Ram\u00edrez believed that one of Celaya’s most urgent problems was its police, who instead of fighting organized crime appeared to be involved in it.<\/p>\n
His son-in-law had been killed in a case that was still unsolved, and officers had demanded bribes and obstructed the investigation. Police misconduct was well documented: Local cops were prosecuted for abusing detainees and participating in kidnappings and even homicides.<\/p>\n
Ram\u00edrez won the election. And in his first act as mayor, he fired 340 of the roughly 600 officers on the force. Then \u2014 as officials across Mexico have been doing for nearly two decades now \u2014 he called in federal troops.<\/p>\n
Mexican President Felipe Calder\u00f3n first deployed soldiers into the streets to fight drug traffickers in 2006, promising then that the military would stay only until police could be reformed.<\/p>\n
In the years since, leaders across the political spectrum have repeatedly vowed to better train and root out corruption among the country’s cops \u2014 a step that security experts agree is essential to reducing crime and violence.<\/p>\n
But with the exception of Mexico’s capital and a few other major cities, those efforts have lost steam. Officials have slashed funding for state and local police forces, and disbanded the federal police altogether. Cops continue to be near-universally reviled, with federal surveys showing that 9 out of 10 Mexicans don’t trust the police.<\/p>\n At the same time, Mexico has vastly expanded the military’s role in public security. There are now more soldiers, marines and members of the national guard deployed nationally than state and local police officers, according to an analysis by the Citizen Security Program at the Universidad Iberoamericana. In most parts of the country, there are fewer state and local police today than there were when the drug war began in 2006.<\/p>\n “The police have been abandoned in favor of militarization,” said Ernesto L\u00f3pez Portillo, a researcher who leads the Iberoamericana program.<\/p>\n There is little evidence that the strategy has worked. Homicides remain persistently high, although they have dipped slightly in recent years. And cartels have only expanded their reach, with a U.S. military analysis finding that criminal groups control more than one-third of Mexico.<\/p>\n Yet officials continue to embrace militarization as the country’s primary security strategy. That even includes leftists who once fiercely warned of the dangers of ceding public security to soldiers, including\u00a0President Claudia Sheinbaum\u00a0and her predecessor,\u00a0Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador.<\/p>\n The mayor’s abrupt decision to summarily replace most of the police force in Celaya, a patchwork of farmland and factories in central Guanajuato state, is a case study in why Mexicans have lost faith in local law enforcement \u2014 and what happens when soldiers take over.<\/p>\n Celaya used to be a tranquil city. Its location along a highway and railroad that stretch 600 miles to the United States drew Honda and other automakers to build plants here.<\/p>\n For years, a local criminal group called the\u00a0Santa Rosa de Lima\u00a0cartel quietly stole fuel from the major oil pipelines that cross the region.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until the notorious\u00a0Jalisco New Generation Cartel\u00a0edged in several years ago that violence exploded. The groups battled for control of pipelines but also drug trafficking, extortion rackets and theft of cargo trucks.<\/p>\n Celaya became synonymous with violence as criminals gunned down shopkeepers who refused to pay extortion fees, drug users who couldn’t pay their dealers and everyday citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They carried out massacres at hotels, bars and even funerals.<\/p>\n By 2024, Celaya had a homicide rate of 87 killings per 100,000 people \u2014 17 times the rate in the United States.<\/p>\n It had long been clear that the city’s police force was, at best, not up to the challenge \u2014 and, at worst, deeply corrupt.<\/p>\n The 600 cops on the force in Celaya, which has a population of around half a million, were half of the 1,200 that the United Nations recommends for a city of its size. Officers were poorly trained and badly paid.<\/p>\n That made them easy targets for criminals who offered cash in exchange for intelligence, muscle or simply looking the other way when a crime was committed. When police didn’t cooperate \u2014 or didn’t cooperate correctly \u2014 they were often killed.<\/p>\n In 2024, a cop here was 400 times more likely to be killed than one in the United States.<\/p>\n Fanny Ram\u00edrez, the daughter of a street vendor and a maid, was 21 when she enrolled in Celaya\u2019s police academy. After eight years with the force, she earned just $900 a month, little more than a worker on an assembly line. Her boyfriend was also a police officer in Celaya.<\/p>\n Fanny warned her family to steer clear of the cops, said her sister, Elisabeth. After Elisabeth\u2019s husband witnessed a triple homicide several years ago, Fanny instructed him: \u201cGo inside and say you don\u2019t know anything.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe police are supposed to take care of you,\u201d Elisabeth said. \u201cBut here, we have to protect ourselves from the police.\u201d<\/p>\n Mayor Ram\u00edrez wasn’t the first local politician to try to clean house. Previous leaders had made a show of purging dozens or even hundreds of police officers that they claimed were rotten.<\/p>\n But with most mayors serving just a single three-year term and scant public funds, reform efforts gained no traction. Experts say change takes time and requires concrete action to raise salaries, improve recruitment criteria and strengthen oversight.<\/p>\n On the national level, the approach to policing was inconsistent. Before he was elected president in 2018, L\u00f3pez Obrador criticized his predecessors for replacing police with soldiers.<\/p>\n “We can\u2019t use the military to make up for the civilian government\u2019s shortcomings,” L\u00f3pez Obrador insisted, vowing to send soldiers “back to their barracks.”<\/p>\n On taking office, he changed his tune. Facing record high homicide rates, he released a security plan that argued that taking soldiers off the streets would be \u201cdisastrous\u201d because cops were \u201ccontrolled by organized crime and moved by self-interest and corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n He dismantled the federal police, a famously corrupt force whose longtime leader\u00a0was convicted\u00a0in the U.S. of taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.<\/p>\n And L\u00f3pez Obrador steered money once destined for local and state law enforcement to create a 120,000-officer-strong national guard, a force he vowed would be \u201cincorruptible” and civilian-led, and which was supposed to take over the investigative functions of the federal police.<\/p>\n In fact, nearly 90% of the members of the national guard are former soldiers, and few have been trained to carry out investigations.<\/p>\n In Celaya, violence continued to spiral. And policing never improved.<\/p>\n Last year, about a month before the mayoral candidate was cut down with bullets, Fanny set out to drop her 6-year-old daughter off at child care before starting work. She was driving a sedan that belonged to her boyfriend.<\/p>\n Assailants opened fire. She and her daughter died on the spot. A few months later, Fanny’s boyfriend was gunned down, too.<\/p>\n Neither case has been solved, but Fanny’s sister believes the deaths were connected to the boyfriend’s ties to organized crime.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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