Mexico has a problem with violence. Organized crime, closely related to drug trafficking, has permeated all social strata, reaching a point where wars between cartels have become authentic civil wars and where large companies claim that these organizations control a large part of their operations. legitimate businesses.
It not only affects companies, but part of the population. Beyond direct violence against populations or the collateral damage of these gang wars, there have been cases of people modifying their daily habits (carrying replicas of cell phones to deliver during robberies) and even directly financing organized crime due to gangs. who hack Internet antennas.
However – and fortunately – this is not the case in all territories, and there is one that was dominated by organized crime a decade agobut which is now one of the safest urban areas in Mexico. That is the story of Tampico, a city in which its inhabitants got fed up with organized crime and acted on their own.
Voluntary curfew
Tampico is a port city located in the Huasteca region. This area is of great cultural importance because the Mayans had direct access to the Atlantic here, being a very relevant cultural focus. Tampico has about 300,000 inhabitants and, in 2010, residents decided to implement something that seemed crazy: a voluntary curfew.
In a report by Milenio, they remember that time. As is currently happening in other municipalities, in February 2010 there was a break between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. This resulted in an armed conflict between the gangs that caught civilians in the middle. Local criminal groups took advantage of the commotion to act and the following days in Tampico, Madero and Altamira were marked by violence.
Without official reports from the authorities, with people who could not attend work and with police officers murdered —whose corpses were displayed in public—, the atmosphere in the municipalities was one of absolute terror. In a report published by BBC Mundo, it is recalled how there were more than 30 kidnappings a month and 100 homicides a year, turning Tampico into one of the most dangerous cities in the country.
In that article, a local businessman tells how criminal groups kidnapped different citizens one by one. They held them for one or two days, demanded ransoms or took them to complicit police stations where they had to leave their property. Between the violence and corruption of the institutions, Tampico was hell. It was then that citizens imposed a self-imposed curfew and when change began to take shape.
The Tampico case
That change came hand in hand with the creation of the Citizens’ Security and Justice Table of the Southern Zone of Tamaulipas, a meeting attended by army generals, senior police officials, university rectors and businessmen. Once a month, for a decade, they have met to discuss the best way to keep the region safe, but it all started with a first session in which they discussed the key issue: attacking the root of organized crime in the area.
Luis Apperti is a businessman and one of the founders of the Table who has suffered violence from organized gangs in his own family. On BBC Mundo he commented that, seeing that the authorities could not do anythingthe Table was created to confront crime. However, they realized that they could not solve everything and focused on one of its causes.
In his words, more than poverty and lack of opportunities for young people, the root of this organized crime was corruption. “The level of cooptation of the authorities by organized crime was such that you could not report it, since on the way to report the bad guys were already informed and intercepted you along the way,” says Apperti.
Thus, the Board launched campaigns to raise large sums of money to reinforce police infrastructure and the creation of a complaints center completely independent of local authorities. And the results are evident.
“In three years we had already tripled the number of police officers. In five, we achieved the first goal of zero kidnappings, and six years ago we managed to be one of the safest cities in the country.” With the results, the police and judicial authorities away from corruption and the effectiveness of legal channels, the community began to cooperate with the Roundtable. As? Daring to report, something unthinkable a few years ago.
A police academy is “what allows you to trust your police and thus fight crime together,” according to Willy Zúñiga.
Thus, the city has come to have enviable numbers for other Mexican towns, with zero homicides and kidnappings in recent months, and only two extortions. That corruption is the main problem in Mexicoahead of the aforementioned poverty, is something that Willy Zúñiga, rector of the University of Security and Justice of Tamaulipas, where police forces are trained, agrees.
Thus, today Tampico is an example for Mexico. Apperti affirms that they are not the State and cannot put an end to drug trafficking, but comments that “what we can do is create a reliable institutional framework that involves the community and facilitates complaints so that the authorities can do their job.” .
This citizen organization is not something foreign to some Mexican areas. An example is the local militias that try to prevent the massification of avocado cultivation (where organized crime also has influence due to the immense importance of this product for the country). And recently, Mexico’s current president detailed her plan to end violence at the state level.
Claudia Sheinbaum presented a roadmap in which the understanding of the causes, the cooperation of the National Guard, the use of intelligence systems and Coordination between departments will be key to ending this violence. However, it points to poverty as one of the main reasons why young people join these groups and, among those critical of these measures, there are those who point out that the main problem is political and police corruption.
And that, as we have seen, is what Tampico has demonstrated over the last decade.
Images | Mexican Film Commission from Mexico City, Jonas Zacarias
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