Mexico’s army given greater powers

The Mexican Army is officially in charge of the National Guard, as the senate passed the president’s plan on Wednesday, sparking concerns regarding the country’s increasing militarization.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, serving since 2018, created the National Guard in 2019 and introduced the force, whose command was primarily made up of retired military officers, as a civilian security force under the control of the Public Safety Ministry, according to the Associated Press.

The bill making the National Guard a subsidiary of the Mexican military passed with 86 votes in favor and 42 against. Obrador told a press conference that the amendment to the Mexican constitution will ensure that the National Guard is not “thrown away and destroyed in the future,” about the Federal Police, according to Bloomberg.

Newsweek reached out to the Mexican government for comment via email outside of business hours.

The Mexican president disbanded the Federal Police in 2019 after he said that he believed it was “deeply corrupt and unfixable,” and utilized the National Guard as a force to replace the Federal Police.

According to The New York Times, when speaking of the reform, Obrador told reporters, “If it becomes, like the army and the air force, a branch of the Ministry of Defense, we have the guarantee that it will remain and will continue to act with rectitude.”

Regarding the amendment to the constitution, Ana Vanessa Cardenas, a Mexican political scientist and researcher in Chile, told the Associated Press, “It is a regression and an implosion in terms of security, as well as human rights.”

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

Obrador, who is set to leave office on September 30, created the Morena political party behind the push to make the civilian National Guard, consisting of 120,000 members, part of the military.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday that the move “could increase the risk of human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.”

“We are alarmed that, if the constitutional reform proposal is approved, it would permanently assign public security functions to the Armed Forces. The potential impact of this modification on the increase of enforced disappearances and impunity is extremely worrying,” UN experts said in a statement.

The senate’s passing of this bill follows Obrador’s previous attempt to incorporate the National Guard into the military in 2022, which failed to pass as it was declared unconstitutional by the Mexican Supreme Court.

The Mexican president is set to be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, another member of the Morena party, and the first woman and the first Jewish individual to be elected to the position, who will take office on October 1.

When Obrador took office in 2018, he ran his campaign on sending “the soldiers back to their barracks,” as he cited widespread corruption in police forces nationally and wanted to come up with a new plan to combat rising violence and drug crime, according to the BBC.

The Mexican president changed plans and put the military in charge of several civilian projects including building the new Benito Juárez International Airport, distributing vaccines and school textbooks, policing migration at the Mexican border, and cleaning beaches at coastal resorts.

Critics have voiced concerns that this constitutional amendment will signal the deployment of the National Guard in a battle against the cartels, as the Mexican government declared war against the illegal drug suppliers in 2006, deploying the military to battle the cartels, according to the Global Conflict Tracker.

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