After a pack of assailants shot Omar García Harfuch three times in 2020, he began sleeping in his office.
He was Mexico City’s police chief at the time and said a powerful cartel tried to assassinate him. Now Mr. Harfuch is Mexico’s top security official, tasked with dismantling those very groups. And he still spends many nights sleeping near his desk, with an armed soldier in combat gear outside his door.
It is that sort of obsessive dedication to solving his country’s most seemingly unsolvable problem that has earned him the trust of President Claudia Sheinbaum and made him the face of Mexico’s most aggressive offensive against the cartels in more than a decade.
The government says it is arresting cartel members and destroying drug labs at nearly four times the rate of the previous government. As a result, government data show that homicides have fallen 22 percent so far this year from last, to their lowest level in a decade, and violent robberies are down 15 percent.
“We’re not saying the problem is solved,” said Mr. Harfuch in his first on-the-record interview with the international media since becoming Mexico’s minister of security last year. But, he added, “what we’re doing is hitting the criminal structure at the bottom, in the middle and at the top.”
His early success has helped mollify Washington. With Mr. Harfuch as the point person with U.S. security agencies, intelligence sharing has surged between the two countries, and President Trump has shifted his attention to drug traffickers in South America instead of Mexico.
Yet Mexico’s history says the smart money is on the cartels. Their criminal empires have outlasted everything past governments have thrown at them.
While murders and robberies are down, reports of extortion, kidnappings and disappearances are up. And polls show that since Ms. Sheinbaum took office, the percentage of Mexicans who say they feel unsafe has increased by almost 5 percentage points, to 63 percent of the country.
“Changing the perception in 14 months is more complex,” said Mr. Harfuch from his heavily guarded office in Mexico City.
