The military is encroaching on Mexican democracy

The military is encroaching on Mexican democracy

Mexico’s president has transferred vast resources and power to the military.

The Washington Post, By the Editorial Board, May 21, 2024 

Mexico has had its share of political ills, but at least its modern history has been free of military coups and juntas. Contrary to their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, the Mexican armed forces have mostly kept to their barracks — doing what civilian authorities have asked. One oft-told anecdote from the 1960s illustrates the point. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who governed from 1964 to 1970, once complained to the head of Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company, that the defense minister claimed that the military had enough fuel to last only two days. The Pemex boss replied by asking the president whether he really wanted the armed forces to have more. After some reflection, Díaz Ordaz decided he did not.

The reasons for this exceptional situation are complex — but broadly rooted in the one-party political system that prevailed until about a quarter-century ago. Military subordination to civilian authority was one of the relatively healthy aspects of that old system to survive the transition to multiparty democracy in 2000. Unfortunately, though, the arrangement is now over. During his 5½ years in office, Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has transferred vast resources to the armed forces and assigned them numerous tasks that civilians previously would have handled. By one estimate, as of 2021, Mexico’s armed forces, more than 325,000 strong, including 110,000 in the National Guard, were carrying out 246 more such functions than 15 years earlier.

The net effect has been to aggrandize and politicize the officer corps, while shielding the government functions they carry out from democratic oversight. The military’s enlarged role poses one of the thorniest questions that Mr. López Obrador’s successor — to be chosen in a national election June 2 

To be sure, the Mexican military’s mandate began growing two administrations ago, under President Felipe Calderón, who deployed it to fight organized crime. But AMLO, as the current president is known, went much further, pushing through constitutional amendments to grant the armed forces responsibility for public security until 2028, as well as legislation and executive orders putting migration, customs, management of ports — even the Mexican equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration — under the military. Mr. López Obrador has transferred 15 state companies to military management, including Mexico City’s two airports, a new airline and the new Maya Train, which one day will circumnavigate the Yucatán Peninsula.

The combined budgets of the defense and navy ministries have more than doubled since 2019, to 316 billion pesos ($18.6 billion). That is more than three times the budget of the Health Ministry. It doesn’t count about 67 billion pesos ($4 billion) dedicated to the National Guard, which the president created to replace the federal police and which he has kept under military command despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring it unconstitutional.

AMLO argues that the military constitutes a bulwark against the corruption that infected governments before his and that the armed forces are doing a good job combating crime. Both claims are implausible, especially the second: There have been more than 170,000 homicides on his watch, many more than during the past three administrations.

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What’s true is that the growth of the military’s footprint has come alongside focused efforts by the president to hamstring much of the civilian state, including the judiciary and institutions such as the elections watchdog and the freedom-of-information agency. With its oversight over seaports, airports and borders, alongside its ubiquitous presence throughout Mexico, the military has become an invaluable tool for the president to do his will across the territory, centralizing power and sidestepping democratically elected state and municipal governments.

But if Mr. López Obrador values a muscled-up military as an unquestionably loyal institution with which to counter what he considers a “deep state” built by corrupt past administrations, it’s unclear whether such loyalty will transfer to the next president: either his anointed successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who leads in the polls, or the underdog opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez.

Ms. Sheinbaum has recently suggested that her government could reconsider Mr. López Obrador’s decision to let the military run businesses, such as the Maya Train. But whatever her public security strategy is, the armed forces will be in charge of it at least until 2028 because of a constitutional amendment.

For now, Mexico’s generals show no open interest in taking over the country. Yet these things have a way of happening incrementally. The United States can influence the situation, given its role as Mexico’s largest trading partner and the Mexican military’s chief source of arms and equipment. During the Cold War, the United States often tolerated or supported military regimes; afterward, however, it invested, with some success, in demilitarizing and democratizing Latin America. All the more reason to resist a new foothold for militarism where it never previously existed, right next door.#