On November 24, a noise at kilometer 29 of the toll highway from Ocozocoautla to Arriaga, Chiapas, broke the dawn. Unit 320320 of the National Guard (GN) collided head-on with a private vehicle.
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The car accident fractured two families: Domínguez Castillejos and Castillejos de la Cruz. After the impact, Ángel Domínguez Castillejos, 10 years old, and his grandfather, Moisés Castillejos López, lost their lives. Three days later, and as a result of the injuries left by the collision, Bernardo Domínguez, Ángel’s father, also died.
After the road accident, caused, according to the first reports, by the eyelash of the driver of the GN vehicle, Gisela Castillejos and Diego, the other son of the Domínguez Castillejos family, were hospitalized.
Five members of the GN were also injured and received medical attention, but the driver of the unit fled, according to what Éder Castillejos, Gisela’s brother, mentioned in a telephone interview.
The accident of that day is not something extraordinary. On average, the National Guard registers three road accidents per day, according to 2022 statistics delivered via the transparency law.
It is also a figure that has been increasing since 2020. The data provided reveals that, between January 2020 and September of this year, the number of road accidents grew 40.9%. It went from having, on average, 2.2 events per day to 3.1 cases in the reporting period.
Although there are days like August 18 of this year when eight incidents occurred in 24 hours, one with a total loss.
Other accidents that have been publicly known this year and where the National Guard They are, for example, that of February 11. Unit number 323331 ran a red light at one of the intersections on Federico Benítez Boulevard in Tijuana, Baja California, and collided with another vehicle. With the crash, an element that was traveling in the tray was expelled and this caused a head injury.
On May 20 of this year in the municipality of Mazamitla, Jalisco, a GN patrol that was being driven at excessive speed collided with two cars; three people were injured.
On October 31, also of this year, another unit stopped at the Independencia and Periférico roads, in Guadalajara, Jalisco. At the crossroads, he collided with a private vehicle and ran over a person who sold sweets on public roads. He lost his life.
When questioned in this regard, Miguel Guzmán Negrete, an expert in traffic accidents and road safety consultant, maintains that, by creating the GN with an important base of military personnel, personnel without the necessary training were put in charge of public security units. it. “Unfortunately, changes always, always bring a consequence. So, it is being structured strategically and it is accompanied by a series of trainings for all the personnel who are in this process, and we hope it will be a very quick process so that these skills and knowledge can be generated in the people who are in charge of road safety in the National Guard”, he mentions.
César Girón Ramírez, risk prevention manager for the insurer Quálitas, points out that according to studies carried out by the Center for Experimentation and Road Safety of Mexico, “there are three factors involved in road incidents: the human being, the environment and the vehicle. The studies that have been done in this regard tell us that 80% of road accidents are caused by the human factor: the person is the most important factor, the driver, his habits and his abilities”.
An interview with the GN was requested, but until press time there was no response to the three requests that were made.
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soldiers behind the wheel
The growth of accidents in the GN has forced the contracting of increasingly higher insurance policies.
María Juana Rojas, professional adviser for Provincial Insurance, mentions that the statistics reflect an increase in the cost of insurance.
“Insurance premiums are worked from accident statistics, the higher the accident rate of the insured subject, the cost of the policy increases.”
In 2020, the GN paid 71.6 million pesos to the company Quálitas for ensuring a vehicle fleet of 13,555 units, in the period from April 1 to December 31. This means that the federal government paid each month an average of 587 pesos per insured unit.
For 2021 the contract covered the period from March to December. In the contract and its annexes there is no data on the size of the vehicle fleet. There the established amount was 100 million pesos as a ceiling and it was signed with the same company.
By 2022 there was a change of service provider. The contract was signed with the company Chubb Seguros México. Now it did cover the entire year, but the vehicle fleet was reduced by 12.2%, and 11,900 units were insured. The agreement was signed for 108.6 million pesos, an average monthly payment per insured vehicle of 760.6 pesos.
For 2023 and 2024 the cost of insurance continues to rise. Although the public tender for multi-year contracting was declared void on November 29, which will force a new tender, the ruling record shows that Quálitas submitted a proposal for 124.2 million pesos for 2023 and 132.2 million for 2024 .
The higher the accident rate, the higher the cost of the insurance policies, explains Girón Ramírez: “The accident rate is a measure that we have to determine the cost of the policies, for example, for every 100 pesos that they pay us for the policy, I cannot spend more than 70 pesos”.
More accidents, less payments
Along with the increase in the costs of the contracts, the benefits have been reduced, for example, in 2020 it was established that the limit of coverage of funeral expenses would be the equivalent of one thousand Units of Measurement and Update (UMA), whose amount defines the federal government year after year to establish the amounts of payment of obligations (previously the minimum wage was used as a measure), that is, 86 thousand 880 pesos. By 2022, that coverage limit dropped to 500 UMA, this represents 48,110 pesos, updated value for that year.
Another example. In the 2020 contract, the damage suffered to both vehicles and people in the event of attacks by members of organized crime was recognized as insured risks, but by 2022 that risk was no longer included.
The closest thing to this clause is the section where it is stated that the “acts of people who take part in stoppages, strikes, riots of a worker nature, rallies, popular riots, riots” are considered as risks, as well as “the damages caused to consequence of vandalism.
One of the sections that did grow was the amount allocated to the payment of civil liability in goods and people, which went from a maximum limit of 3 million in the 2020 contract, to a range of possibilities between 3.5 and 4.5 million pesos, depending on the type of unit involved in a road accident.
“What I am going to fight them for,” says Éder Castillejos, son of the late Moisés Castillejos and brother of Gisela, in an interview, “is a pension for my mother. I told the representative of the legal area that came to us after the accident to tell his immediate boss, ‘a pension’. My dad and my mom have a business and they ran it together. He was his company and also his livelihood, the National Guard offers us a certain amount of money, but that eventually ends; What I want is for my mom to have a certainty for the future, a certainty that was taken from her with the death of my dad.”