Mexico City, Mexico
Between 2018 and 2019, the last year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government and the first of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 148 criminal groups operated in Mexico across the country, according to a CIDE investigation.
Jorge Roa, a researcher with the Center for Economic Research and Education (CIDE) Drug Policy Program, took on the task of mapping the presence of criminal groups.
The investigation determined that Guerrero, Michoacán, the State of Mexico and Mexico City were the entities that registered the presence and operation of more criminal groups.
Guerrero and Michoacán were members of 24 criminal groups, 22 in Edomex and 20 in the country’s capital.
“This coincides with a statement by the US Bureau of Consular Affairs to its citizens not to travel to those regions, especially Guerrero, Michoacán and the state of Mexico,” Roa stressed.
In those years, the most present criminal group was the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG), led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, which was present in 28 of the Republic’s 32 states, except Sinaloa, Baja California Sur, Durango and Tamaulipas.
While the Sinaloa cartel manifested itself in 15 entities.
In an interview, Jorge Roa explains that the presence was explained by a blanket, cardboard or journalistic report from three different media outlets, which referred to the criminal group.
From the 148 criminal groups discovered are 34 armed weapons from larger organizations.
“On average, we count on 6 armed weapons per criminal group, those are the groups that are committed to introducing violence,” Roa explains.
“The cartel with the most armed weapons is that of Sinaloa, which has eleven armed weapons, and most curiously, some of them are former members of the security forces, both military and civilian.”
According to Roa’s systematization, the United Cartels group is an alliance between the Sinaloa groups, Los Zetas, and the Gulf Cartel, formed to fight the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel in Guanajuato.
From the point of view of the CIDE detective, the information provided on his card is held by the prosecutor’s office, but it must be publicly accessible so that anyone can analyze criminal phenomena.
As an example, he cited Colima, who has the presence of 6 criminal groups, but had one of the highest rates of intentional murders in the country for the year 2019.