Presidents and governments change, but the violence continues in Mexico, a tragedy with an uncertain end that leaves thousands of murders every year, more than 30,000 annually since 2017. This week, the country has experienced two chilling examples, drug blockades and attacks in Ciudad Juárez, Jalisco and Guanajuato.
Faced with this, the political class hardly proposes new ideas.
The last three administrations, including the current one, have tried to tackle the problem with large deployments and military operations.
Nearly 16 years later, the only victory the government can celebrate is a subtle trend toward stabilization.
At the very least, the growth curve for murders flattens.
The Army appears as the only possible solution, for the present and also for the future.
The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced this week his intention to change the command structure of the National Guard, a corporation that emerged at the beginning of his term.
If it fulfills its purpose, the Guard will no longer depend on the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection and will become part of the organization chart of the Ministry of National Defense.
Thus, the military would permanently control the colossal effort to prevent crimes in a country of 126 million inhabitants.
Since its advent in 2019, the mission of the National Guard has been to replace the Federal Police, created during the first government of change, headed by Vicente Fox (2000 - 2006), after 71 years of PRI dominance in the country.
During the last presidential campaign, López Obrador harshly criticized the federal government, a nest of corruption, in his opinion, that would have no place in his government.
“There is a lot of decomposition in the police forces.
The Federal Police was created to guarantee public safety, so that neither the Army nor the Navy intervened.
But it has not been consolidated,” said the future president in November 2018, already the winner in the elections, a month before being sworn in.
Born civilian, now the organic future of the National Guard is being discussed and, therefore, the weight of the Armed Forces in the State.
The affiliation of the corporation matters, mainly for three reasons.
One, the growing power of the Armed Forces in the country's public life, two, the doubts about the advantages and benefits of employing military officers as policemen, and three, the suspicion that a National Guard dependent on the Army would adopt the characteristic opacity of the military world.
Despite the above, López Obrador has been firm about his decision, paying the idea that he transmitted almost four years ago, when he announced its creation: "Politics is always choosing between drawbacks."
Of the three, perhaps the most imminent, due to its consequences, is the second, the alleged benefits of using soldiers and officers in public security tasks.
Despite what it may seem, different studies published these years in Mexico indicate that the presence of the military in the streets has actually been detrimental to the country.
In
The Violence: In Search of the Public Policy Behind the War on Drugs
, the academics Laura Atuesta and Alejandro Madrazo point out, for example, that the number of homicides at the municipal level increases due to the existence of clashes between public forces and alleged criminals. criminals.
Above all, they say, if the public forces are made up of soldiers.
Given the evidence, the answer seems simple: and if soldiers are not used, then what?
If the military returns to the barracks, as López Obrador defended before coming to government, who is in charge of security?
The reply usually points to the strengthening of the municipal and state police and the maintenance of the National Guard in civil hierarchies, as is the case in Spain with the Civil Guard.
There, the corporation, with a hybrid spirit between the civil and the military, depends on the Ministry of the Interior and not on the Ministry of Defense.
But the truth is that right now, Mexico seems to have no other options.
The allegations in favor of the Armed Forces that López Obrador has rehearsed these years allude to his presumed incorruptible character.
For the president, generals and admirals are oblivious to fraud, diversion of resources or illicit enrichment.
Hence, he has put in his hands paradigmatic works of the six-year term, in the case of the new airport in Mexico City, built on an old air base, or sections of the Mayan train, in addition to basic mechanisms of the State, such as the customs service.
Little has mattered the accusations of corruption due to irregular hiring within the Ministry of Defense, revealed by EL PAÍS among other media, in recent years.
In July 2020, this newspaper reported, for example, that the Army had diverted almost 15 million dollars in previous years to buy weapons from a ghost company.
A month later, the accusation against the agency pointed to the alleged use of 11 ghost companies in the modernization of customs.
The previous complaints point to alleged corruption that occurred in the years of Enrique Peña Nieto in the presidency (2012 - 2018), an argument that López Obrador has placed at the core of his defense of the Armed Forces.
"It's not like before," the president usually says in the face of any type of criticism of the government's performance.
Thus, although the military patrol the streets as in the years of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) or Peña Nieto himself, now it is different because, under his command, the order is that human rights be respected.
This week, in an interview with this medium, the academic Ernesto López Portillo, coordinator of the Citizen Security Program of the Universidad Iberoamericana, expressed his concern about the change in the National Guard.
“It places us in a disturbing scenario.
Where is López Obrador going?
What he wants?
What regime and political system does he think of?”, he would say.
“There is not a week that goes by without him giving more resources and influence to the military, what is he thinking?
The news openly challenges the constitutional regime and flouts its own agreement”, he added.
The ball is in the court of the Government, which has mortgaged its last two years to a strategy that, for the time being, has not worked.
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