In recent weeks the Army it has been a topic of public conversation and political attrition. The militarization of the country due to the growing number of civil tasks that it has accumulated by presidential decision, it has not ceased to confront positions based on the conviction that the new law that requires accountability regular, will be breached. This was accentuated in the week, when the Secretary of Defense, the General Luis Cresencio Sandoval refused to appear before a commission of the Congress, because the deputies, which is an autonomous power and have the faculties and attributions to call it, they had been “disrespectful”.
General yields are down and there are storms you may not be seeing. The last one, a projection of the historian Lorenzo Meyer on Carmen Aristegui’s radio program this Monday, where he revived an old idea of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador by suggesting, although he clarified that at the present time it is not close to reality, that the Army should disappear and only the National Guard. Previously there was another, in the book by Jesús Lemus, “El Fiscal Imperial”, about Alejandro Gertz Manero who on page 165 detonates a nuclear bomb against the Mexican generals.
The chapter is called “Rescuing the General”, referring to the backstage that, according to him, led to the former Secretary of Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, being repatriated to Mexico without being prosecuted in the United States for alleged links with the organization. criminal of the Beltrán Leyva brothers. Lemus argues that there is a brotherhood that pressured and subdued the president to demand the release of Cienfuegos. “I had no other option,” an official at the National Palace told the journalist.
The claims in that chapter seem foolhardy, and to better understand them you need to know the context. Days before going on sale on July 6, one of the presidential spokesman’s sidekicks, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, made it public in the morning and even read a chapter to López Obrador about Gertz Manero. The president supported the prosecutor but also asked the palero to congratulate the author.
López Obrador tacitly endorsed the content of the book and publicly congratulated Lemus. This moment was not spontaneous. Every night López Obrador and Ramírez Cuevas design the morning show and choose the themes that the paleros at their service will air. The question about the book could not have been otherwise given the oiled mechanics they have. Hence the relevance of what happened and its aftermath.
In “Rescuing the General,” Lemus says there is a group of 43 generals lobbying the president, revealing their names, including 16 generals, led by Secretary of Defense Sandoval, and three former secretaries. The rest may go unnoticed by most of those who read the book, but a minimum amount of work allows us to see the level of soldiers that he incorporates into the brotherhood:
Agustín Radilla Suástegui, Undersecretary of Defense; Gabriel García Rincón, Senior Officer; Carlos Arturo Pancardo Escudero, Inspector and Comptroller General of the Army and Air Force; Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, chief of the National Defense General Staff; Eufemio Alberto Ibarra Flores, commander of the Mexican Army; José Gerardo Veja Rivera, commander of the Mexican Air Force; Alejandro Saavedra Hernández, director of the Social Security Institute of the Armed Forces; Miguel Enrique Vallín Osuna, General Commissioner of the Directorate of Air Transport of the National Guard; Foullon Van Lissum, a former Deputy Defense Secretary who retired last year; Arturo Granados Gallardo, Undersecretary of Defense in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, retired; Eduardo Emilio Zárate Landero, former Chief Officer; and Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez, former Inspector and Comptroller General of the Army and Air Force.
They are part of the military staff in the government of López Obrador and of the military staff in the Enrique Peña Nieto government. “As a brotherhood,” Lemus wrote, “they take care of and protect each other, even from the provisions of the President of the Republic,” and they are “those who make decisions that affect the security of the country,” which gained strength during the last three federal administrations “under the sign of economic benefit”. Corrupt and powerful, as the author describes in a book that has received support from the National Palace, including that of the president.
The book had no repercussion, but it is still relevant, because the most refined readers for this type of material are in Washington -the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency-, where several officials in the National Palace believe they are find the origin of Guacamaya, the hackers who intervened the Army emails.
The growing power of the military has been a cause for concern in various parts of the world, and the fact that a book sanctioned by the Presidency marks them as corrupt and unpunished potentially harms the generals more than the president. The example can be seen in another case, with the withdrawal of arrest warrants for 16 soldiers for the Ayotzinapa Case and the resignation of the special prosecutor for the case, which was seen as pressure from the Army so that generals and officers close to the secretary, they will not be charged.
The political cost for the president of this action cannot yet be measured, but López Obrador, when the time comes, will probably distance himself, as he will when having to account for the violence and the number of deaths that will exceed those who had their predecessors, he will shift the blame to the military, who gave them everything, he can say, and they failed him and everyone else. The hacked emails to the Army come, at least for now, like a glove, when showing them, with the information that has begun to flow, incapable, arbitrary and ignored.
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A perfect storm is forming over the Army, creating the conditions of potential discredit necessary for López Obrador to have a pretext to fulfill his dream, disappear it and replace it with the National Guard.
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