2024-10-10 03:00:00
How to fight drug trafficking? Should we wage a frontal war against over-armed enemies? In Mexico, a country plagued by cartels, the question arises all the more acutely since it is this type of fight which has been put in place since 2006 by the former conservative president Felipe Calderon. Poorly elected amid accusations of fraud, the head of state wants to legitimize his power through a merciless war against organized crime.
Eighteen years later, and while the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (left, known as “AMLO”) – despite his promises of«hugs, not bullets» (“hugs, not shootings”) – accelerated the militarization of the country, the results of this choice are clear: 450,000 dead, 100,000 missing and a proliferation of ever more violent cartels, with increased strike force, who are no longer content with drug trafficking but have diversified their activities with human trafficking, cybercrime or oil theft.
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It was these eighteen years that the journalist Frédéric Saliba, who was correspondent for Monde in Mexico between 2009 and 2022, traces in his book Cartels. Journey to the land of narcotics (Rocher, 414 p., 19,90 €). “Eighteen years of security crisis later, these five heads will seem sadly banal to me”he writes at the beginning of his work about the beheading of five people, in September 2006, on a dance floor in Uruapan, which marks the start of the massacre.
From the “Chapomania” around the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to the militarization of the country by AMLO, including the Florence Cassez affair and what it says about Genaro’s methods Garcia Luna – the architect of the war on drugs who was ultimately in cahoots with the narcos – and the excesses of Felipe Calderon’s security policy, the author recounts a country which is sinking into extreme violence, corruption and narcopolitics.
“Mexicanization” of French narcobanditry
With, in the background, one certainty: the lack of will of Mexico and Washington to truly eradicate drug trafficking. And yet. In his last chapter, entitled “A foot in Europe”, Frédéric Saliba broadens the horizon and warns about the boom in synthetic drugs in France, the proliferation of clandestine laboratories on European soil and a possible “Mexicanization” of narcobanditism French.
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But he recalls this terrible survey published by the CSA in July: seven out of ten French people support an army intervention against drug trafficking in difficult neighborhoods. “The Myth of Sisyphus (…) comes to mind. Isn’t it time, asks the journalist, to analyze the errors made by Mexico and the United States to prevent France from also being the victim of such an unmanageable wave of violence? »
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