MEXICO CITY (AP) — For the last six years, Mexico bragged about its oft-questioned “hugs, not bullets” strategy, in which its leaders avoided confrontations with drug cartels that were gradually taking control of large parts of the country. The thinking was that social programs, not shootouts, would gradually drain the pool of cartel gunmen.
Now, a month into the term of new President Claudia Sheinbaum, a string of bloody confrontations suggests the government is quietly abandoning the “no bullets” part of that strategy and is much more willing to use the full force of the military and the militarized National Guard.
But the challenge Mexico now faces is different from that during the country’s 2006-2012 drug war. Cartels today are more diversified, more deeply entrenched in migrant smuggling and more willing to use foreign recruits and adolescents to fill their ranks.
All of that has led to a string of violent clashes in which security forces who shoot at suspected drug cartel convoys wind up killing bystanders and migrants, and reporting lopsided death tolls in which soldiers aren’t harmed but most of the suspects are wiped out.
Sheinbaum has studiously avoided using the “hugs, not bullets” slogan popularized by her predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office on Sept. 30. She has, after all, pledged to continue each and every one of López Obrador’s policies. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.
But Sheinbaum has had to perform some verbal gymnastics to avoid disowning the policy entirely.
“Clearly, it isn’t a question of hugs for criminals, nobody has ever said that,” Sheinbaum said soon after taking office. The hugs, she said, were meant for impoverished youths, to avoid having them recruited as cartel gunmen.
“There are traces of a change in tone toward organized crime, but it’s too early to call,” said Falko Ernst, a security analyst. “It seems unlikely that the Sheinbaum administration would risk a politically inconvenient, steady stream of violent imagery by betting on wholesale balazos (bullets)-only strategy,” but there may be more willingness to confront “the most overt and brazen displays of power” by the cartels.
But it is hard to imagine Sheinbaum issuing public praise for drug lords for behaving themselves, or saying — as López Obrador did — that she will “tell on them to their fathers and grandfathers” if they cause too much violence.
She has also been unwilling to tolerate criminals taking police and soldiers hostage, or to crow about reductions in Mexico’s “lethality index” — the measure of suspects killed, wounded or taken into custody, versus casualties on the law enforcement side — the way her predecessor did.
López Obrador famously called off the 2019 arrest of drug lord Ovidio Guzmán, and ordered his release, after his Sinaloa cartel threatened to plunge the northern city of Culiacan into chaos to win his freedom. López Obrador said he made the decision to avoid bloodshed.
Sheinbaum’s administration has been a tad different. On her first day in office, soldiers in the southern state of Chiapas opened fire on a truck that “looked like one used by criminal groups.” But after shooting up the truck, they found only migrants, six of whom were killed and 10 wounded.
Ten days later, army and National Guard troops killed three innocent bystanders as they were pursuing suspected gunmen. And this weekend, the National Guard opened fire on a truck carrying migrants, killing two Colombians and wounding at least four.
Then there are the lopsided death tolls: López Obrador always criticized previous administrations for shootouts in which all the suspects were killed, and very few were taken alive. But in Sheinbaum’s third week in office, soldiers in Sinaloa killed 19 drug cartel suspects and arrested one in a confrontation, but suffered not a scratch themselves.
And toward the end of her first month in office, soldiers pursuing cartel gunmen who had killed two local policemen killed 17 of them but lost no soldiers. Most of the dead, and 10 of the 15 gunmen arrested in the confrontation, were Guatemalan.
“The hugs not bullets strategy ended some time ago,” said security analyst David Saucedo, pointing to an increased number of high-level drug arrests and extraditions of suspects. “The U.S. government pressured Andrés Manuel López Obrador to resume the capture of high-level drug lords.”
One of the key differences Sheinbaum faces is that Mexican cartels have gotten involved in the lucrative trade of smuggling migrants from far-away countries.
In the old days, the cartels took a cut from smugglers moving Central Americans, who used to make up the vast majority of those crossing Mexico to reach the United States. Those migrants paid hundreds or a few thousand dollars apiece.
