

Search of Missing Persons. One body

has been returned to family members,

according to the state.

Lupita Orduño, spokeswoman for

the Sonora Attorney General’s Office,

has previously said it was too early to

come up with theories on why the bod-

ies were buried in a mass grave be-

cause they first had to determine how

they died or were killed.

The Sonora state attorney general is

able to continue its work thanks to the

support of high-profile medical and

criminal experts, as well as groups like

the Searching Mothers of Sonora,

“women who have turned their pain

into strength to recover their ‘trea-

sures,’ ” the office wrote in a statement.

10 bodies found

at mass grave

near border of

US and Mexico

Molly Duerig

Arizona Republic

USA TODAY NETWORK