Mexico Nabs Another Kingpin

There can no longer be any doubt: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has gone from criticizing his predecessor’s “kingpin strategy” to actively embracing it. And while he has touted a drop in homicides under his administration, high rates of kidnapping and extortion persist. Certainly, officials’ announcement of the arrest of Beltran Leyva Organization head Hector Beltran Leyva is an important achievement for law enforcement. But it is only the latest in a string of high-profile catches made under the Peña Nieto administration. Since he took office, Mexico has captured Zetas leader Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, arrested the Sinaloa Cartel’s “Chapo” Guzman, and killed La Familia’s Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, to name a few big fish. Yet the government’s continued emphasis on arresting top cartel figures as a security strategy is ironic, given that in December 2012 top officials in the Peña Nieto administration specifically blamed the approach for fragmenting criminal groups and turning them “more violent and much more dangerous.” Compare this to a Washington Post interview published last week, in which the president held up big-name arrests as one measure of success: “At the beginning [of my term], we had 122 targets we identified as leaders of criminal organizations; 84 have been detained. This is quite encouraging, but there is a lot to do still,” Peña Nieto said. Also in the interview, the president pointed to a drop in homicides under his administration, an achievement he has boasted about in the past. State statistics agency INEGI has found that the total number of homicides in 2013 stands at 22,732, compared to 26,037 in 2012. Peña Nieto has also claimed that the murder rate for the first half of 2014 is 27 percent below the same period in 2012. Even with these numbers, however, Mexico’s security situation remains in dire straits. As Reuters and the Wall Street Journal report, a new INEGI survey of crime trends in 2013 found that kidnappings had risen to 123,470 reported cases, roughly 30 percent up from 94,438 the year before. And the overall crime rate, excluding homicides, has risen 19 percent to 33.1 million crimes. According to INEGI, less than 10 percent of these crimes were reported to police, due to widespread lack of faith in law enforcement. However much Peña Nieto wants to cast his administration’s security strategy as a radical break from the past, it can’t be done honestly. With citizen security indicators faltering and the president deemphasizing them to focus on kingpin arrests, the administration’s security approach increasingly resembles that of ex-President Felipe Calderon.