30 The Americas The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
21parties also agree on investing in low-rent
housing. Both want a federal-government-
run drug plan, but Mr Singh’s ideas would
probably be more expensive. He laid out
other preconditions for supporting Liberal
policies on election night, which would tug
the government to the left if Mr Trudeau ac-
cepted them. Mr Singh wants a new “super
wealth tax”, for example.
The two parties’ agreement on the prin-
ciple of fighting climate change (shared by
the Greens and the Bloc Québécois) is
bound to raise tensions with the western
prairie provinces. Mr Trudeau’s previous
government sought to reduce them by
backing the Trans Mountain Expansion
(tmx), a project to expand an oil pipeline
from Alberta to a terminal near Vancouver.
In 2018 it bought the pipeline from a private
firm. Mr Trudeau had hoped this would
reconcile Alberta and Saskatchewan to his
signature environmental policy: a national
floor for the price of carbon emissions,
which took effect this year.
As the election showed, it did not work.
Alberta and Saskatchewan have long
chafed at the greater power of the more
populous central provinces of Ontario and
Quebec. Their anger has deepened since
2014, when global oil prices slumped, caus-
ing regional hardship. Jason Kenney, the
Conservative premier of Alberta, blames
the Liberals’ climate-change policies for
worsening the situation.
During the campaign, Mr Trudeau
stoked those resentments as a way of win-
ning votes from the ndpand the Greens. In
the final party leaders’ debate, he aban-
doned his usual talk of balancing green
goals with developing natural resources.
Instead, he attacked “oil interests” and pro-
vincial leaders opposed to his climate-
change policies. The election has given a
fillip to separatist sentiment in Alberta.
More surprisingly, it has also revived
the issue of Quebec separatism, a force that
threatened Canada’s integrity from the
1970s to the 1990s but has lately seemed
dormant. Yves-François Blanchet, the Bloc
Québécois’s leader, downplayed its sepa-
ratist aspirations during the election cam-
paign. The party’s surprising resurgence is
probably largely the result of identity poli-
tics, a more potent theme in Quebec than in
other provinces. Mr Blanchet endorses a
controversial law passed by Quebec’s right-
leaning government this year that prohib-
its many civil servants from wearing reli-
gious symbols, including turbans, hijabs
and kippas. The Bloc owes some of its elec-
toral success to the collapse in support in
Quebec for the ndp, whose leader, Mr
Singh, is Sikh and wears a turban.
Mr Blanchet says his party will back the
Trudeau government when its policies are
good for Quebec and seek to thwart those
that are not. It could endorse much of the
Liberals’ economic and environmentalprogramme. But a clash may occur over
Quebec’s religious-symbols ban. Mr Tru-
deau is under pressure from supporters to
challenge it in court.
All this means Mr Trudeau will find his
second term harder than his first. The son
of a former prime minister, he must hope
that his fortunes follow his father’s. In an
election in 1972 Pierre Trudeau saw his Lib-
eral majority government reduced to a mi-
nority. Two years later he won a new major-
ity. He ended up governing, with a brief
interruption, until 1984. His son no doubt
hopes for a similar comeback. 7T
he gunbattle on the streets of the Mex-
ican city of Culiacán was, once again, a
tale of organised crime against the disor-
ganised state. It started as an attempt by
soldiers and other armed law enforcers to
arrest a much-wanted suspect: Ovidio Guz-
mán López. His father, Joaquín (aka “El
Chapo”), once ran the Sinaloa drug gang
and is serving a life sentence in an Ameri-
can prison. Chapo junior is thought to lead
a faction of the gang, along with his broth-
er. But soon after security forces nabbed
him on October 17th, reinforcements from
the family business arrived. As lorries
burned and bullets cracked across the city,
bystanders picked up their children and
fled. At least 14 people died. Outnumbered,
the soldiers let Chapo junior go free.
This was a novel kind of failure. Shoot-outs have been commonplace since 2006,
when the then-president, Felipe Calderón,
mobilised the army to fight drug gangs. The
state has also suffered its share of humilia-
tions, not least the escape from a Mexican
prison of El Chapo in 2015. But never has
the government buckled so publicly to the
power of gangsters.
The deployment of just 30 soldiers with
no secure perimeter and no air support
suggests that the operation in Culiacán, Si-
naloa’s capital, was poorly planned. To
make matters worse, some 50 inmates
broke out of a nearby prison during the
mayhem. The government eventually
claimed that its surrender had, in fact,
averted a massacre.
The episode in Sinaloa revealed much
about the confused policies of Andrés Ma-
nuel López Obrador, Mexico’s populist
president, for dealing with the scourge of
violence. He laments decades of economic
stasis which, he argues, have pushed the
poor into crime. And he is sceptical of us-
ing force to fight criminals. On October
20th Mr López Obrador, who is commonly
known as amlo, said past presidents had
“turned the country into a cemetery” by
“wanting to put out fire with fire”. His
crime-fighting plan relies on a mix of wel-
fare for the young, a clampdown on corrup-
tion and a new 60,000-strong national
guard. He also talks of legalising cannabis
and other drugs. “Think of your mothers,”
he urges youngsters considering a life of
crime. It is not enough.
The president predicted in April that,
with this formula, homicides would drop
within six months. But the number of mur-
ders per month has risen since them. This
year’s toll is likely to exceed last year’s
33,000. That was the highest ever.
It is possible that neither the president
nor Alfonso Durazo, his security secretary,
authorised the botched raid in Culiacán.
Whoever did may have been in search of a
trophy. It would have been the first big one
for the president’s national guard, created
this year. The United States, which has re-
quested Chapo junior’s extradition on
drug-trafficking charges and is keen to
learn the whereabouts of Chapo senior’s
$13bn of loot, may have leaned on Mexico to
make the arrest. However it started, the de-
bacle made clear that the government is
unwilling to spend much money on catch-
ing high-level drug traffickers, says David
Shirk of the University of San Diego.
Unchecked, gangs will commit crimes
like extortion, induce corruption and ter-
rorise citizens. But their existence alone
need not send killings rocketing. The mur-
der rate tends to rise when a gang’s power is
threatened by the state, by a rival or by pres-
sure from civil-society groups. Gang mem-
bers defend their rackets with force. Al-
most any attempt by the state to constrain
gangs risks triggering a rise in violence.MEXICO CITY
The president’s strategy to reduce
violence is not workingCrime in MexicoThe AMLO doctrine