Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist president of Mexico, seems to have pulled a 180 on his recent “hugs not bullets” initiative in regard to dealing with violent crime issues in Mexico that have fueled and advanced the notorious drug cartels all over the country.
AMLO’s policy shift was made public this past week when a massive number of insane images came to light showing multiple thousands of Mexican soldiers carrying out a large-scale operation in an effort to bring into custody Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of notorious Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a man also known worldwide as “El Chapo.”
This operation was so massive in scale due to the fact that the previous time that the Mexican military captured Ovidio Guzmán back in 2019, they ended up being forced to release the man in the wake of hundreds of heavily armed cartel gunmen threatening to overrun the soldiers and murder various families.
The initial thought process from AMLO seemingly reflected the thought process in the U.S. who think that the war on drugs has been entirely ineffective and who do not seek to further escalate the total number of violent confrontations with criminal groups.
As a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Raúl Benítez expressed to The Wall Street Journal that this most recent action highlights an end to that particular mindset coming from the president of Mexico.
“López Obrador is leaving behind that stuff about hugs, not bullets,” he stated. “It shows that such an anticrime strategy didn’t work and is not viable.”
A group of ten soldiers was killed as part of the massive 3,500-man operation in addition to 19 members of the cartel with 35 soldiers ending up with gunshot injuries. Almost two dozen cartel members were taken into custody, along with a large number of .20-caliber weapons being confiscated with a few dozen rifles, and close to two dozen armored vehicles.
An official from the U.S. stated to the Journal that while “things have improved … there is still a fair amount of suspicion on both sides.”
This past summer, Infamous Mexican cartel kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, well-known for murdering a U.S. federal agent back in 1985, was arrested by an elite Mexican military unit after a period of close to a decade of being on the lamb.
“Caro Quintero helped a lot, this will help a lot,” explained the U.S. official.
Quintero was issued a sentence of over 40 years in prison because of the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camerena but was released after a stint of 28 years due to a judge from Mexico issuing a ruling that he should have been put on trial in federal court vs state court.
Once they attempted to retry the case, Quintero fled into hiding and went on the run for close to 10 years.
