The Conclusion Before the Questions

Peace Under Construction

There are banners all over Cuautla saying that peace is under construction. Or something like that.

By now some have faded and torn so badly that it is hard to remember exactly what they said. Plan Cuautla can still be made out. The rest has been eaten away by the sun, the rain, the dust, and my city’s particular ability to turn almost any attempt at beautification into rubbish. For a few days they were new, hanging from avenues, walls, poles, bridges—wherever there was space. It is not just my impression: in mid-September EL PAÍS described Cuautla as a city plastered with the plan’s propaganda and published a photograph of one of those signs.[^1]

Now some hang crooked and others are torn. The government managed to fill the city with security advertising; meanwhile, the neighbours keep picking up rubbish in front of our homes, cleaning certain spaces, and learning which streets to avoid, when to close, which business may have changed hands, where shots were heard last night, and what sort of vehicle it is better not to look at too closely when it passes slowly.

I would not say Plan Cuautla has failed. From here, it simply does not seem to be working. Or not yet, at least not in the sense in which I would understand a security policy to work.

All of this had begun before the banners. On 30 May, the then mayor of Cuautla, Jesús Corona Damián, was arrested as part of Operación Enjambre. Days later, a judge ruled that the criminal proceedings against him would continue for organised crime linked to drug offences, according to the public information located. His case remains what it is: a case.[^2]

For those of us who live here, the news carried another story with it. For years we had lived with and heard about extortion, threats, shuttered businesses, corruption, and relations between authorities and criminal groups. Some things were rumours; others eventually appeared in journalistic investigations; others we knew because they had happened to friends, neighbours, or ourselves. Then they arrest the mayor and you think: well, now what?

The municipal government continued. Salvador Molina Martínez, Corona’s substitute on the electoral ticket, took office on 30 June. He told El Universal that federal authorities had investigated him earlier and found no “red flag”. I have not seen a public document that explains the scope of that investigation or makes it possible to review it.[^3]

That may be true. The question remains: what changed? Replacing the man sitting in an office is simple. The relationships around that office, the loyalties, the interests, the contractors, the people who know who pays whom and whom they call when there is trouble, do not necessarily evaporate because a federal patrol takes the mayor away. Molina was not a figure unrelated to the previous administration: he had been head of COPLADEMUN under Corona’s government and was also his substitute on the ticket. That does not prove any criminal continuity, but neither does it allow us to treat the handover as a complete break.

Then Plan Cuautla appeared, though in truth it did not arrive on a single day. It emerged through advertisements, coordination meetings, checkpoints, patrols, perimeters, and an ever more visible deployment. At the end of July, the federal government spoke of 394 personnel and 79 vehicles in 14 priority neighbourhoods, involving the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, state authorities, and municipal police. The promise was to curb homicides, extortion, and the collection of protection money.[^4]

By September, the official tally spoke of 119 arrests, 60 searches, and 28,231 actions. There were also welfare drives and the recovery of public spaces. There are police and soldiers, checkpoints, raids, meetings, and figures. Convoys of vehicles full of uniformed men drive down the main avenues during the day, when everyone can see them, all in a line. There are fucking banners all over the place.[^5]

The question is what any of that means. The indicators an administration uses to boast of success usually measure what it itself has done: how many people it deployed, how many operations it carried out, how many people it detained. Those are real figures. But I do not live inside an Excel spreadsheet. We live here.

My measure of security is much more basic. I want to know whether someone can open a business without paying a second levy to a teenager with a gun; whether, after investing twenty years of life in a shop, they can keep it; whether a taxi driver can work without asking permission from someone who officially does not exist; whether reporting a crime serves any purpose or merely gets someone to find out who reported it. I want to know whether you can send a young man to work, walk to the shop, or take a minibus without mentally rearranging the route around the possibility that something might go wrong.

There can be four hundred police officers and no security; there could be four thousand. I do not know what the magic number is. I know that when people reorganise daily life around violence, that violence is already governing something, even if it does not appear on an organisational chart. And if two thousand police officers are the answer, for how long? What happens when they have to go back home?

