Mexico let a good, brave mayor die a cruel death

Mexico has the raw material for greatness: good and courageous people. Now it must protect them.

How did Mexico do it?

How did it produce a man like Alejandro Arcos, who was courageous in ways we will never fully understand?

As we drank coffee in metro Phoenix, he drove food and water to storm-ravaged neighborhoods in Mexico, hugging old women and children who had lost their homes.

At 43, with a wife and young son at home, this bristling, cheerful mayor of Chilpancingo did what he promised he would do when he was sworn in six days earlier.

He made the lives of the people in his city better.

“I have lived here all my life… and it is here that I want to die… I want to die fighting for my city” he said recently, as reported by The Guardian newspaper.

These are words that shudder with foreboding.

When Arcos said them, he was pretty sure he was about to die.

Arcos was last seen helping storm victims

Some say he was just naive. That he had gotten into things way over his head. But his words defy that.

He chose to live a public life that put him in great danger because he saw the need for it.

The last time Mayor Arcos was seen alive was in the wreckage of Hurricane John, hugging old women in this southwestern Mexico city.

On October 6, Mexican authorities were rushed to the Villa del Roble neighborhood of Chilpancingo. People there had made it a gruesome find.

The mayor’s severed head lay on the roof of a white truck.

His blood-soaked torso lay in the taxi.

Whoever did this told the community: we run this city, not the mayor.

The people knew it. This was the work of the cartels.

Terrible violence awaits three hours south of Phoenix

Safe in our homes, apartments and condos in metro Phoenix, we don’t want to think about the horrors that take place every day in a country just a three-hour drive from our relatively quiet neighborhoods.

Mexico has been ravaged by cartel violence over the past forty years. The drug lords are more powerful than ever, expand their reach to the United States and Canada and to Central and South America.

Their trafficking of drugs and people on this continent and to Western Europe and beyond makes them the most powerful criminal syndicates in the world.

The cartels have taken over roughly a third of Mexico and their warring factions have turned cities into cemeteries.

Chilpancingo is one of them.

When Alejandro Arcos became mayor, he placed himself in a series of concentric rings – an ever-expanding threat environment that starts with Mexico itself.

Thousands in Mexico are murdered and missing

This country is one of the deadliest in the Western Hemisphere. Since 2006, this has increased to more than 431,000 people murdered herereports the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2022 alone there were an estimated 33,287 murders in Mexico, the United Nations reports.

Compare that to the United States, where the population is almost three times as large and has its own tradition of guns and violence. There were in 2022 21,594 murders in the United States.

But the severed heads and bodies hanging from overpasses do not capture the full horror of Mexican violence. The nation is also reeling from a growing number of people who simply disappear and are presumed dead.

In 2014, a group of 43 young men from a teacher training college were traveling from nearby Iguala to Chilpancingo when their buses were stopped and they were kidnapped. They were never seen again, nor were their bodies ever found.

More than 105,000 people are missing in Mexico, Human Rights Watch reports. Most have disappeared in the past twenty years.

Moreover, “Mexico is one of the the deadliest countries in the world for journalists and human rights defenders,” the organization reports.

Yet few crimes are reported. The police are a mess

Although Mexico is constantly plagued by massacres, it can offer little help to the victims of crime.

Mexico’s criminal justice system is consumed by corruption, and the people there long ago gave up any expectation that justice will be served.

So nine out of ten crimes are never reported in Mexico, according to Human Rights Watch. Of the one in ten crimes that are, a third are never investigated. All told, only about 1% of crimes are ever solved.

Moreover, the Mexican police and military are forces to be feared.

Police officers routinely engage in “torture to extract confessions,” Human Rights Watch reports. According to national statistics and Human Rights Watch, the Mexican military – which performs many of the functions of law enforcement – killed 5,335 civilians between 2007 and September 2022.

As Mexican police fail to credibly combat crime, the bodies of the dead pile up.

President Sheinbaum promises to reduce violence

On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum took office as Mexico’s first female president and told the nation she would work to reduce violence.

The enormity of that challenge became immediately clear to her during the first two weeks of her term, then 1,247 people murdered throughout Mexicoreports Reuters.

When reporters asked Sheinbaum about the murder of Mayor Arcos, her response was emotionless. She showed no emotion as she said the federal secretaries of security, defense and the Marines had done investigations started.

“We are going to strengthen the investigative capabilities of the Mexican government,” she told reporters.

That left the Mexicans cold. To them, she seemed indifferent.

For Mayor Arcos, just being mayor meant putting a target on his back.

In the run-up to the 2024 summer elections, this number was almost forty Mexicans political candidates were murderedNPR reports. In the state of Guerrero, where Arcos lived, six candidates were killed, USA Today reports.

Yet the threat to government officials remains

In the United States, a mayor who helped storm victims was able to focus entirely on the well-being of his citizens and ensure that emergency services and supplies ran smoothly.

Alejandro Arcos had to deal with the added stress of people wanting to kill him.

The day before he was sworn in as mayor of Chilpancingo, the man he picked as security chief, Ulises Hernández Martínez, was fatally shot in his car together with A woman traveling with him.

Two days after Arcos was sworn in, another colleague, the newly appointed municipal secretary Francisco Tapia, was also murdered and shot dead.

The cartels are the likely culprits.

Arcos went on the radio and talked about his plan to make peace between the two largest warring gangs in his city, Los Ardillos (the Squirrels) and Los Tlacos, their rivals.

“We have always talked about a peace project. It has been our banner, our proposition. And that is what we strive for,” he says.

He also called on state and federal authorities to do so provide protection for him and his assistants, according to The New York Times. ‘We need them. We need them to move forward.”

Mayor asked for protection. It never came

But protection never came.

Drug gangs rule the streets of Chilpancingo. Conditions are so dangerous that the city turns off when it is darkaround 8 p.m., Reuters reports.

‘There is not a single politician in Chilpancingo who does not have that ties with criminal groupsDavid Saucedo, a security analyst in Mexico City, told NPR.

Arcos’ predecessor, Mayor Norma Otilia Hernández, was secretly filmed have breakfast with the leaders of the Ardillos. That made people so angry that the Mexican ruling party Morena expelled her from the country, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The secret video emerged online a month after gangsters beheaded seven people and left behind the bodies and a business card mocking the female mayor, the Journal reported. “I’ll keep waiting for that second breakfast you promised,” it said.

Pioquinto Damián, a hotel owner, told The Wall Street Journal that he believes Arcos tried to reach a truce with the warring gangs and became too immersed. “Alejandro was very naive. … He tried to build peace when the conditions weren’t there.”

Until this is resolved, Mexico has no future

The people in his town understood what he was talking about.

When they heard of his death, they took to the streets and marched. With a church bell in the background and tears in their eyes, they denounced his death and the federal government’s indifference to the violence.

They pointed the finger at the new president. “She (Sheinbaum) didn’t come here to Chilpancingo. … She doesn’t want to realize that this is a very dangerous city.”

The new Mexican president faces an almost impossible task. It will take years to rebuild the legal institutions that can dismantle the cartels. It will take tremendous courage to confront these monsters.

But it is essential.

Because Mexico produced an exceptional man in Alejandro Arcos, a mayor who had the courage to help his people even when the cartels invaded his government circle and murdered some of his closest associates.

Such men and such courage are extremely rare. And until you can protect them, your country has no future.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist at The Arizona Republic. Email him [email protected].