Jorge FM Defends Operation

Jorge Fernández Menéndez does a good job poking holes in the theories suggesting that the operation in Michoacán was purely an electoral hatchet job:

How can the National Commission on Human Rights (with its president José Luis Soberanes thinking that this is the way to in a position on the Supreme Court) say that Governor Leonel Godoy should have been warned of the operation "as a courtesy"? We are talking about organized crime, an operation in which hundreds of agents participate and put themselves at risk and in which the accused were the closest collaborators of the governor on security issues. Let's take the measures that Manuel de Carreño proposes to apply to the CNDH back to the land of reality: would the permission Leonel Godoy have to be requested, as a courtesy, so that his security forces collaborated in the detention of the commanders of those same security forces? Would Leonel Godoy have participated in this when, warned that some of his closest collaborators needed to be investigated, he always responded that he backed them and kept them in positions of responsibility? The CNDH forgets that we are talking about organized crime, criminal groups that have taken the lives of thousands of people in recent years, that have kidnapped and extorted, and about the complicity of public functionaries in protection of these groups. What courtesy are we talking about? Because if that's what it's about, Godoy was given the same treatment that any governor receives during a federal operation against organized crime in his state: they are informed of the operation when it is already underway. The leaks are and have been too many to act in any other way.

Along those lines, the PRD and Godoy himself, instead of offering apologies to the population and accepting full cooperation with the federal security forces, are indignant because the operation, as Godoy said, "was legal but politically incorrect". How would you imagine an operation against narco-politicians that was "politically correct"? Would the arrested be spoken to using usted? Send them a written communication before carrying out the operation? Who told the PRD leaders that a fight which has caused thousands of deaths must be "politically correct"? The point is that the operation was legal, it achieved its objectives, all of those officials were detained without a single shot and without a single act of violence. In any event, the politically correct action would be for those local authorities and the parties involved to apologize to the people, to the society, for having failed them so evidently.

It has been said that, if the investigation started six months ago, why did it take so long to obtain results. This is to try to demonstrate that it was all about an electoral montage. We have to remember that, in December, we analyzed it here, the security strategy was redesigned and since January it has begun to be applied, it was announced publicly, in various states, among them Michoacán: in this way the operation was restructured in that state, in Tamaulipas, in Tijuana, in Chihuahua and, above all, in Juárez. And the objective was to strengthen the intelligence activities to break the networks of operation and protection. If something thinks that such a result can be had in a couple of weeks or whenever desired, they don’t know what they are talking about.

And it has been said that the operation sought to punish the PRD electorally. Unfortunately, in electoral terms that’s not necessary. The most optimistic poll places the PRD at 18 percent of the votes, the most pessimistic one below 10 and the PRD doesn’t figure in any of the six state elections on July 5th. Does anyone really believe that such would be an electoral objective so enticing as to invest so much political capital?

That last point, which I'd not read previously, is exactly right. If it was all about making the PAN's adversaries look bad, why bother with the PRD?