Imagine it’s the morning of June 26, 2020, and you are on the historic Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. Built at the direction of Emperor Maximilian beginning in the 1860s, it was intended to link the National Palace with the Chapultepec Castle where Maximilian and Empress Carlota lived.
Now it is a major thoroughfare, flanked by many of the tallest buildings in the city, a site of celebrations and occasional protests but in general a place of peace. When I would go to Mexico City in business I would always take an early morning run up to the Chapultepec castle and look out to see if I could spot the volcano, Popocatépetl (17,802 feet) which we climbed a number of times.
Early that morning, however, Omar García Harfuch, the chief of police for Mexico City was attacked by some 28 gunmen. He was wounded three times, two of his bodyguards were killed as well as a woman bystander. These men were heavily armed, even with at least one 50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle, the kind of lethal weapon you can only get from the United States.
A number of the gunmen were subsequently arrested, and it is believed that they were members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The sheer brazenness of this attack comes to mind now because Harfuch, only 43 years old, has not only been named President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Minister of Security but is the subject of a full-page article on page A4 of the December 22 edition of the New York Times.
The article is positive in terms of his work combatting the cartels and his relations with US officials in Washington but is it dangerous? Does it put Harfuch in the sights of one of the cartels?
How brazen are these cartels? Only two months ago – November 1, to be precise – Carlos Manzo, the 40-year-old Mayor of Uruapan (pop. 350,000) was murdered while giving a speech at a celebration for the Day of the Dead. He was in the midst of hundreds, maybe thousands of spectators. In fact, seven mayors in the state of Michoacán have been murdered in the last four years.
Ten people have been arrested in the case of Manzo, seven of them his bodyguards. It shows how difficult it is to trust those who are allegedly protecting you, no matter the level of government.
Another example of high-level corruption is Genaro García Luna who served as Secretary of Public Security – Harfuch’s current position – from 2006 to 2012 under then-President Felipe Calderón. He was convicted last October in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York and received a 38-year prison sentence. He is the highest-ranking Mexican official ever to be convicted in the US and is now in the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.
What next? Manzo criticized both President Claudia Sheinbaum and Harfuch for moving too slowly to combat the cartels. He made himself an obvious target in the violent state of Michoacán and paid the ultimate price. Has the New York Times made Harfuch a target for the second time? We think murder is an issue in the US but according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (USODC), the homicide rate here is 5.8 per 100,000 so far in 2025. In Mexico, it is 24.9. By way of comparison, it is also 24.9 in Colombia, 31.4 in Honduras but only 12.6 in Venezuela.
As 2026 begins, I wish Harfuch and Sheinbaum success in their awesome task. We could do more to help. Stopping the flow of Barrett sniper rifles would be a small step, for example, but there is no evidence that our administration is committed to issues like this.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by writer and humanitarian Morgan Smith. Based in New Mexico, Smith writes frequently about border and Latin American issues and can be reached at Morgan-smith@comcast.net.