Years ago we could still talk about these things as events: something happened in such-and-such a neighbourhood, someone was killed in such-and-such a place, a business closed. Then they stop feeling like events and begin to become the climate. A police officer was murdered practically in front of my business. I have heard bursts of automatic gunfire from my house, explosions, fires. I know stories of shopkeepers who paid protection money until they could no longer pay, of people who closed, left, or effectively handed their businesses over to those extorting them. I also know people who suffered far more violent and tragic fates and experiences.

There are places near my house where I could buy certain things and prefer to walk several blocks farther. No one has an app telling them which business to enter. I have heard of businesses that stopped advertising on Google Maps because, they said, it was basically a menu for telephone extortionists. That is how one learns to live when too many decisions depend on rumours, warnings, acquaintances, and strange movements—things one cannot fully prove but that the neighbourhood seems to know. Much of what alters our decisions will never make it into a case file. From outside, then, it does not exist.

I know Cuautla’s security arch, loaded with cameras, but I do not see a comparable public network distributed through the neighbourhoods. The first arch was inaugurated in September 2025, and the project, promoted under Jesús Corona’s administration, contemplated five arches with licence-plate readers and six poles, connected to the municipal C2 and the state C5; I do not know how many remain in operation or how many cameras each one contains.[^6] Neighbours have tried to organise their own cameras, and I know of a nearby system that was removed. Officially, on 25 August 2026, six devices in public space that the town hall did not recognise and that were not integrated into the video-surveillance system were removed. The State also maintains a policy of removing so-called “parasite cameras”.[^7]

It was in those conversations that young men began to appear. At first I was not even thinking about men and women. I was thinking about crime. But time and again we ended up talking about very young men: the one who turned up dead, the one who started keeping company with certain people, the one who is useful for collecting money, the one who disappeared, the one who suddenly has money, and the one who is no longer there.

A neighbour spoke to me about how difficult it has become to find young helpers who will learn a trade and stay with it. I have seen it while looking for helpers myself; I have heard it from people in construction, transport, and education; I saw it when I had my business. It would be too easy to draw from that the sermon that young people no longer want to work or study. What troubles me instead is what we are offering them as a way of becoming adult men.

A trade is slow. You have to get up early, earn little at first, learn to do something badly before doing it well, and put up with someone who knows more than you do. By contrast, the other economy presents itself as a visible, quick route: there is money, a group, someone calling for you, something that looks like respect. It may last six months; it may last less. At sixteen, six months can look like a whole life. When family, school, trade, and work cannot draw a path, someone else draws one for them, even if it leads elsewhere.

That is why I could never see Plan Cuautla as only a policing problem. I want extortionists (and those who help them) arrested and weapons found. But the crime we are seeing did not emerge because 394 police officers were missing, and it will not be solved by reaching 400. It has entered businesses, transport, and families, into the lives of young men who ought still to be figuring out what to do with theirs.

Those Who Don’t Count

On the night Claudia Tacoronte was murdered, I was still thinking about Cuautla in those terms: the Plan, the banners, the closed businesses, the number of police officers that fit along an avenue without making the city any safer, the distance between what the government can show and what alters the lives of those of us who live here.

Then word began to spread that something had happened near the Casa de Cultura; urgent help was needed. In Cuautla, this news first arrives in a disordered form: Facebook and WhatsApp groups, messages, calls, videos, someone who knows someone who was there, a photograph you do not yet know exactly how to read. Through people close to that space, the news entered my conversation before there was a consolidated public account.

At first it was a young woman who had been attacked. Then we learned she had died. Then that she was a UAEM student and, finally, that she was Spanish and on an exchange. As soon as that last fact appeared, I thought something that seemed obvious to me at the time: this was not going to go unnoticed.

I thought: what would happen if every victim received a fifth of the media attention—and, as a consequence, official attention—that Claudia received? By then I had encountered too many stories that survived only a few hours beyond the victim’s immediate circle. A murder might occupy a local news item, a few Facebook posts, perhaps a statement, and sink beneath the next murder. There were people whose deaths shattered a family, a street, or a business and who, outside that, had practically never existed.

