(Bloomberg) — Mexico’s senate passed President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan to bring the National Guard under military command, shrugging off warnings that it will give the armed forces excessive power.
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Lopez Obrador created the Guard in 2019 as a civilian institution with policing duties, but argued it will operate more efficiently under the command of the Defense Ministry rather than the Public Security Ministry.
The bill, which amends the constitution, passed with 86 votes in favor and 42 against on Wednesday morning.
The reform will ensure the National Guard “is not thrown away and destroyed in the future,” Lopez Obrador said in a press conference Sept. 22. “We don’t want to see a repeat of what happened to the Federal Police,” he said, referring to the police force he eliminated because he considered them too corrupt to function.
The change comes at a time when violence by organized crime gangs is roiling the country. Clashes between rival drug cartels in the northern state of Sinaloa left at least 53 people dead in recent weeks.
The new rules will allow the armed forces to fully participate in public security, something which had previously been restricted to exceptional cases, said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, who heads Universidad Iberoamericana’s Citizen Security program.
“It’s not an another step toward militarization, it’s the definitive step,” Lopez Portillo said in an interview. “This decision carries enormous risks because there’s 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 policing had been unchanged since 1857, he said.
Civilian Oversight
The move comes just days before Lopez Obrador’s term ends and his protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office. Sheinbaum told reporters that fears over the change are baseless, and that human rights will be respected, while Mexico’s military has civilian oversight.
There have been 198,571 homicides in Mexico since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, up 45% from the previous administration. Lopez Portillo said the government hadn’t provided any evidence that the armed forces are better than civilians at fighting crime.
“This reform is the final nail in the coffin of Mexico’s civilian security,” said Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio from the opposition Movimiento Ciudadano party during the debate. “Our armed forces are lethal. They’re masterfully trained to shoot, kill and bring down any threat to national security, not to prevent, not to dissuade.”
A previous attempt by Lopez Obrador in 2022 to make the Guard a fully military organization was blocked by the Supreme Court, which ruled it unconstitutional.
Now, with his party controlling more than two thirds of the lower house, and nearly two thirds of the senate, the president was able to achieve his goal by amending the constitution.
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