On October 17, during his tour of the country to thank voters for his election, President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador [aka AMLO] announced that he has made some progress on his security plan that he will present at the end of this month.
Specifically, he announced that to face the insecurity and violence, the country will be divided into 265 regions, each of which will have all security forces coordinated by a Single Command. He stated that 600 security agents will be assigned to the most dangerous regions and 300 for those with low crime rates.
MV Note: This announcement was included in a longer article about AMLO's choices for Secretary of Defense (Army and Airforce) and Secretary of the Navy. As it appears to presage a major attempt to unify all the forces being used in the war against the drug cartels, we are publishing it as a separate post.
"All security forces" apparently means the military forces of the Army and Marines, together with federal, state and municipal police forces. Mexico is composed of thirty-one states and Mexico City. The states are divided into municipalities, of which there are a total of 2,448 in the country. For Army operations, the country is divided into twelve regions, further divided into forty-five zones. How the proposed 265 regions and their boundaries have been defined is unknown.
Coordinated command centers have been previously established in some parts of the country, and the Peña Nieto administration made extensive efforts to create a single or unified police force in each state, subject to federal direction. Resistance to this by state governors led to the creation of "mixed" police commands in which governors may opt to take over municipal police departments deemed non-functional and the federal government may, similarly, intervene in the management of state police departments deemed non-functional. At one point, the Peña Nieto government also announced it had divided the country into five regions for coordinated planning and action in the war against the cartels.Spanish original
See also: López Obrador Government Sets Goal to Reduce Homicides 30% by End of 2021: What Needs to Be Done to Achieve That Result? by México Evalúa published in Ánimal Político, October 18, 2018.