Mexico City, Mexico
Between 2018 and 2019, the last year of the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto and the first of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 148 criminal groups operated in Mexico throughout the country, according to a CIDE investigation .
Jorge Roa, a researcher in the Drug Policy Program of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), set himself the task of mapping the presence of criminal groups.
In the study, it was determined that Guerrero, Michoacán, the State of Mexico and Mexico City were the entities that recorded the presence and operation of more criminal groups.
Guerrero and Michoacán suffered 24 criminal groups, in Edomex there were 22 and in the country’s capital there were 20.
“This coincides with a statement issued by the U.S. Consular Affairs Office to its citizens, for not traveling to these regions, particularly Guerrero, Michoacan, and Mexico State,” Roa stressed.
In those years, the criminal group that had the most presence was the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG), led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, which had a presence in 28 of the 32 states of the Republic, except in Sinaloa, Baja California Sur, Durango and Tamaulipas.
While the Sinaloa Cartel manifested itself in 15 entities.
In an interview, Jorge Roa explains that his presence was accounted for by any blanket, card or newspaper report, from three different media, which referred to the criminal group.
Of the 148 criminal groups detected, 34 are armed arms of larger organizations.
“On average, per criminal group, we are counting on 6 armed arms, that is, those groups that are engaged in instilling violence,” Roa explained.
“The cartel that has the most armed arms is the one in Sinaloa, which has 11 armed arms, and the most curious thing is that some are made up of former members of security forces, both military and civilian.”
According to Roa’s systematization, the United Cartels group is an alliance between the Sinaloa, Los Zetas, and the Golf Cartel groups, formed to peel against the New Generation Jalisco Cartel in Guanajuato.
From the point of view of the CIDE researcher, the information provided by his map is held by the prosecutors of the States, but it should be publicly accessible so that everyone can analyze the criminal phenomena.
As an example he put Colima, which has the presence of 6 criminal groups, but by 2019 had one of the highest rates of malicious homicides in the country.