Amlo promised to take Mexico’s army off the streets – but he made it more powerful
For much of the past decade, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was an opponent of military involvement in the country’s so-called war on drugs.
When then president Felipe Calderón deployed the army in full force in 2006, López Obrador – best known as Amlo – called for the troops to return to their barracks. When Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, tried to codify the presence of the military into law, Amlo decried the move and said, if he became president, that would change.
“We will not use force to resolve social problems,” López Obrador said in 2017. “We are going to confront insecurity and violence by addressing the root causes, not as they have been doing.”
All that changed when López Obrador took power.
Soon after taking office in December 2018, he created a new force, known as the national guard, to take over public security across the country. And then he successfully pushed his political party, and allied parties, to hand the control of the national guard over to the Mexican army.
The Mexican senate voted the measure into law earlier this month despite López Obrador promising the newly created force would remain under civilian control.
The national guard was meant to replace the disbanded federal police as a public security force. Now, analysts say placing the force under the control of the military is a final step in the militarization of public security in Mexico.
The move has sparked an outcry from human rights organizations who state that, rather than turn security over to the military, the government should instead reform state and local police forces.
“Nowhere in the world has the deployment of soldiers, armed to the teeth, pacified a country,” said security expert Catalina Pérez Correa.
Experts say the expansion of military powers often result in increased human rights violations. And the Mexican military has a long history of massacres in the country.
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In 1968, soldiers and police forces gunned down what some estimates suggest was 300 students. In 2014, troops summarily executed 22 people in the state of Guerrero. The military has also been implicated in one of the most notorious atrocities of recent years: the disappearance of 43 student teachers who were pulled off a convoy of buses by corrupt police and cartel gunmen.
Earlier this month a retired army general and two other soldiers were arrested after a government truth commission announced that six of the missing students had been kept alive for days before being executed on the orders of the general, who was then commander of a local military base.
The national guard has also come under scrutiny.
In the state of Tamaulipas, members of the force are under investigation for the extrajudicial killing of six people. And troops are under investigation for killing a state prosecutor in the state of Sonora.
And the new force, numbering over 113,000, has had limited success in combating crime when compared to civilian law enforcement, according to security analyst Alejandro Hope.
The national guard is replacing police forces across the country, but its own statistics show few arrests and investigations, compared with other police forces, said Hope. Government statistics show the national guard arrested more than 8,000 people in 2021 compared with the federal police who, with 38,000 agents, arrested 21,702 people in 2018.
“It is an institution that patrols and does not investigate,” Hope said of the fledgling force. “There is a near total absence of investigative work.”
Critics of the plan say that the military deployment has done nothing to reduce the violence, and may well have contributed to Mexico’s spiralling death toll.
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In the past 15 years, the number of soldiers on the streets has more than doubled. In the same period, homicides increased by 240%, according to public records requests cited by the Mexican news outlet Animal Politico.
In giving the military greater control, Amlo is following the lead of other Latin American countries who have expanded the functions of the military. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro ordered the military to do everything from monitoring the voting process to managing schools to combating deforestation in the Amazon. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele had soldiers march into parliament to demand an increase in security funds.
In Mexico, Amlo has ordered the military to do everything from building an airport to providing logistics to the Covid pandemic response to building a controversial new train network across several southern states. Such roles, the president’s critics say, have little to do with enforcing the law.
“They want to create an addiction to the presence of the military” in Mexico, Hope said.