Since smugglers opened up a new route through the Darien Gap, people from farther away have been crossing Mexico, and they can pay far higher smuggling fees.
Simultaneously, an immigration crackdown in the U.S. and Mexico has meant a significant number of Central and South Americans now have no avenue to get into the United States, said military analyst Juan Ibarrola, noting, “It is big business, and it is a far more profitable business than drugs.”
Ibarrola claims the cartels are now using migrants both as human shields, and sometimes as cannon fodder for their squads of hitmen.
“The recruitment of larger batches of foreign fighters is yet another sign of the gradual deepening of Mexico’s armed conflicts,” said Ernst. “Left unchecked — much like the employment of homemade explosive devices — it’s a trend that’s been allowed to expand.”
Expand is exactly what the cartels did during López Obrador’s six-year term from late 2018 to 2024.
“For six years we were ruled by the policies of a president who did not understand, or who did not realize, that the worst thing he could have done, the worst error he could have made, was not to use legal force against criminal violence,” said Ibarrola, who is convinced the policy has now changed.
The other problem Sheinbaum faces is the result of her determination to continue with López Obrador’s strategy of militarizing Mexican law enforcement — essentially giving soldiers a task they weren’t trained to do.
Together with the mix of migrants and drug traffickers, it seems almost a certain recipe for more deaths of innocent bystanders.
“It is a fact that the National Guard does not correctly apply the rules of engagement on the use of force,” said Saucedo. “They tend to open fire before investigating or trying to detain criminal suspects.”
Backdropped the Tajumulco volcano, migrants walk along the Huixtla highway, in southern Mexico, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, hoping to reach the country's northern border and ultimately the United States. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
FILE - President Claudia Sheinbaum holds hands with outgoing President Andres Manuel López Obrador after taking the oath of office in the lower chamber of Congress, in Mexico City, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File)
Security agents and experts work the scene where a car bomb exploded near a police station, in Acambaro, Guanajuato state, Mexico, Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Armando Solis)
FILE - Mexico's President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum and outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attend an anniversary event at the Zocalo in Mexico City, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
President Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks to the nation in what will be his first appearance on camera in the aftermath of Donald Trump ’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris.
Control over the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance, teetering between a Republican or Democratic majority with dozens of races left to be called.
The Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate early Wednesday.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest:
Independent Sen. Angus King won a third term in the U.S. Senate representing Maine on Thursday, turning back challenges from a former Republican state party chair and a Democratic environmental activist.
The 80-year-old former governor would be the oldest senator from Maine to serve if he completes his term, which ends in 2030, but he wasn't dogged by questions about his age like President Joe Biden, the former Democratic presidential nominee. King caucuses with Democrats and was first elected to the Senate in 2012. The Associated Press declared King the winner at 10:14 a.m. EST.
Donald Trump won the presidency after holding tight to his core base of voters and slightly expanding his coalition to include several groups that have traditionally been part of the Democratic base. That finding comes from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide that shows what issues mattered to voters in this election.
Trump picked up a small but significant share of Black and Hispanic voters and made narrow gains with men and women. As Trump chipped away at parts of the Democratic coalition, Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t able to make enough of her own gains.
Trump succeeded in locking down his traditionally older, white base of voters, and he slightly expanded his margins with other groups into a winning coalition.
▶ Read more about how five key demographic groups voted
Around 50 European leaders on Thursday called for a stronger defense posture across the continent that no longer necessitates a fundamental dependence on Washington as they gave a guarded welcome to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
The European Political Community summit on Thursday in Hungary’s capital of Budapest reassessed trans-Atlantic relations in the hope that Trump’s second U.S. presidency will avoid the strife of his first administration.
“He was elected by the American people. He will defend the American interests,” French President Emmanuel Macron told the other leaders, adding that it was not the role of European Union leaders to “comment on the election ... to wonder if it is good or not.”
“The question is whether we are willing to defend the European interest. It is the only question. It is our priority,” Macron said.
There are concerns, too, that the robust military aid Ukraine has enjoyed under President Joe Biden will be cut under Trump, particularly if Republicans take control of the House.
