Breathe
By Adela Navarro Bello
No cartel can form, develop and grow without the help of the State. Criminals require impunity to subsist and empower themselves, and they can buy money, obtain it through threats or enjoy it through the complicity of the authorities, when the State decides not to investigate the crimes they commit, not to prosecute the perpetrators, not to judge the murderers and even to protect the thugs.
The clearest example of this terrible vicious circle of authority sustaining drug cartels is being observed by Mexicans with the case of the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, discovered by mothers searching for the disappeared only on March 5, but which had already been located and allegedly secured by the local authority in September 2024.
In spite of the videos that the collectives of searchers of the disappeared took when they discovered the horror in the so-called ranch of extermination, of the hundreds of objects that belonged to people with unknown whereabouts, among pairs of shoes, backpacks, clothes, personal items, of the images of the women excavating bones, of the photographs of the training, confinement and death areas, both the Attorney General's Office and the Presidency of the Republic and its Secretariat of Citizen Security, are practically denying what they have found in the so-called ranch of extermination, human remains, of the photographs of the training, confinement and death areas, both the Attorney General's Office and the Presidency of the Republic and its Secretariat of Citizen Security, are practically denying what the evidence taken by the collectives showed.
Even President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo justified, in the Amloist style, a campaign of attack by her adversaries to minimize before the population the horrors discovered there by the civilians. In this environment, the calmest are the criminals who used the Izaguirre ranch to train, to hold against their will, to deprive people, young people, men and women of their freedom and life, according to the remains located on the surface and under the surface of the ranch of extermination.
They are so complicit, so inefficient and corruptible in the police forces that even the criminals themselves, generally from the opposing cartels, point the finger at them. In the last few days, in Baja California, in the State Capital, six narco-banners were hung in different and very public places; in the threatening messages, members of drug trafficking cells, particularly of the Sinaloa Cartel, point out, by name and surname, to police officers of serving mafia interests.
In Ensenada, Baja California, 15 police officers were investigated for taking part in a criminal feud between the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation and the Sinaloa Cartel. Eleven of them were arrested and are being prosecuted, and four more are fugitives.
Once Lieutenant Julián Leyzaola Pérez was appointed Director of Public Security in Mexicali, a municipality he arrived in after Morena failed to keep its promise to appoint him as Secretary of Citizen Security in Tijuana, when this city became part of the interests and the centralist control strategy of the federal secretary, Omar García Harfuch, the drug traffickers that with impunity commit crimes in the Capital of Baja California, sent him messages in narcomantas, not only threatening him, but challenging him that in that demarcation the lieutenant will not have the power, as he did when he confronted the Sinaloa Cartel and the Arellano Cartel in Tijuana in the second half of the decade of the 2000s.
In other words, the criminals have so much impunity that they control part of the state's police forces, accuse others of complicity with their adversaries, and threaten those who, from a high command, are not committed to any of them and want to fight insecurity, such as Lieutenant Leyzaola.
This power of the narco to judge, murder, threaten, maintain training and death centers, crematoriums and clandestine graves, under the protection of police corporations, whether municipal, state or federal, or due to the inability to provide justice, whether for lack of preparation, complicity or to justify the public policy of the Government of the Republic, is the beginning of the narco-state: the state at the service not of justice, nor of investigation, nor of truth in the face of overwhelming evidence, but of opacity, concealment of evidence, distraction from an atrocious reality.
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