Claudia was young, a student, European; she was in Mexico on an exchange and took part in a cultural activity. She was a woman. It was difficult for her death to remain in Cuautla. Before long, the UAEM, the University of Granada, Morelos authorities, federal officials, and the Spanish government had intervened. There were tributes, protests, and national and international coverage.

It struck me because a death in Cuautla, at last, seemed to matter for real. There was attention and follow-up, universities asking questions, officials discussing the case, journalists wanting to know who Claudia was, where she came from, and what had happened. It is the response one would want when someone is murdered. I had also seen too many cases in which nothing like it happened. The question changed a little there: what does a victim need in order to pass through the layers of indifference surrounding violence in Morelos?

After Claudia’s murder, various media outlets began grouping her case with those of Kimberly Ramos, Karol Toledo, and Michelle Itzayana Fuentes: four female students connected to the UAEM whose cases had occurred since February of that year.[^8]

Four female students: that was a figure one could understand immediately. There were already names, photographs, statements, and a category capable of gathering them together. Then I asked a question that at first had no political intent: why that particular period of time? And, above all, how many male students had been murdered or disappeared during the same period?

I assumed I would find the answer in a few minutes of research, but nothing clear appeared. I looked for an equivalent figure, reports bringing together the male cases, an institutional count. Perhaps I was looking badly; perhaps there were no comparable cases; perhaps the university had a risk distribution very different from that of the rest of the state. All of that remained possible.

Outside the university, men account for nearly nine out of every ten homicides recorded in Morelos; in some recent years the ratio has approached eleven men for every woman.[^9] That does not entitle us to transfer that proportion to a university, but it does make the absence of an equivalent count of male students stranger. A university does not necessarily reproduce the exposure of an entire state. But an uncomfortable question remained: if outside, homicidal violence falls so disproportionately on men, what was happening within the university community for male students to seem not to exist in public conversation?

There was a clear number for women and a blank whenever I tried to ask the same question about men. It was not only that four female students had been assembled together: there was already a way to see them together, to write a headline about them, and to demand an answer for that group. With the men, I did not yet even know whom I was looking for.

The first answer did not come from a database. It came from a neighbour who works in construction. Without my asking him for anything, while we were talking about what everyone in this city talks about now—violence—he recalled several recent cases of young male students who had been victims of these crimes, though he had no complete list or exact dates. He mentioned an attack in a bar near the university and the murder of a young man connected to his family. These are testimonies, not a statistical series.

They helped me in another way. The men were not absent; they were scattered. One remained in a crime report, another in a bar, another in a story known by someone who knew someone. And before dying, many had already been placed inside “he had fallen in with the wrong crowd”, a phrase particularly efficient at ending a conversation.

Perhaps some of them were involved in criminal activity. What began to trouble me was how easily that suspicion closed off everything else. He was a man, he was young, perhaps he was mixed up in something, and with that the story seemed to explain itself. We stopped asking who recruited him, what opportunities he had, or why so many young men ended up occupying the most dangerous positions in a criminal economy. The corpse seemed to come with an explanation already included.

Later I spoke with a UAEM professor. She has worked with students for years and knows the university environment well. I put the question to her: if we already had four female students gathered into a public category, where were the male students?

She told me I was right to ask, and that she herself had lost at least two male students in recent months; she too had noticed the difference in the community’s response. She told me about one case in particular:
I had a student who was disappeared together with his partner, also a student. After a search, he was found dead, but she never appeared. In the university’s memory, she has counted for more: he was left in oblivion.

When I heard that, I thought: he was disappeared twice. First, he was disappeared alive and found dead. Then he was disappeared from memory.

That fact is not conclusive proof of a difference in treatment, nor of its extent. But it left me seeing that perhaps what mattered was not only who was a victim, but which victims we manage to gather inside the same story. Violence gives us men in pieces: one had trouble, another went out at night, another was in a bar, another disappeared. After explaining each case separately, one stops seeing that almost all the bodies belong to the same sex.

