Breathe
By Yuriria Rodriguez* By Yuriria Rodriguez* By Yuriria Rodriguez* By Yuriria Rodriguez
For decades, the Mexico City Metro has accumulated a history of attempted attacks by military-grade explosives and homemade bombs, many of which were thwarted by the police and others covered up by the authorities. In some explosive device attacks on Metro facilities, the authorities themselves recognized that a drug trafficking group was involved, so the nature of the attack and its authorship only confirms the link of criminal behavior between drug trafficking and terrorism.
After the deadly mishaps of the last two years in the subway, in a matter of months, government authorities seemed to justify the abandonment and corruption in the Mexico City Metro by warning of possible acts of sabotage that made the public distrustful about the latent risk of terror in the capital's subway. However, in mid-January, someone was arrested in the Tacubaya Metro with placebo material, frequently used by terrorists to measure the security and reaction capacity of the authorities: the simulated devices that were seized corresponded to the assembly of an explosive for remote detonation.
This information was not made public.
As a precedent, there was an attack in 2008 on the perimeter of the Insurgentes station, one of the busiest and most visited by tourists:
"A military explosive made with a compound called C4, chlorate, bullets of half a centimeter in diameter and mercury drops, exploded yesterday about 60 meters from the main building of the Secretariat of Public Security of the Federal District (SSP-DF)[1]". On that occasion, the result was one dead, two wounded and material damage to buildings and automobiles.
At the time of this attack, Marcelo Ebrard was the governor of Mexico City, and since then there has been a tendency to minimize terrorism on the part of the capital's authorities.
A year later, in 2009, there was an attack by an armed man in the Balderas Metro station, where an element of the Banking Police and a laminero who struggled with the attacker to avoid more deaths were killed, as I was told at the time by the family of the so-called "hero of the Metro", Esteban Cervantes. As a security measure, weapons detectors had been placed in some stations, something that soon ceased to work, as the checks and detectors were dismantled or became inoperative.
Currently, one more euphemism emerges in the political discourse of Claudia Sheimbaum' s government: sabotage, a term that defines a particular terrorism, which does not refer to the attack of an external enemy, but that coming from an internal enemy.
In big cities, the subway is and will be a latent target of any form of terrorism, besides being the laboratory of organized chaos for political convenience. However, the great risk of pretending to "organize chaos" or to control it when it comes to an attack on the Metro is the very high risk of even greater violent consequences than those originally intended by the attackers. Therefore, it is urgent to think and prevent the worst case scenario in order not to be overwhelmed by the consequences of these acts in the future.
Terrorism will allow us to better understand the authorship of the crime: on the one hand, there is the terrorist who only executes the action by order of those who plan and organize it; in this case, the executor of the act is unaware of its scope and possible consequences, since he is only an envoy. The other type of terrorist is both the executor and author of the attack. In this case, it is possible that he may have greater knowledge of the scope and consequences, but even so, the spatial context and the inevitable contact with elements sensitive to the detonation may generate effects not planned by the perpetrator-author.
The CDMX Metro: years of neglect and risk of attack
Here again we note that the only difference in using the term "sabotage", instead of "terrorism", consists only in the specification of the type of terrorist attack, since we are dealing with a particular type of terrorism, that of sabotage. This serves to clarify that sabotage is inseparable from terrorism.
Therefore, when the government of the Mexican capital warns of acts of sabotage, it is referring to "internal terrorism", almost self-destructive.
Mexicans do not accept terror because it lives deep inside us and what culture has made unconscious we cannot externalize. This is what is happening in the Mexico City Subway, which has been facing real terrorist attacks for decades and has been dodging the installation of bombs and explosives that have been deactivated by the work of the police and investigative forces, but now, with the police doing an intelligence work decimated by the government itself, the National Guard is called upon to guard and prevent these contingencies.
It must be made clear that terrorism is a political decision, but it is not necessarily the result of a political ideology; on the contrary, acts of terror are increasingly disconnected from an intentionally political discourse, since terrorism today is all intention and does not require borrowing any flag from traditional party politics to justify its intentionality. Having clarified this, there is no need to be confused with ghosts of the terrorist past that will not return in the same way; everything comes back, but it does not return as before.
What makes terrorism is the full intention to provoke terror and that is what the capital's government is generating in the users of the Metro Collective Transportation System, who according to their own testimonies thought they would die of asphyxiation in the Barranca del muerto station.
The government of the CDMX has given press conference after press conference to whip up passers-by, claiming without evidence that it is sabotage - by the way, they still do not dare to use the taboo term "terrorism", which is a socially and legally defined scientific concept.
What a disproportion of this government that assures that objects such as bottles and iron bars thrown on the railroad tracks are the demonstration of the by-product of terrorism, called "sabotage", but they do not consider that the attacks with drones, explosives, the fire engines and blockades, in addition to the broken bodies scattered on public roads in practically the whole country, should be considered terrorism. At least, they understand by intuition, not by knowledge, that sabotage is a by-product of terrorism which is inevitably political, but they should also know that not all terrorism is like that, and that it is rather the political decision to name it what gives it that category, in this case caused by political strategies and very careless security in this means of mass transportation.
Terrorism and lack of maintenance are not mutually exclusive.
For example, it is thought that one thesis or hypothesis excludes the other, but they are not always mutually exclusive, but complementary: the conditions of the capital's Metro have been risky for decades, but also the attacks have not ceased.
Terrorism and acts of sabotage as possible causes of incidents in subway transportation coexist with Mexican culture: would anyone doubt that a Metro worker would be capable of placing an explosive device hidden in a nondescript object without checking it first, in exchange for a negligible payment? Corruption and ignorance may be the trigger for a major security crisis in Mexico.
Possible scenarios of an attack on the Mexico City Subway:
[1] "They used military type C4 explosive in the bombing of Chapultepec Avenue". (February 16, 2008). La Jornada newspaper.
*Dr. Yuriria Rodríguez Castro is one of the few specialists in terrorism prevention and criminal intelligence analysis. She is a recognized consultant and trainer on criminal phenomena such as mass and serial killings. She recently published the second edition of her book "El terrorismo transnacional y del narcotráfico en México: el concurso de delitos o cuando el narcotráfico tiene un comportamiento terrorista" (Transnational terrorism and drug trafficking in Mexico: the competition of crimes or when drug trafficking has a terrorist behavior). He is also preparing his second book "El pensamiento criminal en México: Psicología, cultura y comunicación para una metodología del perfilador".
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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