Can this man finally defeat Mexico’s cartels?
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
By JACK NICAS
After a pack of assailants shot Omar García Harfuch three times in 2020, he began sleeping in his office.
He was Mexico City’s police chief at the time and said a powerful cartel tried to assassinate him. Now Harfuch is Mexico’s top security official, tasked with dismantling those very groups. And he still spends many nights sleeping near his desk, with an armed soldier in combat gear outside his door.
It is that sort of obsessive dedication to solving his country’s most seemingly unsolvable problem that has earned him the trust of President Claudia Sheinbaum and made him the face of Mexico’s most aggressive offensive against the cartels in more than a decade.
The government says it is arresting cartel members and destroying drug labs at nearly four times the rate of the previous government. As a result, government data shows that homicides have fallen 22% so far this year from last, to their lowest level in a decade, and violent robberies are down 15%.
“We’re not saying the problem is solved,” Harfuch said in his first on-the-record interview with the international media since becoming Mexico’s minister of security last year. But, he added, “what we’re doing is hitting the criminal structure at the bottom, in the middle and at the top.”
His early success has helped mollify Washington. With Harfuch as the point person with U.S. security agencies, intelligence sharing has surged between the two countries, and President Donald Trump has shifted his attention to drug traffickers in South America instead of Mexico.
Yet Mexico’s history says the smart money is on the cartels. Their criminal empires have outlasted everything past governments have thrown at them.
While murders and robberies are down, reports of extortion, kidnappings and disappearances are up. And polls show that since Sheinbaum took office, the percentage of Mexicans who say they feel unsafe has increased by almost 5 percentage points, to 63% of the country.
“Changing the perception in 14 months is more complex,” Harfuch said from his heavily guarded office in Mexico City.
Security analysts say that while Harfuch deserves credit for his progress, Mexico’s cartels are too powerful, too rich, too heavily armed and too deeply entrenched in the political system to eradicate.
“We have the best security secretary we could have,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a former Mexican security official and one of the country’s most prominent security consultants. “But frankly, it seems to me that the problem of organized crime has already surpassed Mexico’s institutional capacities.”
Harfuch, 43, has consolidated control of Mexico’s security strategy unlike any of his predecessors, analysts said. He has direct leadership of a small but growing investigative force. He has influence over federal prosecutors, intelligence agencies and the armed forces. And he has deep support from Sheinbaum to set the agenda. (He was her security chief when she was Mexico City’s mayor.)
“Omar is the undisputed leader of the security strategy in Mexico, not the military commanders,” Guerrero said. “He is a sort of security czar that we haven’t had before.”
With that remit, Harfuch has acted decisively. In the first 14 months of the Sheinbaum administration, Mexican authorities say they have arrested nearly 39,000 people for violent crimes, seized 20,000 guns and destroyed 1,760 drug labs.
Over an average 14 months under the previous administration, authorities made 10,400 such arrests, seized 8,300 guns and destroyed 445 labs.
The approach is a stark contrast to the “hugs not bullets” strategy of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and ally, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who sought to address root causes instead of the violence itself. The new government has deployed thousands of security forces to patrol cartel strongholds and execute surgical strikes.
That has helped ingratiate Harfuch to Washington. Trump administration officials have praised U.S.-Mexico security cooperation under his watch.
John Creamer, the U.S. Embassy’s former No. 2 official in Mexico, said that as a no-nonsense former cop with years of experience working with U.S. agencies, Harfuch has calmed U.S. officials who were concerned about Mexico’s capability to combat the cartels.
“He’s uniquely suited within the Mexican government to repair some of the bilateral relations that were damaged in the last few years and build constructive ties going forward,” Creamer said.
Harfuch is the son of a prominent actress and a former labor secretary. His grandfather was the defense secretary during the Mexican government’s massacre of perhaps hundreds of student protesters in 1968.
Harfuch climbed the ranks of the federal police before leading Mexico City’s security. Under his watch, the city’s murder rate fell by roughly 40%, according to government data. The press nicknamed him Batman for his crime fighting.
He was elected senator when Sheinbaum sought the presidency but instead joined her administration. Now he is widely viewed as the government’s second most powerful official — and the natural successor as president when Sheinbaum’s term ends in 2030.
In the interview, Harfuch spoke in measured words and technical details. He cited local crime stats from memory. And he repeatedly made the point that Sheinbaum was in charge. When asked why this government would succeed when others had failed, he replied, “That’s because they didn’t have the president.”
Twice during the interview, a red telephone on his desk rang. Harfuch said it was a direct line to Sheinbaum, and he hurried to take the calls.
Sheinbaum leads a Cabinet meeting focused on security every weekday at 6 a.m., Harfuch said.
“For years, I’ve had to sit at tables where it was, ‘Let’s coordinate,’ and it was just ...” he said, waving his hands in the air. Now they bear down on statistics, he said, and call local officials when they spot trends of violence.
“We ask, ‘How many arrest warrants do you have for those drivers of violence? As the federal government, we’ll help you detain them,’” Harfuch said. “There isn’t a single governor who doesn’t support this security strategy.”
Harfuch said their multipronged strategy focuses on bolstering intelligence to more precisely target operations, strengthening investigators and prosecutors to secure more convictions and coordinating action across federal and state security forces.
The results have been a drop in violent crime, though by how much is debated. Harfuch frequently cites a 37% decline in the daily murder rate from when Sheinbaum took office last year. But some analysts dispute that approach, and instead point to government data that shows the 21,743 homicides through November are 22% fewer than the same period last year.
Still, not everything is improving. Kidnappings and extortion are each up 3% this year, and disappearances are up 9%. Human rights groups have suggested the administration may be hiding homicides in the disappearances numbers. Harfuch denied that and said many missing people have been found.
The government has shown early success in its efforts to fracture the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s most infamous criminal groups. Yet at the same time, Mexico’s other criminal juggernaut, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, has appeared to gain ground.
“Weakening one cartel, of course, strengthens the other,” Harfuch said. “Sorry for stating the obvious.”