In a speech in Ciudad Juárez (in northern Mexico), the country’s most violent city, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe backed Mexico’s anti-drug strategy, indicating that there are security problems that merit the use of military personnel to combat organized crime.
In a speech in Ciudad Juárez (in northern Mexico), the country’s most violent city, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe backed Mexico’s anti-drug strategy, indicating that there are security problems that merit the use of military personnel to combat organized crime.
“Problems of insecurity are only resolved by paying attention to social development, and the armed forces are needed in order to combat organized crime,” Uribe said, speaking to hundreds of students at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez.
In that Mexican city, on the border with El Paso (Texas, United States), 3,100 people were murdered last year.
The former Colombian president (2002-2010) also indicated that “the only way to prevent (young people) from being recruited by organized crime is to guarantee them educational opportunity and income.”
Since December 2006, the Mexican government has deployed around fifty thousand military personnel and thousands of federal police officers to the locations most affected by the presence of drug trafficking.
That strategy is questioned by the opposition and civil-society organizations, which emphasize that it has led to an increase in human-rights violations committed by soldiers and has exacerbated the homicides, of which over 37,000 have been committed since then.
The majority of homicides in Ciudad Juárez are attributed by the government to a clash between the Juárez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel led by drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.