The Conclusion Before the Questions

I returned then to Claudia and to the case, which was still unfolding. The prosecutor’s office investigated her death under a femicide protocol; with videos recorded by citizens and private cameras, testimonies, calls, and messages, it identified and located Francisco Javier N. On 17 September his detention was reported, after coordination between state and federal authorities. The speed of that initial response surprised me.[^10]

Though really it should not surprise me. I know the State is perfectly capable of acting when it has the right incentives. It was quite well documented here: there was identification, an arrest warrant, a coordinated search, and a detention. That is still far from a conviction, but it would be absurd to pretend that the prosecutor’s office did nothing. To me, it suggests something more perverse about the authorities: that the problem may often lie less in incapacity than in a lack of incentives to act.

The Morelos prosecutor later stated in a communiqué that the identified motive was “the theft of Claudia’s mobile phone”. He also said that the detainee “had a history of robbery, had been in prison, and had been sentenced in Morelos”. So far there is no prior judgment, case number, or public judicial record that would allow those antecedents to be reconstructed beyond the prosecutor’s statement.[^11]

Two languages began to coexist there. One starts from the hypothesis of a man who steals a phone and kills a young woman when she asks for help; the other calls it femicide and incorporates it into a broader conversation about violence against women. The prosecutor’s office sought and obtained an order for femicide. Theft as a motive does not make that legally impossible, but the public information still does not reveal which circumstance in the Morelos Criminal Code the prosecutor’s office presented to the judge. It did not publicly identify which subsection of Article 213 Quintus it invoked, nor the specific expert evidence.[^8]

The word began to grow: femicide, femicidal violence, gender violence; then machismo, misogyny, patriarchy. The same person did not say all of them, nor were they said at the same time, and it would be dishonest to put into the prosecutor’s office’s mouth what an activist, a journalist, or an organisation said. Even so, the transformation is visible. A legal category can begin by naming an investigative route and end up functioning as an explanation.

I still had questions about the theft, the detainee’s antecedents, the police, the prosecutor’s office, Cuautla, the disappeared students, and victims who never became national news. Around the case, by contrast, there were answers that seemed already prepared. The conclusion had arrived before the questions.

My unease with the category of femicide did not begin with Claudia. In Morelos, Article “213 Quintus” calls femicide the taking of a woman’s life for gender reasons and lists circumstances through which such reasons are deemed to exist: sexual violence, degrading injuries or mutilation, a history of violence, threats, certain relationships with the aggressor, isolation, or exposure of the body, among others. If they are not established, the law refers the matter to homicide.[^12]

I understand the ground it is trying to recognise. But when I read the article, a question returns: many of the circumstances listed there can also be read through undue advantage, treachery, abuse of trust, kinship, threats, deprivation of liberty, sexual violence, or especially cruel injuries. What additional operation does the word “gender” perform? Why does the law need to turn those circumstances into a distinct criminal classification when the victim is a woman?

I am not interested in settling whether the prosecutor was entitled to use it. He may have properly sought the order, and the law may have been applied as written. The question reaches the law itself: why it was designed that way, what assumptions it incorporates, and how much ultimately depends on whoever interprets “gender reasons”. A law can be in force and still seem to me a bad law.

Claudia’s case concentrates that tension. The prosecutor spoke of mobile-phone theft as the motive and of “the manner” in which she was deprived of life to explain the femicide order, without specifying the legal subsection or the expert evidence. I still do not know how that subsumption will be resolved. The open case does not make the underlying question useless.

What happens if we use the same principle to look at male vulnerabilities? A young man recruited because he is useful, replaceable, and socially disposable may also be selected, in part, because of his sex. A man sent to collect a debt, transport drugs, or stand at the front of a confrontation occupies a sexed place within an economy of violence. When he turns up dead, we usually say he was mixed up in something and move on. If sex serves as an interpretive key, it ought to interest us too when most of the dead are men.

Laws do not fall from the sky. Someone decides which circumstances to group together and which causal relations deserve a name of their own. Then those words return with the authority of a code, a prosecutor’s office, a judge, or a newspaper. The category does not magically control what we see, but it participates in the way we look. There are words that, over time, become offices, budgets, and protocols.

The Immune Response

At some point I began to think of this as an immune response. The metaphor is imperfect, but it works for me. A visible crime or murder can direct attention towards concrete questions: where were the police, what did the prosecutor’s office know, were there prior records, why was someone still free, how effective had the security strategy been? These are questions with direction: they end in an office, a case file, a decision, or a budget.

