At four o’clock in the afternoon on October 17, 2019, the Mexican city of Culiacán, capital of the northeastern state of Sinaloa, erupted in gunfire. Minutes before, in the exclusive Tres Ríos district, members of the army and National Guard had arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, son of the jailed former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán (“El Chapo”), and one of the organization’s new generation of leaders.

The response was immediate: taking to the streets, cartel members fired rounds of automatic weapons from trucks and blocked intersections with burning vehicles, all in a bid to sow chaos. Surrounding the armed forces involved in the raid, they cut off access on the three bridges leading out of the area.

Over the radio frequencies used by the police and the army, the cartel proceeded to announce that, if Guzmán was not freed, it would take revenge against both the family members of those participating and the general public. Following hasty deliberations, the federal security cabinet decided to go ahead and release Guzmán, a decision approved by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

The response from the Mexican right was equally apoplectic and hypocritical. With no apparent irony, Marko Cortés, leader of the National Action Party (PAN), came to the remarkable conclusion that Mexico is a “failed state” that is “experiencing one of its worst episodes in the combat against delinquency.” While stating his party’s intention to sue AMLO for freeing Guzmán, Cortés stated that “the Mexican State was subdued, brought to its knees, humiliated by organized crime.”

Not to be outdone, elements of the military also got in on the game: in a case of rank insubordination, General Carlos Demetrio Gaytán Ochoa declared: “We feel insulted as Mexicans and offended as soldiers.” Going on to question the “strategic decisions” of the president, Gaytán Ochoa stated: “We are currently living in a politically polarized society because the dominant ideology . . . is based on currents from the so-called left, which accumulated a large amount of resentment over the years.”

Conveniently omitted from such vociferations were several key points. First, that President Felipe Calderón was the one who launched his homicidal, so-called war on drugs in the first place, which saw over 121,000 killed in his administration alone. Second, that Calderón himself oversaw the freeing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, under similar siege circumstances in 2012. And third, according to investigative journalist Anabel Hernández, Calderón’s government was in fact an active supporter of the Sinaloa Cartel by means of his all-powerful federal police force.

But history hardly matters when the goal is to make AMLO look weak in the fight against organized crime, the captain of a nation that is slipping out of his control.

None of this is to imply that what happened in Culiacán is above criticism. In the government’s own analysis, provided by secretary of defense Luis Cresencio Sandoval González the following day, the operation was conducted “precipitously, with deficient planning and a failure to provide for the consequences of the intervention.” In light of the fact that the Sinaloa Cartel is the third most powerful criminal organization in the world, with a presence in eighty-one countries, sending such a small squadron down the streets of its head city to arrest a capo’s son was naive in the extreme. As if to underscore the point, one of the state police officers that supported the operation was gunned down in a hail of over 150 bullets outside of a shopping center on November 4.

Equally problematic was the government’s handling of communications. In a video released hours after the operation, secretary of public safety Alfonso Durazo stated that a “routine patrol” was fired upon from a house that turned out to have Ovidio Guzmán inside, an account that was subsequently refuted by footage showing the military caravan approaching its target area deliberately.

In stark contrast with previous administrations, however (Durazo, for his part, promptly rectified the mistake the following day), was AMLO’s openness, transparency, willingness to admit errors, and frank admission that saving innocent lives — or, to borrow a favorite term from the Calderón era, “collateral damage” — was more important than having yet one more head to perp before the cameras.

As analyst Edgardo Buscaglia pointed out in an interview with Carmen Aristegui, the problem in Sinaloa is not one of simple criminal delinquency, but about the abandonment by the state of its core functions:

This organization is made up of politicians, it’s made up of businesspeople, it’s made up of trade unionists, it’s made up of civil-society front groups. It’s an organization that, when you arrive at the airport in Culiacán, the taxis that come by belong to the Sinaloa Cartel in many cases. So we are talking about a state within a state that provides employment, that provides quasi-social goods, delivers water, establishes health centers.

Buscaglia concludes: “In this type of case [such as Culiacán], mechanisms of disinformation are generated in order to generate political instability.” And there is the rub: at a time of remarkable political upheaval in Latin America, the Mexican right cynically attempted to use a crisis of its own making in an attempt to destabilize AMLO, using the citizenry as hostages to its ploys.