Mexico’s Congress puts National Guard under military command despite criticism. Why does it matter?

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday approved putting the National Guard under the command of the military despite widespread criticism over deepening the country’s militarization.

It’s the second constitutional change in two weeks, giving outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador another victory days before his exit. On Sept. 11, the Congress passed a contentious judicial overhaul he pushed that forces all the country’s judges to stand for election, raising concerns of politicizing the judiciary.

After debating through the night, the governing Morena party and its allies overcame opposition fueled by concerns from human rights organizations and the United Nations. They denied the change would militarize the country, instead saying the military would help the National Guard become a more effective security force.

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Why is this important?

When López Obrador entered office in December 2018, there was hope — buoyed by his own comments — that he would send the military back to the barracks after many years battling the powerful drug cartels. Now, at the end of his six-year term, the military not only remains in the streets, but now will also command the 120,000-strong National Guard.

The National Guard was created in 2019 and sold to Mexicans as a civilian security force under the control of the Public Safety Ministry. There were doubts immediately because many of its members initially came from the military police and its command structure was largely made up of recently retired military officers.

The president had tried before to put the National Guard under military command, but it was declared unconstitutional last year by the Supreme Court.

Why does the president trust the military so much?

The president, like previous administrations, needed the military in the face of staggering levels of violence. The police were outgunned and infiltrated by the drug cartels. He had proposed the National Guard as a civilian force that would allow the military to leave the streets by 2024. Instead, he has put the National Guard under military command and extended the legal justification for keeping soldiers in the streets.

López Obrador says that the military is trustworthy and not corrupt. Simultaneously he railed against the Federal Police as deeply corrupt and unfixable before he disbanded them. There have been cases of military corruption — the U.S. government arrested the former defense secretary, before López Obrador persuaded the U.S. to give him back.

In addition to public safety, López Obrador has given the armed forces unprecedented responsibilities including running airports, ports, customs, an airline and building a tourist train around the Yucatan Peninsula.

What risks does the shift pose?

“It is a regression and an implosion in terms of security, as well as human rights,” said Mexican political scientist Ana Vanessa Cardenas, a researcher at the International Affairs Observatory at the Finis Terrae University in Chile. While police are trained to be guarantors of rights, soldiers are trained to fight external enemies who do not have the same rights as citizens, she said.

“I believe that this change, along with what we just saw with the judicial reform, leaves citizens completely vulnerable,” she said.

Critics say that the military by nature is an opaque and guarded institution in Mexico. Shifting more responsibilities to the military further reduces government transparency.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday in a statement before the vote that its experts worried the change could lead to more forced disappearances and impunity. The Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center in Mexico warned that it would be a step toward militarization that there would be no coming back from.

Sen. Luis Donaldo Colosio of the opposition Citizen Movement party said giving the military control of the National Guard rather than making it a real civilian police force normalized the idea that Mexico has to be under military control to achieve peace.

Will the move improve the National Guard’s effectiveness?

Security analyst David Saucedo said the change “only is the formalization of something that already de facto existed.”

And the National Guard has not been effective in lowering violence levels because its way of operating is “nothing more than as a deterrence presence, patrols and building bases.” It doesn’t investigate, have intelligence or even directly confront criminal cells, he said.

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AP reporter Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.