On a sunny spring day last year, a young attorney named Gisela Gaytán kicked off her campaign for mayor in this gritty Mexican city.
Under her blouse she wore a ballistic vest.
Celaya had become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war, with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and a local police force that appeared powerless to stop it.
“We must recover the security that we so long for,” Gaytán, 38, wrote on social media before setting out that day.
As she shook hands at an event on the outskirts of town, a man approached, raised a gun and shot her in the head.
After her funeral, where a priest lamented “a death caused by murderers who believe they control society,” local Morena party leaders picked a new candidate: Juan Miguel Ramírez Sánchez, a bespectacled former university rector who had worked on Gaytán’s campaign.
Forensic personnel study the scene after candidate Gisela Gaytán was killedduring a rally on April 1, 2024, in Celaya, Guanajuato. (Oscar Ortega / AFP/Getty Images)
Ramírez believed that one of Celaya’s most urgent problems was its police, who instead of fighting organized crime appeared to be involved in it.
His son-in-law had been killed in a case that was still unsolved, and officers had demanded bribes and obstructed the investigation. Police misconduct was well documented: Local cops were prosecuted for abusing detainees and participating in kidnappings and even homicides.
Ramírez won the election. And in his first act as mayor, he fired 340 of the roughly 600 officers on the force. Then — as officials across Mexico have been doing for nearly two decades now — he called in federal troops.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón first deployed soldiers into the streets to fight drug traffickers in 2006, promising then that the military would stay only until police could be reformed.
In the years since, leaders across the political spectrum have repeatedly vowed to better train and root out corruption among the country’s cops — a step that security experts agree is essential to reducing crime and violence.
But with the exception of Mexico’s capital and a few other major cities, those efforts have lost steam. Officials have slashed funding for state and local police forces, and disbanded the federal police altogether. Cops continue to be near-universally reviled, with federal surveys showing that 9 out of 10 Mexicans don’t trust the police.
A missing person’s portrait is posted at the town hall in Celaya, Guanajuato.
At the same time, Mexico has vastly expanded the military’s role in public security. There are now more soldiers, marines and members of the national guard deployed nationally than state and local police officers, according to an analysis by the Citizen Security Program at the Universidad Iberoamericana. In most parts of the country, there are fewer state and local police today than there were when the drug war began in 2006.
“The police have been abandoned in favor of militarization,” said Ernesto López Portillo, a researcher who leads the Iberoamericana program.
There is little evidence that the strategy has worked. Homicides remain persistently high, although they have dipped slightly in recent years. And cartels have only expanded their reach, with a U.S. military analysis finding that criminal groups control more than one-third of Mexico.
A member of Mexico’s national guard patrols in Celaya.
Yet officials continue to embrace militarization as the country’s primary security strategy. That even includes leftists who once fiercely warned of the dangers of ceding public security to soldiers, including President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The mayor’s abrupt decision to summarily replace most of the police force in Celaya, a patchwork of farmland and factories in central Guanajuato state, is a case study in why Mexicans have lost faith in local law enforcement — and what happens when soldiers take over.
The historic center in Celaya, Guanajuato.
Celaya used to be a tranquil city. Its location along a highway and railroad that stretch 600 miles to the United States drew Honda and other automakers to build plants here.
For years, a local criminal group called the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel quietly stole fuel from the major oil pipelines that cross the region.
It wasn’t until the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel edged in several years ago that violence exploded. The groups battled for control of pipelines but also drug trafficking, extortion rackets and theft of cargo trucks.
Celaya became synonymous with violence as criminals gunned down shopkeepers who refused to pay extortion fees, drug users who couldn’t pay their dealers and everyday citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They carried out massacres at hotels, bars and even funerals.
By 2024, Celaya had a homicide rate of 87 killings per 100,000 people — 17 times the rate in the United States.
It had long been clear that the city’s police force was, at best, not up to the challenge — and, at worst, deeply corrupt.
Celaya police officers take an intensive course in radio communication at the city’s Municipal Institute of Police Training facility.
The 600 cops on the force in Celaya, which has a population of around half a million, were half of the 1,200 that the United Nations recommends for a city of its size. Officers were poorly trained and badly paid.
That made them easy targets for criminals who offered cash in exchange for intelligence, muscle or simply looking the other way when a crime was committed. When police didn’t cooperate — or didn’t cooperate correctly — they were often killed.
