Why does local law enforcement here seem so ineffective?
About ten days ago, a close friend I’ll call Tom, was carjacked and kidnapped as he returned to his ranch early in the afternoon, on a road near our ranch.
During the attack the assailants busted the driver side window, yanked him out and shoved him into an older white SUV and, apparently trying to disorient him, drove around for about an hour. They warned Tom to keep his eyes closed though he quickly figured they were headed to somewhere near Los Rodríguez, a wreck of a town about ten miles outside San Miguel.
In addition to his pickup and a cargo of construction materials, including two two-ton split-level air conditioning units, Tom lost his phone, all the contents of his wallet, except for the hard-to-replace immigration card, plus one shoe and one hearing aid. That left him with $19 pesos in his pocket, or about one dollar.
Tom was dropped off in an open field and after 15 minutes hitched a ride to Los Rodríguez from a field worker returning home on his motorcycle. Tom used the $19 pesos to take a bus into San Miguel, where he went to the home of a couple of friends where he made a few phone calls. His friends drove him back to his ranch.
“It was quite the 24 hours,” Tom wrote on a email to us and several other friends and relatives. Stew and I were relieved that between his truck and possibly his life, Tom made the right choice.
Fans of TV’s iconic cop show “Law and Order,” in which stone-faced detectives follow leads and catch criminals with the determination of hound dogs chasing a rabbit, will be disappointed that San Miguel’s law enforcement squad doesn’t work at all like that. In fact, most times it hardly functions at all.
A 2021 study by Global Press Journal found that only 1.1 percent of crimes in Mexico are conclusively investigated and resolved. Indeed the vast majority are not even reported by victims who believe to do so is a waste of time.
In one incident three years ago near near our ranch, a young father was shot and left paralyzed when he tried to stop a drunken brawl during the town’s annual fiesta. His wife told me she didn’t plan to report the shooting. “It wouldn’t do any good,” she told me. “Somebody probably would get paid off and nothing would happen.”
In the case of Tom’s carjacking/kidnapping, the police might recover the stolen vehicle but the chances that the merchandise aboard, alone worth several thousand dollars, will be recovered are virtually zero, as is the possibility the assailants will be captured, prosecuted or spend any time in jail.
According to the local rumor mill, the crime is the work of a carjacking ring from nearby Querétaro, who have a contact in the motor vehicle bureau there that “launders” the registration and other documentation of stolen vehicles that will appear at a used car lot within a week.
One wonders if prospective buyers will ask about the bullet holes in the Tom’s pickup souvenirs of a previous carjacking attempt, some people suspect carried out by the same gang of thugs.
When such horror stories reach the expat community, the response too often is wishful denial that almost rings like blaming the victim, as in “Well, that happens over there (in a rural area or a “bad neighborhood” far from my house).” Or “who would be crazy enough to drive after dark? Not me,” others would say.
Truth is that such incidents take place all over town at all hours of the day. Rather than being desolate, the road past our ranch in fact has two major housing subdivisions under construction and the music venue called Zandunga that hosts frequent concerts. Even Mauricio Trejo, the current mayor of San Miguel has an impressive ranch near us that includes an extensive vineyard.
I can only speculate why law enforcement here is so ineffective. Corruption could be a factor, including the continuing tradition of “mordidas” or bribes. Or perhaps that police officers’ salaries are too low to attract qualified personnel. Incompetent leadership and organization could be to blame too. Or maybe officers fear retaliation if they pursue criminals too zealously. Some blame the inefficiency caused by overlapping and conflicting police jurisdictions.
A common response by newly elected municipal administrations to perennial complaints about public safety is to purchase flashy hardware. So we have state and local police drive around on motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, pickup trucks armed with machine guns mounted on top, new patrol cars—all of them with their red-and-blue lights constantly flashing. After some public snickering a few years ago that bandits driving a fast car got away from the cops, the city promptly purchased two Ford Mustangs with 5.0 liter engines.
There is even a contraption locals call “the spider” stationed at one of the roads into town, that consists of an observation booth that can be raised or lowered by a scissor-like mechanism, and from which officers presumably can spot criminals at a distance. Impressive, though not particularly reassuring, is the surfeit of machine gun-like weapons, some incongruously large compared to the young officers wielding them, even at routine traffic checkpoints.
During the past few years closed-circuit cameras also have become ubiquitous throughout San Miguel, even on the road to Los Rodríguez. Félix, our in-house forensics consultant, says the police might use some of that video footage to track Tom’s car and the one used by his kidnappers. In fact, the cops took Tom to where the carjackers left him near Los Rodriguez and said they would search the video for any clues.
The cynic in me whispers doubts: Such investigation would require more enterprise and perspicacity than the local gendarmerie normally displays.
For the time being, Stew and I will continue to, yes, avoid driving at night, and at the sight of a car blocking the road ahead, make a quick U-turn and tromp on the gas, especially if we’re driving our still-shiny 2018 Chevy Colorado pickup, supposedly a prime target of carjackers.
Above all we’ll remember a skit by Jack Benny, who played a miserly guy and is confronted by a mugger who demands “your money or your life!” After a long pause Benny replies, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
That may be funny but not in real life. You can always replace a vehicle. Your life, not so much. Tom made the right move.