▶ Read more about how European leaders are responding to Trump’s election
Federal Reserve officials are poised Thursday to reduce their key interest rate for a second straight time, responding to a steady slowdown of inflation pressures that exasperated many Americans and contributed to Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
Yet the Fed’s future moves are now more uncertain in the aftermath of the election, given that Trump’s economic proposals have been widely flagged as potentially inflationary. His election has also raised the specter of meddling by the White House in the Fed’s policy decisions, with Trump having proclaimed that as president he should have a voice in the central bank’s interest rate decisions.
The Fed has long guarded its status as an independent institution able to make difficult decisions about borrowing rates, free from political interference. Yet during his previous term in the White House, Trump publicly attacked Chair Jerome Powell after the Fed raised rates to fight inflation, and he may do so again.
▶ Read more about interest rate cuts
Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, social media users began pushing two conflicting narratives to suggest election fraud, one that revived false claims by Trump that the 2020 vote was stolen from him and the other questioning how Vice President Kamala Harris could have received so many fewer votes in 2024 than President Joe Biden in 2020.
Both narratives hinge on a supposed 20 million vote gap between Harris and Biden.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: President Joe Biden won approximately 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris earned in the 2024 race, proving either that Trump has cheated his way to a second term or that there was widespread fraud four years ago.
THE FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison with previous races would not be accurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote have reported no significant issues with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been debunked countless times.
▶ Read more on this fact focus
Iranians, like many around the world, are divided on what Donald Trump’s next presidency will bring: Some foresee an all-out war between Tehran and Washington, particularly as other conflicts rage in the region. Others hold out hope that America’s 47th president might engage in unexpected diplomacy as he did with North Korea.
But nearly all believe something will change in the U.S.-Iran relationship.
And while Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all matters of state, has repeatedly expressed his own disgust with Trump, Iran’s new reformist president has kept the door open to talks with Trump to seek relief from international sanctions to buoy a cratering economy. The Iranian rial, in a free fall for years, hit its lowest value against the dollar on Wednesday before slightly recovering.
▶ Read more about the response in Iran to Trump’s election win
Trump’s second term could realign U.S. diplomacy away from traditional international alliances and more toward populist, authoritarian politicians, according to both those leaders and outside observers.
Among them are:
▶ Read more about these leaders and their diplomatic approaches
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders did not mince words in a scathing statement Wednesday.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders, Vermont’s senior senator, said.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” Sanders said.
Sanders won reelection to a fourth term on Tuesday. He singled out wealth inequality, a slipping standard of living in the U.S., a lack of full health care guarantees and support for Israel’s recent military campaigns as problems Democrats need to focus on. Sanders’s 2016 presidential run was a key factor in pushing the dialogue in the Democratic party to the left. Sanders has built his political career outside — and often criticizing — the Democratic Party, but he caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.
“At the start of his mandate, we wish him much wisdom because this is the main virtue of rulers according to the Bible,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin said, speaking on the sidelines of a Rome conference on Thursday, according to Vatican News.
While acknowledging no one had a “magic wand” to end wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Parolin said the Holy See hoped Trump “can indeed be an element of détente and pacification in the current conflicts that are bleeding the world.”
Parolin also said he hoped Trump would work to end polarization in the U.S., including over abortion. On migration, he recalled Pope Francis’ call to welcome those fleeing wars, poverty and climate change.
After visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016 and asked about Trump’s call to build a wall, Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants was “not Christian.”
More recently, Francis recommended U.S. voters choose the “lesser evil” when asked how a U.S. Catholic should vote given Trump’s pledge to deport migrants and Vice President Kamala Harris’ support of abortion rights.
“I have long admired the United States of America as the champion of democracy, freedom and the rule of law,” the Tibetan spiritual leader said in a message to Trump from the northern Indian town of Dharamshala where he has lived in exile since fleeing Tibet in 1959.
“The Tibetan people and I have been honored to have received the support of respective U.S. Presidents and the American people, in our endeavor to protect and preserve our ancient Buddhist culture — a culture of peace, non-violence and compassion that has the potential to benefit humanity as a whole,” he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conveyed his hopes in a call for strengthened cooperation between their two countries during Trump’s new term in office, according to a statement from the Turkish president’s office.
