![]() ![]() He said one of the children said their mother had been gunned down after she got out of the car screaming at the attackers to stop shooting. Photograph: Kenneth Miller/Lafe Langford JR/Reuters The burnt wreckage of a vehicle in northern Mexico that had been carrying members of the LeBarón family when they were attacked on Monday. Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office. But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants. “It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine.Īmlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels. The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain. When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups.īut Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie. That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. ![]() Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed. Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán.Ĭalderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. They set out together, but one of them later fell behind because of a flat tire. Initial accounts from local authorities and relatives of the victims differed on several key points, but it appears that the three women were travelling in three SUVs with their children when they were attacked on a remote and unpaved mountain road at around 1pm on Monday.Īccording to relatives, the three vehicles were travelling from the community of La Mora, Sonora toward Pancho Villa, in Chihuahua. ![]() Monday’s merciless slaughter of children and their mothers is the latest in a recent string of violent episodes which have piled pressure on López Obrador to modify his softly-softly approach to organized crime. The massacre prompted three tweets from Trump urging Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth” – and offering US help to do this. Victims and survivors of the attack near the border between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua all belong to a well-known Mormon family that is based in Mexico but has dual US/Mexican citizenship and deep roots on both sides of the frontier. ![]()
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