The transfer of the National Guard to the Secretary of National Defense was consummated with the majority vote of Morena and its satellite parties, contravening the Constitution. A monumental farce was consummated, with a tricky presidential speech and an opposition that did not know how to respond to him and fell into his game, even though they voted against it. The argument was simple: the creation of the National Guard in 2019 and the presence of the Armed Forces in public security tasks, in this government, has been a resounding failure. How would a new law change the course?
On a tour of Jalisco this weekend, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that insecurity and violence had already been “tamed”. “Realistically, without triumphalism, I am already realizing that we are taming the problem of insecurity and violence because these well-being actions are giving effect, the actions to improve the economic and social situation of our people,” he affirmed. The handling of the verb recalls when in April 2020 he assured that it had already been possible to “tame the pandemic” of covid-19.
That was a misleading speech; this one too. The pandemic grew, it overflowed and today Mexico has the fourth highest mortality in the world, with around 700 thousand deaths, due to excess mortality from diseases related to covid-19. “Tame” is a déjà vu. At the cutoff of August 20, the Executive Secretariat of the National System for Public Security had registered 21 thousand 48 thousand intentional homicides during the first semester, and the president affirmed that it was a reduction of 2.8% of intentional homicides with respect to the first four years of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
The figures are true, but decontextualized. In the first four years of Peña Nieto, there were 85,384 intentional homicides, while in the first three and a half years of the López Obrador government they added up to 130,107 until July. It is not clear where he got the percentage reduction he mentioned. in its fourth Government Report, unless it has compared the 12 months of 2016 (24 thousand 559 intentional homicides) with the first six of 2022 (21 thousand 48). In any case, we must wait for the end of the year to make the correct analogy.
Where they were the same was in strategy: not fighting criminals, because, both argued, that generates more violence. Peña Nieto’s inaction caused the violence to spill over and hand over a country to López Obrador bathed in blood. Instead of learning, the president delved deeper. The Sinaloa Cartel enjoys almost total impunity, and there is limited confrontation against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Even though the Navy knows the location where its boss, Nemesio Oseguera, El Mencho, is hiding, the instructions are not to arrest him.
If López Obrador does the same as Peña Nieto, the result will not be the same, but worse, because the drug cartels’ field day has allowed them to advance their territorial control in the country due to institutional abandonment. The farce of transferring the National Guard to the Secretary of National Defense lies in the justification that doctrine and discipline will improve security and reduce violence. That will not happen because their commander in chief, the President, has ordered them not to confront criminals. If the orders are not changed, the violence will continue and intentional homicides will increase in absolute numbers. There is not much science in it. The extraordinary thing is that the speech hides the sun.
The only thing that changed last week was that a presidential decree illegally overrode the Constitution. The Law of the National Guard published in May 2019, establishes that the National Guard would be a public security institution of a civilian nature, assigned as a decentralized body of the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection. That was never-
The National Guard was under the command of the Secretary of National Defense. Its commander-in-chief, General Luis Rodríguez Bucio, the face of this paramilitary body, received instructions from the high command of the Army, and Brigadier General Inocente Prado López is the chief commissioner of the Police Coordination of the National Guard, a position that combined with his work as commander of the Army Military Police.
The National Guard was fundamentally nourished by the Military Police, and formed a paramilitary body in form and a military one in substance, which has not been able to pacify the country, as promised by the president, who always uses a dizzying speech. In Jalisco he stated that the percentage reduction in violence was the result of social programs, without providing evidence that this is true. For this strategy to be successful, it would be necessary to accompany it for a long time, from another that fights criminals. The current plan is truncated and runs to failure.
The criminals have had the best six-year term in their history due to the deliberate failure of the president to confront them. They have been fighting each other on the same battlefields for 15 years. During the Penya government, the states with the highest number of homicides above the national rate were Baja California, Colima, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco Michoacán, Morelos, Nayarit and Oaxaca. López Obrador’s military has not done much about it. The first eight states are the same and in the same order, in the same statistics, and only the last ones changed to Quintana Roo and Sonora.
The only presidential victory has been rhetorical. He presumes that like never before, the security cabinet meets daily, and the National Guard has more than 120,000 elements deployed, almost six times more than the old Federal Police. Why then, if there is a larger budget, greater territorial deployment and more public attention to the issue, does violence remain at historical highs, with a tendency to worsen? For the simple reason that everything is simulation.
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