OPINION: Mexico's National Guard, its Conflicts and Future Challenges

By Gerardo Rodríguez Sánchez Lara and Juan Antonio Le Clercq Ortega *

With the creation of the National GuardAs an intermediate military and civic force, Mexico is debating the deepest reform of national security and defense apparatus since the promulgation of the Constitution of 1917. This week, the Senate of the Republic and the Government of Mexico have agreed on the creation of a police force in charge of a state of truly national strength.

To contextualize the situation in which security institutions live in Mexico, it is necessary to know the specific data relating to their chronic disintegration. Mexico has less than 30,000 members of the federal policeonly 36,000 military police elements and about 9,000 naval officers to attend 130 million inhabitants.

The country is a federation and, as such, the 32 states and the 2,458 municipalities are jointly responsible for public security. However, according to the National Diagnostic the state police issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 2017, local governments only have at least half of the police force. According to this report, federal entities require train 115,943 new elements to reach the minimum standard of 1.8 police officers per 1,000 inhabitants, corresponding to 235,944 items.

The vast majority of governors in Mexico they have been extremely irresponsible not to create public security institutions with sufficient human and professional capacity, with the minimum of equipment and training to deal with this reality.

The deployment of the armed forces in terms of public security has generated an institutional trap. The states of the republic affected by the common violence and by organized crime have taken refuge in the use of the army and navy to fill this deficit of security elements in order to cover some of the their territories with what we call bases. mixed operations (coordination mechanism between federal and local authorities).

The president of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, received a country with the most high levels of violence, corruption and impunity which have probably been recorded since the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. For this reason and given the obvious incompetence of local governments, he wanted to take full responsibility for the situation and proposed a militarized model of national police with legal capabilities in detention, investigation and deterrence. However, in the Senate of the Republic, the opposition parties, with the support of some social and academic organizations, have advanced the idea that the National Guard should have civilian command but with military doctrine and training.

In all these discussions, there has been talk of the militarization of the country and the threat of increased political power of the armed forces, which in reality have little counterweight and management mechanisms on the part of the civilian authorities. . Obviously, the governors and the mayors prefer to have for interlocutor, the deployment of the National Guard on their territory, to a civilian minister with whom they can negotiate and not to an uncompromising soldier to listen to his political demands.

The first challenge of training the National Guard is the recruiting new cadets. It will be much easier for the army and the navy, for the infrastructure and the national deployment of facilities, to train with future military discipline the future members of the Guard to the badysis of the information, the tactical operations, handling weapons and vehicles. The federal police, through its police development system, will badist in the training of future National Guards, supported mainly by the divisions of Science, Intelligence and Gendarmerie.

Approval of wages and benefits will generate tension as well as the origin of the controls of the various areas of the Guard. Doctrines, codes, languages, thought and organizational culture differ between military and police. Change the mentality of the first generation of guards from different institutions It will not be easy but it is not impossible. The key will be in the secondary laws approved by the Congress of the Union.

Everyone wins with the creation of the national civilian court approved by Congress in its terms. The defense and navy secretariats will receive additional budgets, already approved since 2018, for the formation of this new company. Politically and strategically, the Secretary for Security and Citizen Protection in charge of the politician is elected Alfonso Durazo. He will have a strategic role in the creation of this institution. You will have to politically administer the structural power conflicts that exist in the national security system. President López Obrador remains as a statesman when he accepts the changes proposed by the opposition with the accompaniment of some leaders of civil society and academia.

However, the Violence and impunity will not end only with the creation of the guard. The problems are structural in the security and justice systems that have collapsed. Mexico has very bad judicial institutions at the local level, with little independence from local political power. There are very few really professional police officers. The Government of the Republic pays little attention to the problem of money laundering and badet recovery.

In the process of creating and strengthening institutions in Mexico, the country will take at least a decade to have a scaffold of security and justice that allows it to reduce impunity and reduce levels of violence.

Finally, there are two very specific challengesThe first is that the National Guard, in those years, went from a military-based institution to a genuinely civilian institution. The second challenge is strengthening and professionalization of state security organs that they must reach minimum standards, of structure and functioning, verifiable. If this second challenge is not met, we will observe in five years the debate on the use of armed forces in terms of public security due to the incompetence of local governments and civil authorities.

* Gerardo is a full-time professor at the University of the Americas in Puebla (UDLAP). Juan Antonio Le Clercq Ortega is Director of the Academic Department of International Relations of UDLAP. Both are coordinators of the Global Impunity Index.

What is said here is the opinion of the author and does not reflect the editorial position of this media