I’ve just been on holiday in Mexico, and it is with some astonishment that I realised that, far from being caught up in cartel violence as so many people visiting Mexico fear, I actually escaped cartel violence in South Africa by being in Mexico. What an astonishing turn of events.
In less than a week while I was away, 38 people were murdered in three mass shootings across South Africa — 17 in Wedela, 10 in Lwandle, and another 11 near Durban. It’s not like there has been no cartel violence in Mexico over the past week: there were three incidents and four people were killed in what may or may not have been cartel violence.
But this is the country where cartel violence is notionally rampant. It has the highest and most intense ongoing battle between the state and armed gangs in the world. This is partly, one presumes, because it lies at the intersection between a continent of drug producers and the world’s largest and richest drug market.
Yet Mexico has one-third the murder rate per 100,000 citizens than South Africa. Isn’t that just an astounding fact?
We know very little about the motives of the three local shootings, which in itself is kinda shocking. The theories include an illegal mining conflict and business rivalry. What we do know is that at Wedela and KwaMakhutha, the gunmen used AK-47s and pistols, and all three attacks involved multiple gunmen operating together. This means the attacks constitute organised crime, not interpersonal violence.
In Wedela and Lwandle, the shootings were apparently at random; the gunmen just shot at everyone. Eight of the dead were women. In KwaMakhutha the killings were probably about a drug territory dispute and the targets seemed to be more specific, though a pregnant woman was not spared.
It also seems there were warning signs before at least two of the massacres. Wedela had experienced earlier shootings, while KwaMakhutha residents had complained about frequent gunfire and criminal activity. In the latter case, the police’s crime intelligence division already knew about suspected illegal activities involving some of the victims.
So the extent of organised crime is at last getting some official recognition, because I suspect at this point it’s just impossible to ignore it, which has been the political modus operandi up until now.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared organised crime “the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society and our economic development”. But that was February — it’s now October. What has happened between then and now? As far as I can see, not much. The only thing that has actually happened is yet another commission of inquiry.
What could have happened between then and now? Oddly enough, Mexico provides one possible example.
Turning things around
In the 2010s, one Mexican state, Nuevo León, decided to take things in hand. The situation was pretty extreme. The state, in the north of the country, had become one of the major battlegrounds of Mexico’s drug war and its capital, Monterrey, was effectively a city under siege.
Monterrey is one of Mexico’s principal industrial cities, associated with companies such as Cemex and Femsa. Monterrey’s sophisticated financial and commercial economy was useful for money laundering, and the city is at the centre of major commercial highways connecting Mexico’s industrial heartland with the US.
So what the state did was first send in the army, and then it renewed its police force, totally sidelining the national police. It was a systemic institutional reconstruction involving government, business and universities. Rather than relying exclusively on investigations and dismissals of corrupt officers, Nuevo León created a new organisation with different recruitment standards, training, remuneration and management arrangements.
Under commander Felipe de Jesús Gallo Gutiérrez, the new force, called Fuerza Civil, also developed a new strategy: targeting stolen vehicles. Cartel members routinely used stolen cars for kidnappings, assassinations and other offences. Pursuing these vehicles became a means of identifying armed criminal operatives before they committed further crimes.
A detailed 2018 Princeton University case study has documented the reform and its initial results. Between 2011 and 2015, Nuevo León’s homicide rate fell from 45 to nine per 100,000 residents. Princeton cautions that the police reforms were only part of the explanation: changes in the drug cartels and the wider national security situation also contributed.
But compare that to South Africa’s national murder rate of 34 per 100,000 residents. Statistically, wouldn’t you rather be living in druglord-central in Mexico than in a rural South African town?
Nuevo León demonstrates that a government facing extensively compromised policing institutions can create a new organisation, professionalise recruitment and reclaim public spaces. It also illustrates the importance of co-operation between police, military forces, prosecutors, business and civil society.
But the larger point is that this is what grabbing a situation by the short and curlies means. It does not consist of declaring something a major problem; it consists of doing something decisive and dramatic to fix it.
