The chronic violence phenomenon within the State of Mexico has worsened. Although common criminality has reigned over the region for a long period, conditions are increasingly worrisome. Thereby, it is not a coincidence that a more intense cooperation strategy between local and federal authorities, headed by the Secretariat of the Interior, was announced by the start of the week.
It is important taking into account that this is not a radical intervention model like the one implemented in Michoacán (setting a Commission for Security and Integral Development) a few weeks ago. Even though there were some changes in the State of Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Safety which were apparently ordered by the most important branch within the Federal Executive Power and that there will be an increasingly higher number of support staff in the area, the presence of Governor Eruviel Ávila will still be felt, as opposed to what happened with the state’s neighboring leader, Fausto Vallejo. What remains true is that strategic importance of the State of Mexico, homeland (and stronghold) of President Peña, transforms the decrease of criminality rates into a major priority for the federal government. Nevertheless, the question remains: are authorities looking after a simple reduction of criminal offences or have they decided to undertake a greater effort into rebuilding security institutions within Mexico’s most populated state?
The State of Mexico’s social components are quite complex. According to data provided by the National Council for Evaluation of Social Development (CONEVAL), 43 percent of the area’s population lives under conditions of moderate or extreme poverty, and a large proportion of the aforementioned are urban poor, whose development expectations are higher than those living under rural poverty conditions. In addition, the State of Mexico has the second largest density population in the country – itself one of the variables that is mostly correlated with an increase in violence-, with 679 inhabitants per square kilometer, a number that is only outweighed by Mexico City, with around 5,920. The state’s record regarding corruption or governance is not something to be proud either (it’s ranked second to last, according to Mexican Transparency) and the lack of crime reports, inefficient urban planning, low social cohesion, high vulnerability of social capital as well as the substandard real estate market are way below expectations. All of the aforementioned, plus the fact that the entity is located within a strategic point of drug trafficking has submerged the State of Mexico in a level of such complexity that a simple strategy of police reinforcement will only act as a palliative rather than a definitive and sustained solution. These are the social risks of a strategy that is closer to politics than public policy.
Likewise, public security in the state represents a major governability problem that could be transmitted to other entities such as Mexico City. Nevertheless, implementing a strategy that is based only in police and military reinforcement will simply be a small remedy that will not modify a single aspect of the region’s criminal structure, even when in the short term it may decrease crime rates (not a minor issue regarding public image, especially when considering federal and local mid-term elections are just a year away). If the intention is truly to provide an integral solution for the insecurity crisis, it will be essential to come up with a strategy that will include a program of urban reorganization, a strengthening of social cohesion, tackling corruption within several institutions at local and municipal levels as well as a real plan for addressing the problems that have derived from a chaotic growth in Mexico City’s Metropolitan Area: in the end, this ends up being a problem that is not exclusive of one state but of the most important region of the country. The temptation of whitewashing official numbers in order to comply with political goals is still there. However, is this really what the State of Mexico’s population is expecting or is it be the most visible opportunity that the federal government has to present a security strategy?
CIDAC
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