Carlos Manzo, Mayor of Uruapan, was murdered on the night of November 1, during the Day of the Dead Eve celebration. He was with his family, in a public space, in a city that has become accustomed to living with fear. He had received threats and supposedly had official protection. None of that prevented its execution. Since 2018, more than seventy municipal authorities have been murdered in Mexico. Violence no longer breaks out from time to time: it is constant. It is intertwined with institutional life. It is assumed, normalized, expected.
Violence against political actors follows a logic of territorial control. It targets those who ignore the conditions imposed by the royal powers of the environment. It does not respond to ideological confrontations or programmatic differences. He heads to strategic positions. Candidates, mayors, councilors, trustees: the target is the position. In many regions, the leadership is decided before the elections. Authority only prospers if it adjusts to pre-existing balances. Where the State does not reach, others set rules, administer resources, impose punishments. They govern without appointment, but with effective power.
Organized crime did not “penetrate” the State: it grew in its cracks. He fed on his weakness, his way of operating, his inertia. It emerged from within, as part of a long and adaptive process. It did not follow a master plan, but it did follow a trajectory: accommodations, omissions, tacit arrangements. He settled on the margins and advanced to the center. Today it is part of the effective framework, not the one that draws the laws, but the one that imposes the real rules.
At the origin is the prohibition. The so-called war on drugs was the laboratory where the most effective criminal networks on the continent were incubated. In exchange for a promise of order, chaos was sown. Peasants, young people, users were criminalized. Penalties were toughened, agencies multiplied. But consumption did not decrease. And the business grew. Criminal organizations prospered under the protection of the punitive state. Not despite him.
The war discourse concealed an agenda of control and simulation. He pretended to fight crime while reorganizing territorial power. It transformed a public health problem into a national security threat. He applied warlike logic to social phenomena. The result was the multiplication of armed actors with territorial control, operational capacity and economic rationality. When the illegal drug market became insufficient, other businesses arrived: extortion, migrant trafficking, mining, smuggling, and floor collection. Everything with business logic: diversification, outsourcing, expansion. And all within an arrangement where disobedience is negotiated, protection is purchased and the law is applied selectively.
The Mexican State has never managed to consolidate an effective structure capable of imposing the legal order universally. What there has been is a regime of limited access, sustained by patronage networks rather than institutions. Obedience always negotiated, protection always a privilege. With the end of the political monopoly, the state apparatus was not strengthened: it fragmented. Multiple actors emerged—formal and informal—who dispute the control of income and territories. There was no transition to the rule of law, but rather a dysfunctional accommodation: a disorderly competition, without an institutional horizon.
The López Obrador Government did not develop a pacification strategy. Reinstalled an old selective tolerance arrangement. The expectation was simple and risky: if the State did not confront, violence would decrease due to inertia. There was no will to deter nor the capacity to regulate. The National Guard inherited the vices of military deployment: presence without control, routine without intelligence. The social programs were proposed as palliative, without assuming that the ongoing dispute is over the government. Because that’s what armed groups do: they govern. They establish hierarchies, impose rules, dictate sentences. The State could not confront them, that is why it negotiated with them without clear rules, without democratic control, without institutional reform. He delegated functions and assumed withdrawal as a policy.
What there is is not a fight between the State and crime, but rather an ambiguous coexistence. In many areas, the State does not fight crime: it coexists with it, accommodates it, gives it functions. Violence is not dysfunction: it is a form of regulation. Those who do not obey are punished. There is no anarchy: there is order without law.
Claudia Sheinbaum has assumed command with the same recipe: military continuity, social rhetoric, political subordination of security. There is no clear diagnosis or desire for reform. There are also no signs that he wants to build a civil State capable of governing in accordance with the legal order and human rights. The failed military strategy is maintained, as if the deployment was enough to contain deep-rooted violence. Criminal power is not fought with slogans or symbolic presence: it is confronted with rules, institutions, legitimate authority. As long as security remains subordinated to political calculation and illegality is tolerated as part of the arrangement, criminal expansion will continue its course.
A real strategy would have to begin by rebuilding the authority of the civil State: with presence, capabilities, clear rules. He would have to review the prohibitive regime that turned crime into a business. And, above all, assume that without a profound reform of legal power, there is no way to dispute the land from those who already occupy it. Quite the opposite of what is happening, with the destruction of the Judiciary and the delivery of civilian capabilities to the armed forces.
The murder of Carlos Manzo has been one more expression of the dominant arrangement: the unstable balance between factual powers and a weak State, which regulates little and administers less. It was not an anomaly, but rather a practice established in territories where command does not come from law, but from force and agreement. As long as that arrangement remains intact—as long as the legal power is not reformed to challenge the control already exercised by others—scenes like that will continue to mark the country’s daily life.