Michoacán remains the epicenter of violence in Mexico. In the last 18 years, the entity has become a territory suffocated by the war between cartels, where more than 22 thousand people have been murdered.
Mexico City, November 5 (However).- Michoacan It is a swampy terrain, flooded by the blood of thousands of people who in the last 18 years, including the PAN governments Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa; of the PRI Enrique Pena Nieto and the Morenoist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have been murdered by organized crime.
This entity represents the most difficult challenge for the President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and for his administration, which will have to show, in the face of very high-impact incidents, that the history during the governments of the Fourth Transformation It may be different and that gradually those burning lands will regain tranquility and peace.
Only between 2012 and 2024, 22,196 homicides were committed in Michoacán, according to records from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) released on August 1, 2025. In that long stretch of 13 years, it was in 2021, during the PRD government Silvano Aureoles Rabbit when the highest number of homicides was recorded, with 2,696.
By 2024, in the government of Morenista Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, compared to 2021, there was a decrease of 1,064 murders, which is equivalent to 39.46 percent, to reach 1,632 homicides, according to the INEGI.
Two high-impact crimes, involving people who have faced extortion and abuse by organized crime, have shaken Michoacán recently. The murder of the leader of the lemon producers Bernardo Bravo Manríquez, on Monday, October 20, 2025 in Los Tepetates and the crime of Carlos Manzo Rodríguez, mayor of Uruapan, shot in the main square of his municipality last Saturday, November 1, 2025. But the evils that overwhelm Michoacán have been going on for many years.
Calderon’s war
“The main square of Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacán, looks like any other during campaign time in Mexico: a candidate looking for voters, electoral posters on the walls and dozens of people on the terraces of the bars and cafes that look at the cathedral. But this zocalo condenses like few other squares the tragedy of a war that has already left at least 50 thousand dead in the country,” says a note published on the digital platform of BBC Newssigned by Ignacio de los Reyes, on June 6, 2012.
Relates the information of BBC News that Michoacán was the genesis of the fight against drug trafficking undertaken by PAN president Felipe Calderón, who a few days after assuming power in December 2006 decided to send some 5,000 military and police personnel to put a stop to the production, sale and trafficking of drugs in his home state. This territory on the western coast of Mexico is one of the main production and distribution points for drugs, especially methamphetamines and other synthetic substances, although in recent years extortion, extortion and kidnappings have proliferated.
“The six-year term of Felipe Calderón’s government, one of the darkest periods in the contemporary history of Mexico, was marked by the State’s undeclared war against the drug cartels. This terrifying and unresolved conflict, which recorded between 60,000 and 120,000 fatalities – figures vary greatly depending on the source – between 2006 and 2012, put the North American country in the international spotlight and tended to eclipse the other aspects of a presidency that was by no means single-issue,” says a report from the Barcelona Center for International Affairs, known by its acronym CIDOB, updated on July 1, 2025.
The CIDOB report adds that “the strategy of militarizing the offensive against mafia networks, justified by the president (Calderón Hinojosa) by the aggressiveness of some gangs that fought with blood and fire for the control of entire territories, was unsuccessful despite the number of capos captured and, worse still, exacerbated the levels of violence; in 2010, the year of the Bicentennial, there were more than 15 thousand murders directly related with organized crime. The National Agreement for Legality and Security, by which the president (Calderón Hinojosa) hoped to involve all public powers in the fight against the main threat to the peace and freedom of Mexicans”, also did not have the desired results.
The self-defense forces
On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 the magazine Process published a review of the book “Battles of Michoacán. Autodefensas, the Colombian project of Peña Nieto”, by reporter José Gil Olmos, published by Ediciones Proceso, in which the roots of the violence that Michoacán has suffered in the last two decades are unraveled.
Point out the article Process that on February 24, 2013, a large group of armed men appeared in the region of Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, declaring war on organized crime. It seemed like a scene taken from the revolutionary era, but now it was about ranchers who, for years, had been subjected by the Knights Templar to a regime of terror and fear. Those people called themselves “Self-Defense Forces.”
Explain the note Process that the so-called “self-defense groups” became a reference for the social fatigue that exists in the country in the face of the uncontrollable growth of drug trafficking and its flow of violence. But who were those ranchers who were protesting carrying high-powered rifles? Who supported them with economic resources and weapons? Why did they express themselves in this area of Michoacán? What history is there in that region of the country for the phenomenon of armed self-defense groups to occur? What is behind these heavily armed men who did the government’s dirty work and cleared the land of Templars?
The then reporter of Process José Gil Olmos that “given the loss of governability and a good part of control over Michoacan territory, something that worried international businessmen interested in investing in a stable country, the government of Enrique Peña Nieto launched a secret plan that he cooked for several months with his main advisor on public security, Colombian general Óscar Naranjo.”
Reporter José Gil Olmos reasons that “the same tactic (as Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa) was followed by Enrique Peña Nieto since he came to power in 2012. It generated the same type of violence and insecurity, which caused tens of thousands of deaths. In 2014 he took a turn and proposed a strategy that involved illegally supplanting the government of Fausto Vallejo in Michoacán. To do so, he established a kind of viceroyalty under the guardianship of a “commissioner”, and in that position he placed Alfredo Castillo, one of those close to Peña Nieto since he governed the State of Mexico.”
The governorship
In 2027 there will be a Governor election in Michoacán and also federal elections to renew the Chamber of Deputies of the Federation. The results, between the 2021 and 2024 elections, consolidated Morena’s electoral strength in Michoacán.
The most recent survey published by the consulting firm Enkoll regarding the electoral political climate in Michoacán, until last Thursday, October 16, was very favorable to Morena. However, we would have to wait to know if the latest high-impact violent events and the opposition’s campaign to magnify them against Morena change favorable perceptions of the ruling party.
