Due to the advance and evolution of organized crime in the country, the public security model that maintains the peace of Yucatán also needs an update in its strategies where police intelligence is fundamental, not only police equipment and training.
The lawyer, consultant and former national commissioner of the defunct Federal Police, Manelich Castilla Craviotto, suggests that the first thing is to recognize that organized crime is a problem that affects the entire country and that Yucatán is not exempt from these criminal interests settling in the entity.
To the extent that there is close communication with the Federation, between the three neighboring states (Quintana Roo, Campeche and Yucatán) and controlling the growth of the state, there will be greater possibilities of having a safe Yucatán for a long time.
Castilla Craviotto warns that neither the government nor the police can relax in any of the five years left in the government of Morena and the head of the state Executive Branch, Joaquín Díaz Mena.
Manelich Castilla, who is Yucatecan, gives his opinion at the request of the Diario about the first year of Morena’s government in Yucatán in matters of public security.
One of the questions he answered was whether the government of Yucatán is shielding the state from the advance and proximity of organized crime that operates in Quintana Roo.
“The concept of shielding is very subjective,” he points out. “Yucatán has been selected by different criminals as a place to blend in (camouflage, blend in with the environment), to rest, to have a family life, knowing that it is a calm entity and that there are no interests in dispute.”
“What happens when criminal interests enter into disputes in a state, a municipality, or a city?” he explains. “Well, attacks, homicides, illegal deprivations of liberty, so-called uprisings begin. A very different dynamic begins to take place.”
“Yucatán is historically, I dare say in the last 20 or 25 years, a place where the same tranquility and living conditions have allowed some criminal leaders to want to establish themselves there permanently or temporarily, but that is the reason.”
Obligation
“So shielding, I think is subjective, the essential thing is to exchange information, it is an obligation between security forces. Not allowing any of these groups or any of these criminal leaders to feel so comfortable and that one day they want to start working with the same criminal logic in Yucatán.”
“I think the territory helps a lot and I insist, people help to have a solid police force, it helps to have a Prosecutor’s Office that I think also has good capabilities compared to other entities,” he considers.
“The shield has to be that: not allowing anyone who should not be in Yucatán to feel comfortable in our state.”
How do you perceive the public security work of this government? He was asked.
“First we must remember that this administration (of Díaz Mena) chose, as other administrations have done, to give continuity to the work carried out in terms of security: it ratified the secretary of security (Luis Felipe Saidén Ojeda, who has been in office for 24 years),” he says. “In that sense, it seems to me that things have not changed much.”
“There is an axis strategy, which is the shielding of Yucatán. They chose to maintain the experienced commanders they have in the entity and for that reason it would seem very difficult to me to decide any fundamental change in what this administration does.”
Same strategy
“If we had chosen the path of appointing new authorities, a new model, we would be making a much stricter, much deeper evaluation, but what I have managed to conclude from the eyes of someone who is very interested in what is happening in Yucatán, it seems to me that the security policy is maintained by the same strategy,” he said.
In other words, was it right to keep the head of the Ministry of Public Security and his main collaborators because they have kept the peace?
“In sports we sometimes say that a team that wins repeats, right? So it seems to me that the levels that Yucatán maintains statistically speaking, not only at the level of perception, but what the statistics tell us, is that it continues to be an entity with a high level of security.”
“It seems to me that what has happened in Yucatán deserves to maintain in some way that course that has led us to be today the third safest entity in Mexico, according to Inegi in terms of security perception,” he reiterates.
Is this public security model that we have sustainable in the long term or is structural reengineering required to prevent crime from continuing to advance?
“It is a very important question. To begin with, every security model has to adapt to new times. Although I do not see conditions or reasons to rebuild the entire security model, let us remember that we are living in times where crime is also modernizing and adopting new forms,” he points out.
“In that sense, it is worth always being up to date with technical and technological evolutions. I said it in an interview a while ago with the Diario, we cannot dismiss the fact that crime has a very important ability to ‘limit itself’.”
“And if we do not become aware of the exponential growth that Yucatán has, with new and increasingly populated points of practically urban development, no longer in the peripheries because the urban sprawl has extended beyond the Periférico for a long time, that has a lot of impact due to the population density, the profile of the people who arrive, sometimes causing the loss of some of the bastions that maintain security conditions.”
Evolution
The former national police commissioner highlights that Yucatán is an example of how citizens respected the most basic rules of the city and this happens in other areas.
Therefore, it seems to him that this security model has to evolve, but he does not see a need for a reconstruction from scratch. It would be unfair not to recognize that this security model has achieved social stability.
He described as positive that the government of Yucatán, in its different administrations, provides modern technology, video cameras, a C5i center with wide coverage, new patrols and motorcycles, modern weapons, and trains agents and commanders with specialists from the United States.
Intelligence and research
That is the correct path for a police corporation because it must not only focus on prevention or social proximity, but also use intelligence and investigation tools to the maximum and these need to evolve permanently.
He also said that if a police officer does not have enough tools on the street to impose himself as authority, things begin to change. He has seen very sad, very regrettable scenes in other latitudes, where police officers are belittled and are not respected by society.
It seems to him that to the extent that a police officer has the best supplies, the best technology, good patrols, means of transportation that places him with a level of authority on the street, that uniform will represent the State very well.— Joaquín Chan Caamal