The event can then be translated into a larger explanation. Patriarchy is a word large enough to cover family, school, work, police, sexuality, and almost any relation between men and women. There is no need to imagine a secret meeting for that translation to take place. A student can march out of fear and pain, a journalist can look for context, an official can believe that a protocol will save lives. If they already share a language, their decisions can end up pushing in the same direction.

The indignation that pointed to identifiable people responsible disperses. The administration ceases to be only accused and can return as the remedy, offering a gender perspective, training, protocols, specialised prosecutor’s offices, and budget. All of that may be sincere, but it can also push into the background the question of someone with a history of robbery who was still moving about freely, of the shopkeeper who does not report an extortion, or of the young man who disappears and whom no one asks about again.

That is what I call an immune response: an adaptation, not a conspiracy. The apparatus absorbs an accusation and returns it in a language it knows how to administer. One that distributes and dilutes responsibility.

Contemporary politics also takes place in front of a camera or a “post”. Pain can be real and, at the same time, become a public image. A protest offers a familiar way to gather, speak, and be seen. With a young man murdered by organised crime, that form is much less clear: we do not know who represents him or where to place the indignation. Most disappear into the word “violence”.

Murdered women possess a category capable of turning them into a political population. Murdered men possess a statistic. I am not convinced that the two weigh the same. And of course the circumstances and context of each case matter, as does the real suffering of victims; none of that should be set aside.

The asymmetry does not end in language either. Morelos has a prosecutor’s office specialising in femicide, two Centres of Justice for Women, and a Gender Violence Alert in force since 2015 in eight municipalities, including Cuautla.[^13] It is an architecture designed to recognise a pattern of risk and respond to it; its existence does not by itself prove that it works. The question is not why women are helped; it is why the logic that makes universal protection insufficient for one population stops when the sex changes of a population that bears a higher violent mortality.

I do not think the answer should be a prosecutor’s office for murdered men or a mirror-image criminal category. I know that absence also organises attention. When a woman is murdered, we can ask from the outset whether her sex had anything to do with it; when a man is murdered, his sex usually seems irrelevant until an extraordinary reason appears to mention it. Many male risks—confronting others, protecting, doing dangerous work, being useful to a criminal group and easily replaceable—are shaped by sexual and social expectations. Sometimes we call all of that masculinity. When it produces corpses, it seems to stop being gender.

I do not want to turn Claudia into a piece of my argument. Claudia Tacoronte was twenty-one, had come from Spain to study in Morelos, and took part in a cultural activity. Her death deserved the attention it received. That the prosecutor’s office identified and quickly detained a suspect was good. That universities, governments, and media asked what happened was good. I wish it happened more often.

The scandal lies in everything a victim seems to need in order to become visible: to be young, a student, foreign, European, a woman, and able to enter immediately into a recognisable category. Many victims around Cuautla do not meet those conditions. They are shopkeepers, taxi drivers, builders, young men, families, and even children; people who made one bad decision, people who made many, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When they die, each falls into a different explanation: he had fallen in with the wrong crowd, he owed money, he was leaving a bar, he disappeared, no one looked for him again.

All of this began with a smaller question: I wanted to know whether Plan Cuautla was working. Then they arrested a mayor, banners appeared, soldiers arrived, there were raids and figures. Then Claudia was murdered. Then four female students emerged as a group. I asked about the male students and discovered that we did not even know how to count them.

Four female students had names. I ask how many male students have disappeared. So far no one has been able to tell me.

Perhaps there were very few. Perhaps there were many. Either answer matters. But before asking, we already had a conclusion. Some people disappear from the world once; others disappear as well from the story we construct to explain what happened.

I do not want to encourage resentment or add fuel to the conflict over gender. I want minimum conditions for a dignified life—rule of law, protection of property, and freedom—so that we can work on measurable solutions rather than remain with good intentions or posts. We have already seen that the State can work when it is pressured enough: what do we need to sustain that pressure? What are we willing to endure if we remain silent, waiting for the authorities to “do their job”?

I am left with more questions than answers, but also with a better understanding of the capacities and dynamics at work. That is already something.