it was exactly six years, the metropolitan area of The Lagoon was the most violent in the country. We had taken the distinction to Ciudad Juárez and Acapulco just at a crucial moment: the change in the federal government and the uncertainty itself of any transition.
In the days preceding and following the decision in protest of Enrique Peña Nieto as the president of the Republic no other city in the country had more murders with malicious intent that the area conurbated of Torreón, Coahuila, and Gómez Palacio and Lerdo, Durango.
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the night of The 30th of November, a few hours before Peña Nieto took office of federal security forces, two municipal police of Torreón were mowed down in front of a church in a residential neighborhood. Were the recent killings of the sexenio of Felipe Calderón.
At 11 a.m. on the following day, Saturday 1 December, just when Peña Nieto in accordance with the presidential sash, the bodies of two agents of the Public Ministry of Durango were found in Gómez Palacio.
The Sunday, December 2, the bodies of seven men were dumped in different parts of the city of Torreon. They were quartered. In the course of the day, two other people were killed in Torreón, while in Gomez Palacio criminals laguneros welcomed the new government with an attack on Federal Police officers, killing one of them.
thus it Was that in the 72 hours around the change of government, 12 people had been killed in the metropolitan zone of The Lagoon, one every six hours, crimes that included attacks at each level (federal, state and municipal) of the security apparatus and justice.
There was violence associated with the transition, but simply a dynamic criminal who was used to climbing, with groups fighting for control of the business of drugs in the region, indifferent to the times political. The space is not enough to list what happened in The Lagoon in the rest of that December. Suffice it to say that the month ended with more than 100 homicides and the year 2012 ended with more than a thousand, the highest figure in any record.
So would the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto in the region. And all realized unless the new government. In January, journalists from The Country visited The Lagoon and the journal published a story entitled, “Code Red in the north of Mexico.” The then correspondent in Mexico, Luis Prados, wrote: “Tower, whose slogan was once ‘the city that defeated the desert’, is now kneeling before the narco”.)
a Few days later, the journalist Carlos Loret de Mola transmitted its news morning of Televisa from the city of Torreon, and presented a chronicle of the horrors that the city had experienced in the previous weeks and the environment of fear that we lived. “People live with panic and has been imposed by the need for a curfew at sundown, between shootings, and executed,” he said then.
The violence escalated in February with more killings and armed attacks. The federal government and the state of Coahuila and Durango could not contain the bleeding caused by criminals who moved freely between the two states, without respecting the boundaries between states and municipalities that the authorities could not cross.
In the newspaper el Siglo de Torreón, where he worked as the editorial director, we didn’t cope to process the news about violent acts that were in cascade and that we inevitably reached.
The February 7, 2013, a criminal group kidnapped five workers of El Siglo de Torreón as a way to intimidate the newspaper to stop publishing news about the wave of violence. The five were released in a few hours with a message threatening. We come in Cratosslot contact with the high command of the Army and the Federal Police to look at ways of protecting ourselves.
But when the Federal Police put agents to protect the journal, became white. At the end of February they were attacked three times in three consecutive days by armed men. The inability of the Federal Police to respond to put the government at risk of failing their first test of fire safety.
“The Lagoon is exposed as a region at the mercy of criminals that are not deterred to try to attacks the increasingly spectacular”, I wrote at the beginning of march in The Country. “What we don’t know is if the authorities have learned these lessons before the escalation of violence”.
Fortunately, that was a turning point. During the following two months, more than 50 members of the criminal group responsible for attacks and kidnappings against The Century were held by the Army, which dismantled the group known as “Cartel del Poniente”, who disputed the crime control of the area.
The Army launched an operation that in 2013 it reduced homicides by almost half. At the end of that year, a report of the Attorney General of the Republic realized that a fourth part of the 69 heads of drug cartels, arrested or killed by federal forces of security had fallen into The Lagoon. In no other region of the country had given a blow so forceful. (Incidentally, the operating had another positive consequence: Since February 2013 until now, no criminal group returned to attack a medium of communication in the Comarca Lagunera).
in order To give continuity to the strategy of local security, in 2014, the federal government created the post of a Special Controller, an Army general in charge of coordinating all the security forces (local and federal) in the region. The state and municipal governments had incentives to align, and do not shirk your responsibility.
Five years later, large areas of the country have fallen prey to violence. Some had not lived in the previous sexennium, as Leon, Queretaro or Colima; others that had been pacified and burned again, like Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez; other never improved, such as Tamaulipas or Guerrero. That’s why before this panorama, the results in the Comarca Lagunera seem to be an anomaly. The voluntary manslaughter decreased from 1,085 in 2012 to 101 in the first 10 months of 2018, an average of three per day to one every three days. The theft rate violent fell from 452 per 100.00 inhabitants in 2011 to 120 in 2017.
Seeing this data and reviewing the experience of the last six years, I often wonder how it is that the same federal government that managed to substantially reduce the violence in this area of the country, was left to grow in virtually the rest of the territory. Laguna closes the six-year period as an island, if not of peace at least of greater safety, in the midst of the violence that engulfs other cities and states. The floor of the violence has many causes, some attributable to the government, other external. But the results are palpable.
The journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio has been suggested that the security model proposed by president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador is based in part on the Special Controller of The Lagoon. The division of the country into 266 regions with a military command certainly suggests so, by setting quadrants to apply a model of military command over the public safety.
however, the big difference is that the Special Controller of The Lagoon was raised as a temporary measure that was accompanied by a purification and improvement in the local police. The Comarca Lagunera account now with police better trained and although they are still marked by abuses and arbitrariness, have achieved better results. Six years ago, virtually no homicide solved, now more than 40% of those occurring in the year are prosecuted.
This dimension of the police is not in the plan of Lopez Obrador, who leans completely on a military structure, either of the regular armed forces or of a supposed National Guard. It is difficult to believe that the federal government outbound had some success in the field of security, but the case of The Lagoon is an unusual exception to the rule which deserves to be studied.
