🇲🇽IN.VISIBLES WEEKLY: Will the ‘Sheinbaum Plan’ for security in Mexico work? (Bukele, Colombia, Argentina and more)
Hello! “We’ve made it” That’s how Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City for MORENA, the party founded by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on Sunday summed up how it felt to have made history by becoming Mexico's first woman president.
The 61-year-old scientist, with a long resume that includes a doctorate in environmental engineering, has won the elections by a wide margin and is replacing a president who leaves with a high approval rating, something unusual in Mexico and the wider region, in part because of the success of their party's social policies.
The list of challenges the new president faces is monumental, to say the least. Mexico is facing high rates of homicides, disappearances, kidnappings and extortion at the hands of criminal organisations that have effective control of the state in much of the country. The murder of a female mayor in the state of Michoacán the day after the election is a tragic illustration of this.
Although during the campaign she did not share too many details about her proposals to combat what is already a long-standing security crisis, in her closing speech – and then also at her first as president – she said she would not push for “tough on crime” policies and, instead said that her administration will focus on the causes of crime, the expansion of the National Guard, the strengthening of investigative capacity as well as coordination among public institutions.
Will this be enough and will Sheinbaum be able to live up to the high expectations around her upcoming term in office? Security experts in Mexico gave us their verdict. Read our analysis here.
But that's not all that happened in Latin America this week. Below is a round-up of the most important news and the best reads to understand what happened, and its implications.
Thanks for reading. If you like it, please share it and see you in seven days!
Josefina Salomón
Editorial Director, In.Visibles
1. All eyes on Mexico. Although the outcome of the presidential election was anything but surprising, there has been a tsunami of information analysing what happened and the style that the Shinbaum administration, who is clearly the antithesis of his political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may take. We particularly liked this excellent profile by Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo, which traces the origins of the former activist during her student years at UNAM, Mexico's public university. In addition to the enormous security challenges, which long-time investigative journalist Ioan Grillo describes in extensive detail in this New York Times feature, there has been much discussion of the enormous room for manoeuvre that MORENA will have to implement its policies after its stratospheric expansion across Mexico’s and the control it will have in Congress, which some see as problematic.
2. ‘Fundamental right’. This is how the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, described the right of all people to seek asylum, AP reported. It did so in response to US President Joe Biden's announcement that he would impose limits on people seeking asylum at the border –the immigration issue has become a hot topic in the run-up to the November presidential election. Under the new rule, the border will be ‘closed’ when the number of people trying to cross it passes 2,500 in a day, something that is already happening, and those who try to cross it (except children travelling alone, victims of trafficking or people with a medical emergency) will be deported, without having the option of requesting asylum, as was the case until 5 June when the new regulations came into force. The government also announced that interviews for asylum claims will be held to a ‘higher standard’ than previously used, which is a huge blow to thousands of asylum seekers, as Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America explains in this analysis. UNHCR added: ‘Any person claiming to have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin should have access to a safe territory and have this claim assessed before being subject to deportation or removal’.
3. Second Chapter. Nayib Bukele inaugurated his second five-year term as president of El Salvador (which, in theory, the law prohibits) on Saturday with a speech that prioritised the economy and warnings about the difficulties the country will face in that area. The president, who famously implemented some of the toughest security policies in the region to combat the gangs that had turned the country into one of the most violent in the world, congratulated himself on his achievements and showcased his enormous power, partly based on the huge popular support he has amassed in recent years, as summarised by Leire Ventas in this article for BBC Mundo. Bukele managed to control security but at a high cost, particularly in marginalised and rural communities (as John Gibler recounts in this brilliant article for Gatopardo) and with questions over the long-term reliability of the model. The question is how he will address the enormous problems of El Salvador's economy, with poverty on the rise and public accounts that do not add up, as Juan Diego Quesada describes for El País.
4. Colombia's total peace is being cooked up in Venezuela. On 24 June, new peace talks will start in Caracas between the government of Gustavo Petro and the Second Marquetalia of the FARC dissidents, led by alias Iván Márquez. The start of the negotiations, which had also been brewing in the Venezuelan capital, was finalised on Wednesday with the signing of an agreement. The document, quoted in an article in El País, says that “the government will adopt measures to strengthen the de-escalation of the conflict in the areas where the Second Marquetalia - Bolivarian Army, as the decimated armed group now calls itself, is present”. This is the first round of talks between the Colombian executive and the armed group. Norway, Cuba and Venezuela will participate as guarantors in this new process, as they have been doing for almost two years in the negotiation process with the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN). Caracas has already been the scene of several of these meetings. This is no coincidence. Although it may sound repetitive to say that Colombia's peace also depends on Venezuela, this is a reality in many ways. The role of Nicolás Maduro's government is decisive in reaching agreements with both groups, as both criminal organisations also operate in Venezuelan territory.
5. Bukele’s style, further south. The Secretary of Penal Affairs of the Ministry of Justice and Security of Santa Fe, Argentina, Lucía Masneri, announced the construction of a new maximum security prison with capacity for up to 1,150 high-profile individuals. The prison, due to open in 2025, will seek to limit prisons from being used as centres of operations by crime organisations, as we reported in In.Visibles. The official explained that the building will have individual cells and visits will be tightly controlled.
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Our other favourite reads of the week
Crocodiles and air conditioning: The maximum security prison ‘El Infiernito’ in Guatemala (BBC Mundo)
Women and prisons in Chile: pre-trial detention, drug offences and one in four, foreigners (Antonia Laborde, El País)
Children, among the most affected by violence in Haiti (Nathalye Cotrino, Human Rights Watch)
More power and weapons for Latin American military (Octavio Enriquez, Connectas)
On a remote island, Honduras plans mega-prison in an unstudied reserve (Maxwell Radwin, Mongabay)