The initiative of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to place the National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Defense and to that extent hand over public security to the military, has sparked intense controversy.
For purposes of clarity, it would be convenient to unfold this controversy into three: first, the form, when using a debatable legal resource in itself;
second, the substance, due to the many implications of militarizing the police;
and third, the ethical considerations of a change of position with respect to what the president had held as a candidate.
One, the way to do it, or the judicialization of politics
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Unable to change the Constitution, the president is using alternative legal channels to gain time or impose his positions in deeds, be it the change in energy policy, the construction of the Mayan train or, now, the transfer of the National Guard to Sedena.
In his logic, López Obrador understands that his opponents have used the loopholes of the law to stop their works, resorting to protections disguised as environmental arguments or third-party rights.
The president assumes that if they make factious use of laws and courts to stop the changes, he is morally entitled to resort to parallel legal avenues in order to make them possible.
In a strict sense, by issuing decrees and secondary laws he is making use of his powers and affirms that, if at the time,
the Supreme Court finds they are unconstitutional, he will abide by the law.
And while one might wonder if it is ethical to launch something that is explicitly contrary to the Constitution (such as the issue of the National Guard), AMLO will answer that there is a higher mandate, the good of the people, to which his works and actions point. .
Reason or unreason, as you look at it.
Two, the background, the militarization of the public force
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Having 400,000 elements, between the Army and the Navy, whose primary responsibility is to defend ourselves from foreign invasions that are never going to come or unlikely armed uprisings, raises the possibility of using these resources to face the biggest problem facing the country today.
And, for the rest, we should stop hypocrisy and assume that it is precisely what the last three presidents have done without openly acknowledging it.
We have been talking for 20 years about how cleaning up the police is the only civilized way to fight crime, but we have been failing in that task for twenty years.
Those who live in the roughest areas and suffer extortion, kidnapping and disappearance of relatives, are within their right to request the intervention of the State.
Send out a patrol or three,
Even if they are honest and well-trained elements, facing a convoy of 50 assassins is suicidal.
The firepower of the parallel armies has long surpassed that of the police, whether federal or local, except in Mexico City.
If the time has come to be realistic and try to regulate and rationalize what has been done arbitrarily, the president's intention is not unreasonable.
But he carries so many risks that he leads one to wonder if what he proposes is the best solution.
The National Guard, which has five times more elements than the federal judicial police of before, seemed like an interesting idea, in theory the best of two worlds: that is, military discipline and verticality of the military, something that the judicial police have never had and, at the same time, subordination to civilian courts, transparency and human rights norms to which the military usually do not abide, in Mexico or in the world.
But now the president has turned the screw one more time and breaks that pretended balance between military discipline and civil responsibility,
Resorting to the armed forces to address the problem of insecurity, and doing it legally and with clear regulations, can be understood in two ways: one, to dress the military with “civility”;
the other would be in the opposite direction, to militarize the civil forces.
This last one is the one that the president has chosen, and the risks are visible.
This Wednesday he was asked, how would a soldier who commits torture be judged, as a soldier or as a policeman?
He responded by displaying the tweets of communicators who criticize him, that is, he evaded the question.
And, for the rest, the ruse that AMLO is using to force this change opens up even more uncomfortable questions: can a criminal protect himself against the action of the military acting as police, since it is a function that, for the moment, the Constitution prohibits? ?
What will the judges do?
How to avoid that the intervention on the Public Ministry does not lead to agendas that have more to do with espionage of citizens for political purposes in the name of social stability?
And that's not to mention the risk of political protagonism of generals with so much power.
Three, change your mind
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López Obrador acts as if he had never argued the opposite of the militarization that he proposes today.
Categorical videos circulate on the networks that cannot be ignored.
The typical case of a candidate who as an official does the opposite of what was promised.
It seems to me that it would be more honest to approach it openly.
It is not absurd to change your mind when there are legitimate reasons.
The president could well call on the nation to account for the need to find a solution to the incontrovertible fact that we need to give the military another role in the face of the enormous challenge of organized crime.
I can understand that he is trying his way, and we can assume that there is pressure from the generals to resolve the uncomfortable situation in which they find themselves, by forcing them to do, for decades,
a task without the legal framework that authorizes it.
But resorting to a legal route through the back door and incomplete arguments about the humble origins of the military, their probity and the approval they enjoy as an institution, is not a substitute for the open discussion that Mexican society should have on this complex issue.
Giving power to the military has consequences and involves risks;
but not using them, or underusing them when they could be the only resource available to society in the face of a problem that exceeds it, also has them.
Perhaps AMLO is right and we should dare to think differently, but what is at stake should lead everyone to think about it and not just from the Palace.
@jorgezepedap
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