El Rancho Santa Clara 
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div dir=”ltr”>Hi Al,
Thank you for posting this. If you just read Atencion, or listen to local scuttlebut and the Mayor, you would think SMA was the safest place one could possibly live. And adding all these new policemen and the cars and scooters which must cost a fortune
one would think we had things under control. It is so reassuring to see all this showmanship and again, visitors feel safe as do many residents.
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div>Just not true. There are murders, robberies, car jackings, etc. every week here but nothing is done and most go unreported. Don’t want to loose th
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Well, yes that is typical chamber of commerce blather, so as to not scare the horses, the tourists and destination wedding business which is huge and critical to San Miguel who doesn’t have any factories or other economic resources. As a former newspaper man, though, the lack of accurate information here is really maddening. I haven’t checked Atencion recently but they used to public a small chart of crime statistics, for all that’s worth.
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Such a shame, Al. You and Stu have it good in so many aspects – practically every aspect – except . . .
I was looking into warm weather places to visit during the early months of 2024 and Oaxaca hit the top of my list. I was just about to rent the AirBnB for a couple months when those folks from the US got kidnapped in a boarder town and two of the four ended up dead. Then Mexico had an election. Then I thought that no matter how safe Oaxaca is purported to be, it could all turn on a dime and I don;t want to find myself stuck in a bad situation all by myself. Plans have changed and I am no longer going to visit Mexico.
What sucks worse? Travel advisories issued by the NAACP, Human Rights Campaign, and LULAC – the League of United Latin American Citizens warning that Florida is unsafe for certain folks travel activities. Holy moley, I’ve been going to a nice little spot in the Keys for the past two winters! Sigh. What a world. . .
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What sucks worse? I don’t know what to tell you, except just to play the odds and trust your luck. Sitting here in Mexico we hear about constant mass shootings in the U.S. yet we can’t give up on traveling north. Oaxaca is a beautiful place, and I wouldn’t give up on it!
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Alas, Oaxaca is probably a dream that will remain unrealized in this lifetime. I’ve steadily been losing strength and stamina with the cancer’s progression, so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t schedule to go. I don’t know, for sure, that I’d be up to it physically – alone.
I got a reservation to go back to the Keys. A cloistered little women’s only community that began its’ life as a lesbian commune in the 1970s. Fun history. Safe. I have friends there and it’s going to be good to see them for another winter despite my wanderlust to go elsewhere.
Be well and stay safe – both of you!
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Sorry to hear about your limitations but Key West should be good. Haven’t been there in ages. Good luck.
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since we also know “Tom”, and since we commonly drive at night in the city of San Miguel, we’ve always felt safe, but this story might finally cause us to use a little common sense.
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I don’t know what “common sense” Tom could have used, because the robbery and kidnapping took place just outside a fairly large town, in broad daylight. Like Gary Denness mentioned in the previous comment, you end up accepting the uselessness of law enforcement as just a fact of life.
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That’s a tough story, Al. I can’t think of an occasion in Mexico where I thought reporting something to the police was a productive way to spend my time. But that’s Mexico. I think most people move to Mexico with their eyes open to both the pros and cons of the country, Doesn’t make incidents like that any the more pleasant though. I hope ‘To’m’ is ok.
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You’ve got that right. Vehicle thefts are so common that they’ve become routine, but the kidnapping part of the show is what’s really scary. “Tom” is still on the mend mentally. This whole thing scared the hell out of him.
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That is a very disturbing story. It makes one question safety in Mexico. It seems one can not trust authorities to assist in an emergency. I know most Mexicans are trustworthy and honest but the police? Seems not so. I certainly feel for your neighbor and hope he’s doing well.
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It was a disturbing story, aggravated by the near-certainly that nothing is going to come up from the police investigation. My friend is still twisted in a knot over the whole thing. Stolen cars do show up occasionally but it’s either luck or the owner finding his own vehicle at a used-car lot in Queretaro or Celaya. The actual theft of the vehicle is aggravated by the kidnapping, which in the U.S. would be considered a very serious matter, even if the victim survives.
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This is beginning to sound like the old western days in the US 1800s and early 1900s. But the culture back then required that you protect your land, cattle, and assets, thereby you own a few rifles and shotguns and become a damn good marksman, Yes, my husband and I have concealed weapons permits maybe because we grew up on farms in Georgia which required protection of livestock from wolves or coyotes and rattlesnakes buried in our corn cribs. So, having guns locked in the gun cabinet is second nature to us. If landowners were allowed to own guns in Mexico, filled out all the paperwork to get a permit and register the guns, and subsequently become good marksmen, maybe the NON-WORKING police would not be as necessary and all they would do all day is fill out incident reports. But, alas, the Mexican government does not want the average citizen to own a gun, and the criminals know it.
My daughter-in-law’s father went to Viet Nam and came back with a lot of shratnel scars on his back, but bragged that he was never shot. Why? Because he was a Cracker Jack marksman with a rifle learned many years back on the farm. He said his forte was bringing down snipers from the trees as he moved through the jungle and practice makes perfect.
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Typo: “shrapnel” not “shratnel.”
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