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.
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.
Calderón sends in the army
Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán.
Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed.
Kingpin strategy
Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders.
That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie.
Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups.
But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain.
"Hugs not bullets"
The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.
“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine.
Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants.
Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.
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.
