Tampico's transformation from a violent curfew to Mexico's safest city.

A decade ago, Tampico, a major Mexican city, was plagued by violence. Citizens organized to eradicate it, and now it is one of the safest cities in the country.

Mexico has a violence problem. Organized crime, closely related to drug trafficking, has permeated all social strata, to the point where cartel wars have become civil wars and large companies claim that these organizations control much of their legitimate business.

It impacts businesses and people. Beyond direct violence against populations or collateral damage, gang wars have caused people to change their daily habits (carrying replicas of mobile phones to hand in during robberies) and even finance organized crime by hacking Internet antennas.

Luckily, one territory that was ruled by organized crime a decade ago is now one of Mexico’s safest urban areas. Tampico residents were fed up with organized crime and took action.

Port city Tampico is in Huasteca. Because the Mayans had direct access to the Atlantic, this area was a cultural center. In 2010, Tampico’s 300,000 residents implemented a bizarre voluntary curfew.

According to Milenio, they recall that time. In February 2010, the Gulf Cartel and Zetas split, as in other municipalities. This led to gang warfare that caught civilians in the middle. The commotion prompted local criminal groups to commit violence in Tampico, Madero, and Altamira.

No official reports, people unable to work, and police officers killed and displayed in public created an atmosphere of terror in municipalities. Tampico is one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with over 30 kidnappings a month and 100 homicides a year, according to BBC Mundo.

A local businessman describes how criminal groups kidnapped citizens one by one in that article. They held them for one or two days, demanded ransoms, or took them to complicit police stations to give up their property. Tampico was hell due to violence and institutional corruption. People imposed a curfew on themselves, and change began.

The Tampico case
That changed with the creation of the Citizen Roundtable for Security and Justice of the Southern Zone of Tamaulipas, attended by army generals, police chiefs, university rectors, and businessmen. For the past decade, they have met monthly to discuss how to keep the region safe, starting with a first session that addressed the main issue: fighting organized crime.

Businessman and Mesa founder Luis Apperti has been victimized by organized gangs in his family. He told BBC Mundo that the Mesa was created to fight crime because the authorities could do nothing. However, they realized they couldn’t fix everything and focused on one cause.

Corruption, not poverty and youth unemployment, drove organized crime, he said. “The level of co-optation of the authorities by organized crime was such that you could not report it, because on the way to report it, the bad guys were already informed and they intercepted you along the way,” adds Apperti.

Thus, the Roundtable has launched massive fundraising campaigns to improve police infrastructure and establish an independent complaints centre. The results are clear.

“We tripled police officers in three years. We became one of the safest cities in the country six years ago after achieving zero kidnappings in five.” With police and judicial authorities free of corruption and legal channels working, the community cooperated with the Roundtable. How? By reporting, unthinkable a few years ago.

Tampico’s transformation from a violent curfew to Mexico’s safest city.

By ki0nk

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