Trump’s impending return to the White House means he’ll want to stand up an entirely new administration from the one that served under President Joe Biden. His team is also pledging that the second won’t look much like the first one Trump established after his 2016 victory.
The president-elect now has a 75-day transition period to build out his team before Inauguration Day arrives on Jan. 20. One top item on the to-do list: filling around 4,000 government positions with political appointees, people who are specifically tapped for their jobs by Trump’s team.
That includes everyone from the secretary of state and other heads of Cabinet departments to those selected to serve part-time on boards and commissions. Around 1,200 of those presidential appointments require Senate confirmation, which should be easier with the Senate now shifting to Republican control.
▶ Read more about Trump’s transition
The House contests remain a tit-for-tat fight to the finish, with no dominant pathway to the majority for either party. Rarely, if ever, have the two chambers of Congress flipped in opposite directions.
Each side is gaining and losing a few seats, including through the redistricting process, which is the routine redrawing of House seat boundary lines. The process reset seats in North Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama.
Much of the outcome hinges on the West, particularly in California, where a handful of House seats are being fiercely contested, and mail-in ballots arriving a week after the election will still be counted. Hard-fought races around the “blue dot” in Omaha, Nebraska and in far-flung Alaska are among those being watched.
With a win in Wisconsin early Wednesday, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. But his exact margin of victory is still unclear — there are two presidential races that the AP has yet to call:
Arizona: Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County said late Wednesday they’ve got more than 700,000 ballots left to count, which means the races for president and senate were too early to call. In all, AP estimates there are at least a million ballots to be added to the results in Arizona. County election officials are expected to firm up those numbers on Thursday.
Nevada: AP estimated late Wednesday evening that there are more than 200,000 ballots left to count in Nevada — including more than 130,000 in Clark County. Given the narrow margins in the races for president and U.S. Senate, both are too early to call. The AP will further review results released by Nevada election officials on Thursday.
Arizona: Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County said late Wednesday they’ve got more than 700,000 ballots left to count, which means the races for president and senate were too early to call. In all, AP estimates there are at least a million ballots to be added to the results in Arizona. County election officials are expected to firm up those numbers on Thursday.
Nevada: AP estimated late Wednesday evening that there are more than 200,000 ballots left to count in Nevada — including more than 130,000 in Clark County. Given the narrow margins in the races for president and U.S. Senate, both are too early to call. The AP will further review results released by Nevada election officials on Thursday.
The U.S. House majority hung in the balance Wednesday, teetering between Republican control that would usher in a new era of unified GOP governance in Washington or a flip to Democrats as a last line of resistance to a Trump second-term White House agenda.
A few individual seats, or even a single one, will determine the outcome. Final tallies will take a while, likely pushing the decision into next week — or beyond.
After Republicans swept into the majority in the U.S. Senate by picking up seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted his chamber would fall in line next.
“Republicans are poised to have unified government in the White House, Senate and House,” Johnson said Wednesday.
▶ Read more about control of Congress
The remarks to the nation will be Biden’s first appearance on camera in the aftermath of Trump’s decisive victory over Harris.
Donald Trump spent his first day as president-elect receiving congratulatory phone calls from his defeated opponent, world leaders and President Joe Biden as he began the process of turning his election victory into a government.
Trump was keeping a low profile, staying out of the public eye after addressing supporters in Florida during the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump to concede the race and to congratulate him, while Biden invited the man he ousted from the White House four years ago to an Oval Office meeting to prepare to return the keys.
Biden’s chief of staff later Wednesday nudged the Trump team to sign the required federal agreements necessary to begin an orderly presidential transition, a White House official said.
▶ Revisit how the news unfolded with Wednesday’s live coverage
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris shake hands before the start of an ABC News presidential debate at the National Constitution Center, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Joe Biden speaks to union laborers about his administration's support for unions in Philadelphia, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech after the 2024 presidential election, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, stand on stage at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
