Nearly 200,000 homicides occurred in Mexico during the six years that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was in office, worse than any other six-year presidential term in over a century. It’s the failure that will haunt his legacy. Yet, in his final weeks as president, Lopez Obrador seems determined to lock in some of his failing policies to prevent his successor, President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, or any future Mexican leader from changing them.
AMLO, as he is widely known, was elected in 2018 in large part due to the corruption and security failures of his predecessor, former President Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI. Under Pena Nieto, homicides spiked from around 23,000 in 2013 to 36,000 in 2018. His strategy of taking out key leaders of cartels caused the criminal groups to divide into smaller and more violent organizations. High-profile crimes, such as the abduction and presumed killing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero in 2014, went unsolved, and the government coverup of that incident added to the frustrations of citizens. It would later emerge that several of Pena Nieto’s top-level officials, including former Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna and former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, were on the payrolls of cartels.
Exacerbating all these failures, Pena Nieto barely addressed the media or the population about security issues unless events absolutely demanded it, leading Mexican citizens to feel the government was not being honest and direct with them about the challenges. Understandably, after that mess, they wanted both a president who would directly address the security situation and a different strategy that would produce results.