Even as swathes of western Mexico descended into drug-fueled violence, the rugged sierra and pristine beaches of Mexico’s Nayarit state appeared insulated from the bloodshed.
While murder rates rose precipitously in the rest of the country, crime figures showed a miraculous drop in the state – an achievement lauded by Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, when he visited the state in February and praised “a more than 50% reduction in the level of insecurity”.
Much of that success was attributed to Edgar Veytía, the state prosecutor who was lauded by a prominent anti-kidnap group and lionized his own ballad as a “hero” and “brave man” who “fearlessly applies the law”.
It seemed too good to be true – and it was.
Veytía was arrested on drug trafficking charges last week as he crossed the border to the San Diego, California, area, where his family resided and he visited every two weeks.
Analysts say that the arrest arouses suspicions that rather than fending off the worst of Mexico’s narco violence through luck or prudent public policy, the state instead achieved the illusory peace of a pax mafiosa.
“The message is terrible,” wrote columnist Diego Petersen Farah in the Guadalajara newspaper El Informador. “To get results in security you have to hand over the drugs market [to the mafia]. Nayarit put the safety of the state in the hands of organized crime – and in the short term, it worked.”
Accusations that a top anti-crime figure was acting in cahoots with organized crime has caused disquiet in Mexico, where the militarized war against cartels has dragged on for a decade, despite the killing and capture of dozens of crime capos and cartel kingpins.
The violence has cost some 200,000 lives and shows little sign of ending soon.
Nayarit, however, was seen as a success story by locals and outsiders: in 2016, it ranked at No 2 on the Mexico Peace Index, a survey by the Institute for Economics and Peace thinktank. It also showed the largest of improvement of any state between 2011 and 2013, according to the index.
According to official security statistics, the state – with a population of 1.1 million – reported just 700 crimes in the first two months of 2017 – the second lowest among Mexico’s 31 states.
But Nayarit has always been a strategic corridor for moving illegal merchandise north said Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, which monitors state crime statistics and expressed suspicions over Nayarit’s extraordinary success. “The numbers just didn’t square,” he said.
Rivas pointed to an especially suspicious drop in the homicide rate – from 40 per 100,000 residents in 2011 (the height of a battle over the state by rival cartels) to just 3 per 100,000 residents in 2016.
“I once asked [Veytía] ‘What’s your secret?’ Rivas recalled. “I said ‘you shouldn’t be a state prosecutor; you should be president of Mexico!’ He couldn’t respond.”
Veytía is far from the Mexican crime crusader to come under scrutiny for alleged ties to drug cartels. General José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, the country’s highest anti-narcotics in the late 1990s, was long considered incorruptible, but was convicted in 1997 of working for the Juárez Cartel.
Veytía has not entered a plea. Nayarit governor Roberto Sandoval told Mexican media he was unaware of any untoward activities in his administration and insisted: “We will continue to be one of the safest states.”
Mexican media have long alleged links between Veytía and the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG), which has expanded rapidly in recent years and gained a reputation for brutality.
Alongside the violence, however, the CJNG has also systematically infiltrated state and local governments in western Mexico.
Some analysts argue that alleged cartel infiltration in Nayarit underlines the shortcomings in a government strategy which concentrates on the pursuit of kingpins, but seldom subjects political figures to scrutiny.
“What’s lacking in this country is an acceptance that the political class is behind organised crime,” Petersen said. “There’s no way organised crime exists without state support.”
