Even as Enrique Peña Nieto basks in a largely successful first year as president, capped off with a massive energy reform that will introduce elements of privatization and foreign investment to Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state oil company, and the first step of tax reform that will raise VAT of junk food and sodas, Mexicans aren’t sure that his administration is making the same progress on security. 
Nowhere is that more true than in Michoacán.
A sprawling Pacific state that unfurls from the western Mexican coast inland nearly to the capital of México City, Michoacán wasn’t necessarily predestined to become a synonym of drug-fueled anarchy. It’s not home to the Zapatista-style insurgency that former president Ernesto Zedillo faced in Chiapas in the mid-1990s, the destabilizing political protests that former president Vicente Fox faced in Oaxaca in 2006, or to the horrific body counts in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere in Chihuahua that dominated gory headlines just a few years ago during the presidency of Felipe Calderón.
