(Bloomberg) — Mexico’s Senate has approved President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s plan to place the National Guard under military command, ignoring warnings that it would give the military excessive power.
Most read from Bloomberg
Lopez Obrador created the Guard in 2019 as a civilian institution with policing functions, but argued that the Guard would function more efficiently under the command of the Ministry of Defense than under the Ministry of Public Security.
The bill, which amends the constitution, was passed on Wednesday morning by 86 votes to 42.
The reform will ensure that the National Guard “is not discarded and destroyed in the future,” Lopez Obrador said at a news conference on Sept. 22. “We do not want to see a repeat of what happened with the Federal Police,” he said, referring to the police force he disbanded because he considered it too corrupt to function.
The move comes as violence from organized crime gangs has plagued the country, with clashes between rival drug cartels in the northern state of Sinaloa killing at least 53 people in recent weeks.
The new rules will allow the armed forces to fully participate in public security, something that was previously limited to exceptional cases, said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, head of the Citizen Security program at the Universidad Iberoamericana.
“It is not a further step towards militarization, it is the definitive step,” Lopez Portillo said in an interview. “This decision carries enormous risks, because there is a chronic weakness in the accountability and transparency standards of the armed forces.”
The article in the constitution that limited the role of the armed forces to military activities rather than civilian police duties had remained unchanged since 1857, he said.
Civil supervision
The move comes just days before Lopez Obrador’s term ends and his protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office. Sheinbaum told reporters that fears about the change are unfounded and that human rights will be respected while the Mexican military remains under civilian control.
There have been 198,571 murders in Mexico since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, a 45 percent increase from the previous administration. Lopez Portillo said the government had failed to provide any evidence that the armed forces are better than civilians at fighting crime.
“This reform is the final nail in the coffin of Mexican citizen security,” Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio of the opposition Movimiento Ciudadano party said during the debate. “Our armed forces are lethal. They are masterfully trained to shoot, kill and take down any threat to national security, not to prevent, not to deter.”
An earlier attempt by Lopez Obrador in 2022 to make the Guard a fully military organization was blocked by the Supreme Court, which declared the attempt unconstitutional.
Now that his party controls more than two-thirds of the House and nearly two-thirds of the Senate, the president could achieve his goal by amending the Constitution.
Most read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2024 Bloomberg LP