En México hay 148 grupos criminales: CIDE
El Financiero — Bloomberg TV
En México hay 148 grupos criminales: CIDE
El Financiero — Bloomberg TV (Television Interview) November 15, 2020 · Mexico Photo: El Financiero / Bloomberg
El Número que el Gobierno no Tenía
The El Financiero — Bloomberg TV segment leads with the headline finding: 148 criminal groups identified as operationally active across Mexican territory at the close of 2019. The interview frames this as the first systematic count of its kind to combine open-source intelligence, press communiqués, and quantitative text analysis — methodology that lets the broadcast audience understand the figure not as a guess but as a structured estimate built from evidence the federal government had not previously aggregated.
A specific finding the segment surfaces is the emergence of 17 newly identified groups whose membership profile complicates the standard cartel taxonomy. Roa describes them directly: “Identificamos 17 grupos que van desde exmiembros de cárteles de la droga, como el CJNG, hasta expolicías.” The range — former cartel members at one end, former police officers at the other — captures something the standard narrative misses: the actors fueling regional violence do not all come from the criminal world. Many emerge from the very institutions supposed to suppress them.
Un Problema de Fragmentación
For an early-pandemic broadcast recorded in late 2020, the segment carries additional weight: it lands the 148-group figure in front of a national television audience precisely as the federal government was making the public claim that organized crime had been brought under control. The number itself is the rebuttal. Mexico does not have a “cartel problem” of a handful of large actors — it has a fragmentation problem of dozens of regional and local cells operating in fluid alliances, with consequences for how the state defines its target set and for how violence diffuses geographically.
Citation
Jiménez, H., Salazar, A., & Cepeda, O. (2020). En México hay 148 grupos criminales: CIDE — Entrevista a Jorge Roa. El Financiero – Bloomberg TV.