Murder in America on the Rise Again
ON A Monday afternoon cars queue upward to enter the wholesale market outside San Salvador Huixcolotla, a boondocks in the state of Puebla, in due south-key Mexico. Ii shabbily dressed young men warily eye the number plates and drivers. When your correspondent identified himself as a announcer, they lifted their T-shirts over their faces and brusquely ordered him to go out. They do not want inquisitive outsiders. That is because, alongside produce from nearby farms, the market sells stolen petrol. I of the sentries sported a length of petrol-siphoning hose as a hatband.
Fuel theft is increasing in Mexico, and Puebla is its focal point. Thieves drill into the pipeline that passes through the state—where it is more accessible than in neighbouring states—install a tap and drain the liquid. They sell information technology off the backs of trucks on roadsides and in markets like the one near San Salvador Huixcolotla. The price is around 7 pesos (37 cents) a litre, less than one-half what it costs in petrol stations.
This enterprise is the most important new form of organised crime in Mexico, says Eduardo Guerrero, a security consultant. Though it does non friction match drug-trafficking for violence and cashflow, information technology is growing fast and unsettling investors in free energy, one of the country's almost of import industries. In 2006 the pipeline network operated by Pemex, the national oil company, had 213 illegal taps. Final twelvemonth that number jumped to more than than half-dozen,800. The thefts cost the company 30bn pesos in lost sales and repair bills last year.
The rise is caused in part by the authorities'southward decision tardily concluding year to raise the price of petrol, which had been subsidised. It has transformed Puebla, where a quarter of the thefts took place, and Guanajuato from relatively peaceful states into moderately trigger-happy ones (run across map). In the first three months of 2017 Puebla had 185 murders, 50% more than than during the same period in 2011, the last superlative of killings. On May 3rd this year at least ten people, including four soldiers, died in the town of Palmarito, 20km (12 miles) from San Salvador Huixcolotla, in a clash between the ground forces and illegal tappers. Since then, more soldiers take arrived. "Today we accept a problem that is out of control," says Carlos Ignacio Mier Bañuelos, a land congressman whose commune has many petrol thefts.
Fuel thievery is emblematic of a new pattern of crime. Mexico's near violent twelvemonth of recent times was 2011, at the height of a war on drugs waged by the and then-president, Felipe Calderón. As drug gangs battled security forces—and each other for command of trafficking routes into the Us—the northern states were Mexico's killing fields. That year Mexico had 22,852 murders. The number subsided under Mr Calderón'due south successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who de-escalated the drug state of war.
But the killing is at present back to its worst levels. If the year continues as it has begun, the number of murders in 2017 will be the highest nevertheless. There were 6% more homicides in the first three months of 2017 than during the same period in 2011. But the distribution of violence is changing. Equally northern gang wars wind down, smaller-scale battles are erupting in the southward.
One reason for this is the change in the way gangs operate, brought virtually by the drugs war. Law targeted their bosses, often successfully. Leaderless gangs do non disappear. Instead, lower-level gangsters fight for control or leave to grade their own groups, leading to a violent reordering of the organised-crime hierarchy. The re-arrest last year of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the boss of the Sinaloa gang, vi months after his escape from prison, triggered conflicts inside the grouping. The gang also clashed with rivals seeking to exploit its weakness, notably the Jalisco New Generation gang, with which it fought in the port of Manzanillo and elsewhere.
The smaller gangs lack the manpower and management skills to run full-scale drug operations. They concentrate on distributing drugs locally and on such crimes every bit kidnapping and extortion. Both have increased past effectually 20% Mexico-wide between the start 3 months of 2016 and the aforementioned period this year. Fuel theft too suits downsized gangs. Mr Mier says that in his area of Puebla the business is run by three gangs in two towns just 20km autonomously.
Other reasons for the spike in murders include a ascent in opium production to feed growing American need and the election last year of 12 new state governors, who brought in new and less experienced police chiefs. A new criminal-justice organization is supposed to brand trials fairer, but in its early stages information technology has freed many suspects who should have been jailed, says Alejandro Hope, a security analyst. The violence feeds on itself: killings lead to vendettas.
The show of war machine force in Palmarito, ordered by the federal government, suggests that neither the country nor the federal law-enforcement authorities know how to deal with the new sort of violence. "The army doesn't act with intelligence or strategy," says Mr Mier, "simply violence." It will before long exit, he predicts, letting the pipe-tappers return to work.
The odds are that the upsurge of violence volition not soon be contained. The federal government has found no strategy to supercede Mr Calderón's discredited war on drugs, apart from sporadic military deployments. Many land and local police forces lack the professionalism to adjourn violent crime. Municipal police, some of whom collaborate with criminals, are not trusted. Police force-enforcement officials at all levels need more data and a improve understanding of why violence happens where it does, says Ernesto López Portillo of the Establish for Security and Democracy, a think-tank.
With eighteen months left in office, Mr Peña is unlikely to brainstorm whatever bold crime-fighting programmes. But petrol thievery is not the hardest problem to solve. "Pemex knows where information technology is happening," notes Mr Guerrero. That gives the police a place to first.
This article appeared in the The Americas department of the print edition under the headline "Crime's new geography"
Source: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2017/05/11/why-murder-in-mexico-is-rising-again
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