Sheinbaum responded to Calderón after the former president said that, at the end of his six-year term, his “offensive policy” was abandoned and criminal groups were allowed to “grow again”; accused him of launching a “war” in his own country.
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Mexico City, November 11 (However).– The President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo responded this Tuesday to his predecessor, Felipe Calderon Hinojosawho will throw during his government (2006-2012) the call “War on drug trafficking” and that this same week he assured that the racketeering in Latin America if you are taking over the stateand that is replacing functions of federal governments such as the use of public force, the creation of laws and the payment of taxes, including Mexico.
“Felipe Calderón’s period was characterized, among many other things, in what he called the war against drugs, in two characteristics. One: first he took out the Army to combat drug trafficking without a legal framework and that generated many problems, but he defended, because you only have to listen to his… because in the end he is the one who defines the policy,” Sheinbaum said in his morning press conference.
“And I don’t say it about the Army, eh, because it is the best that Mexico has: the Navy and the Army. We saw it in the rains. I see it every day. I am very grateful for the work of the Army, the Navy and the National Guard, and the people of Mexico really love these institutions, but rather the conception of who was President, by the way, who arrived with electoral fraud,” he added from the National Palace.
The President explained that “it is not a matter of the Army, but of who then played the role of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” “He, through Calderón, “decided on a strategy, calling it ‘war’, of confrontation,” Sheinbaum said.
“War is confrontation, with weapons, and he himself said that it did not matter that there were collateral victims. What does collateral victims mean? Civilians, people, boys, girls, young people who in a confrontation could be hit by a bullet and it did not matter, according to the then President, because it was part of the war. Who declares a war in their own country?” questioned the president.
However, Sheinbaum rejected that this does not mean that his Government does not act against criminal groups, as Calderón pointed out this week. “But he decided on extrajudicial executions. What does he mean? That an alleged criminal was executed for the sole reason of being an alleged criminal, without a trial, and there are many examples during that time,” he stressed.
Furthermore, the head of the federal Executive reiterated one of the main criticisms against Calderón: that his Secretary of Security and right-hand man in his six-year term, Genaro García Luna, is today imprisoned in the United States, serving a sentence of more than 38 years for drug trafficking. The former president has washed his hands, ensuring that he never knew of the connections of the then-called “Super Police” with the drug cartels.
“How to defend that action? But it also didn’t give results. War. Who wants war in a country? Very different from acting within the framework of the Law, giving a legal framework to the Army so that it can act, creating the National Guard, the navy as well, and arresting alleged criminals so that they can have a trial,” countered Sheinbaum.
“That,” he added, “is called the rule of law, that is, detaining an alleged criminal so that he has a trial. It is not about impunity, it is about arrests of generators of violence, who have a trial, of course, with judges who do not release them for money or corruption.”
However, Sheinbaum accused, what Calderón did was declare war “and puts at the forefront of the war a person, who is proven, who operated for one of the cartels and who became corrupt in the process and who today is imprisoned in the United States.” But in addition, he noted, intentional homicides increased by 148 percent, “many of them what he called collateral victims.”
Sheinbaum also referred to the six-year term of PRI member Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), which followed that of Calderón. “Peña did the same. He changed practically nothing in his strategy. Of course, he took the Federal Police to the Ministry of the Interior, but in reality he did not change the strategy. And what happened? Forty-two percent of homicides,” recalled the President.
“But also in that period, precisely in that period, the young people were abandoned. It is precisely in that period when the then Rector of the UNAM called the young people ‘ninis’, ‘you neither study nor work’, as if it were the responsibility of the young people. Abandonment of the young people, there are no schools, there is no education, there is no employment, greater poverty, greater inequality, war and permission to kill. No, well. And, furthermore, in front, a criminal. That is what happened for 12 years in our country and associate government corruption with it,” Sheinbaum concluded.