In 2024, a cop here was 400 times more likely to be killed than one in the United States.
Fanny Ramírez, the daughter of a street vendor and a maid, was 21 when she enrolled in Celaya’s police academy. After eight years with the force, she earned just $900 a month, little more than a worker on an assembly line. Her boyfriend was also a police officer in Celaya.
Fanny warned her family to steer clear of the cops, said her sister, Elisabeth. After Elisabeth’s husband witnessed a triple homicide several years ago, Fanny instructed him: “Go inside and say you don’t know anything.”
“The police are supposed to take care of you,” Elisabeth said. “But here, we have to protect ourselves from the police.”
Police Commander Ruben Pineda conducts an intensive course in radio communication at Celaya’s police training facility.
Mayor Ramírez wasn’t the first local politician to try to clean house. Previous leaders had made a show of purging dozens or even hundreds of police officers that they claimed were rotten.
But with most mayors serving just a single three-year term and scant public funds, reform efforts gained no traction. Experts say change takes time and requires concrete action to raise salaries, improve recruitment criteria and strengthen oversight.
On the national level, the approach to policing was inconsistent. Before he was elected president in 2018, López Obrador criticized his predecessors for replacing police with soldiers.
“We can’t use the military to make up for the civilian government’s shortcomings,” López Obrador insisted, vowing to send soldiers “back to their barracks.”
Angel Romero, center, an instructor in defense training, teaches cadets hand to hand combat. Cadets perform tactical rifle training to be officers. Marcos Alfredo Morales, an active municipal police officer of 20 years, instructs cadets in practical firearm usage.
On taking office, he changed his tune. Facing record high homicide rates, he released a security plan that argued that taking soldiers off the streets would be “disastrous” because cops were “controlled by organized crime and moved by self-interest and corruption.”
He dismantled the federal police, a famously corrupt force whose longtime leader was convicted in the U.S. of taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.
And López Obrador steered money once destined for local and state law enforcement to create a 120,000-officer-strong national guard, a force he vowed would be “incorruptible” and civilian-led, and which was supposed to take over the investigative functions of the federal police.
In fact, nearly 90% of the members of the national guard are former soldiers, and few have been trained to carry out investigations.
In Celaya, violence continued to spiral. And policing never improved.
Last year, about a month before the mayoral candidate was cut down with bullets, Fanny set out to drop her 6-year-old daughter off at child care before starting work. She was driving a sedan that belonged to her boyfriend.
Assailants opened fire. She and her daughter died on the spot. A few months later, Fanny’s boyfriend was gunned down, too.
Neither case has been solved, but Fanny’s sister believes the deaths were connected to the boyfriend’s ties to organized crime.
A Celaya police officer questions a woman after a person was detained for suspicious behavior. The subject was later released when it was revealed he lived at the home with the woman. National guard troops and police apprehend a subject for suspicious behavior in Celaya. A fake firearm was found in the suspect’s possession. He was released.
Shortly after he was elected mayor in June 2024, Ramírez said he was approached by cartel members who asked for positions in his government. He said he rebuffed them, but was shaken.
“I’ve been afraid like all citizens,” he said.
He met with Mexico’s top public security official and told her he had no confidence in Celaya’s police. “Not all of them were bad,” he said recently, “but most were.” She pledged to send him 500 members of the national guard.
The mayor’s mass firing of police faced criticism from his political opponents.
Mauro González Martínez, the top security official in Guanajuato state, a former federal police officer and member of an opposition party, said national guard troops and other members of the armed forces were not equipped to fight crime.
“The army is trained for war,” he said in an interview. “A police officer investigates. A soldier kills.”
Nancy Angélica Canjura Luna, an analyst at a think tank called Causa en Comun, said that while soldiers are seen as less corruptible than police because they typically come from other parts of the country, that means they know little about the region they are supposed to be protecting.
“They are always new,” she said. “They don’t know the criminal dynamics and they don’t know the territory itself.”
The Mexican Army on patrol in Celaya, Guanajuato, with the Mexican national guard and the Celaya Municipal Police.
But others in Celaya, exhausted by years of violence, welcomed the troops and two high-ranking military officers loaned to the city to lead its new security force as a show of strength.
Army Col. Pablo Muñoz Huitrón and Lt. Col. Bernardo Cajero rode into town in an armed convoy, dressed in camouflage fatigues. As they strode into City Hall, they were flanked by soldiers.
Muñoz was quickly sworn in as Celaya’s secretary of public security, a role traditionally occupied by civilians, but which in many cities is now filled by current or former soldiers or marines. Cajero was tasked with leading the officers who had survived the purge and the guardsman who now worked alongside them.
When Cajero switched from his olive green army fatigues to a blue police uniform, he was startled by how differently people treated him.
“My first realization was how much people hate the police,” he said.
Police officers and members of the army monitor the surveillance cameras placed throughout the city at a control center in Celaya.
The pair, who had served in cartel hot spots like Tamaulipas and Michoacán, devised a plan. The city’s remaining police would patrol alongside members of the military to reduce opportunities for corruption.
Security forces would focus on improving response times for 911 calls and increasing the number of checkpoints around the city to make sure drivers weren’t carrying guns or drugs.
Celaya’s leaders say crime rates have fallen.
Between January and June, there were 158 homicides in the city, according to the local government, down from 257 during the same time last year.
But high-profile acts of violence continue.
A woman holds the daughter of a taxi driver who was shot and killed in May in Celaya, Guanajuato. The young girl was in the passenger seat. Police and paramedics at the scene where a taxi driver was shot and killed.
Cajero was patrolling on a recent night when the radio crackled with a report of a homicide. His convoy raced to an intersection where a taxi lay overturned. The driver had been shot. His 12-year-old daughter, who had been in the passenger seat, survived but was in shock.
“Take me to my father,” she wailed as a paramedic tended to her wounds.
Earlier this year, the mayor’s bodyguard was shot to death outside his own home. Ramírez, who cries while remembering him, said the perpetrators were likely criminals angry about his new security plan. “Obviously it was to send me a message,” Ramírez said.
Some locals have bristled at the presence of federal forces in their streets. Alejandro, a 24-year-old Uber driver who did not give his last name because of fear of reprisals, said he had been stopped frequently by national guard members, and treated as roughly as by police while they reviewed his car and identity. “They’re all the same,” he said.
This summer, 11 members of the national guard were charged with theft after they were caught extracting fuel from an illegal tap not far from Celaya.
“How can we trust people who are robbing from us?” Alejandro said. “That’s not logical.”
Read more: She’s likely to be Mexico’s next president. Can she save the country from cartel violence?
Cadets rappel down a building during training at the Municipal Institute of Police Training in Celaya, Guanajuato.
Sheinbaum won the presidency last year in part on a promise to replicate the security strategy she had embraced as mayor of Mexico City, which focused on improving investigations, professionalizing cops and implementing community policing models developed in U.S. cities such as Oakland. But as president she has taken few steps toward police reform, and she recently pushed a constitutional amendment that puts the national guard permanently under military control.
The lack of federal help has made it challenging for Celaya’s efforts to rebuild its police force.
On a recent afternoon at the city’s aging police academy, young officers rappelled down walls and simulated hand-to-hand combat. They practiced wielding guns but not actually shooting them because the cost of bullets was too high.
One recent graduate, 29-year-old Jose Francisco Hernández Herrera, decided to join the police after his brother, a merchant, was killed by criminals.
Hernández said instructors rarely discussed how police should handle bribery offers from organized crime, even if it may be only a matter of time before he is approached.
A mural of the assassinated Gisela Gaytán, a candidate for mayor, in Celaya’s historic center.
“You’re never 100% prepared,” he said, adding that he would refuse to cooperate for his brother’s memory, and because he wants his son to live in a city where he can trust police. “If you really want to change your society, you have to make the right decision, even if it’s the more complicated one.”
Ramírez has touted young officers like Hernández as the future of Celaya. But the academy is graduating fewer than 20 officers a month, and is struggling to recruit new officers. Pay starts at just $800 a month.
Recently, the city put out a call to current and former soldiers, asking them to take jobs on the force.
Estefania Vela, a human rights lawyer at a think tank called Intersecta, worries militarization is near-sighted.
“Nobody disputes that the police have problems,” she said. “But what are you doing to fix those problems?”
Officials say the new force is not intended to be permanent. But how long will they stay? And what happens when they leave?
“It’s necessary today,” said Muñoz, the colonel in charge of the deployment. “Tomorrow, who knows?”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
