A political reading of the incidents of the Senate on Wednesday during the appearance of the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection and the euphoria of the senatorial opposition facing the Secretary of National Defense could lead to a discussion that could take advantage of the new rules of political competition: institutionalization.
For a long time, the Armed forces were seen as an instance outside the PRI political system although within the state regime and its stabilizing role required a treatment of political exceptionality in which everyone agreed because of the role played by the military in carrying out the Mexican Revolution, the approval of the Constitution of 1917, the foundation of the structures of the PRI system through the state party and its role as guarantor of national sovereignty in the face of foreign armies and of internal stability in the face of armed adversaries.
Tasks assigned to the Armed Forces by President López Obrador based on the spaces guaranteed in the Organic Laws of the Army and Navy they were creating a new exceptional situation: keeping them on the sidelines of institutional observation due to their role as guarantors of stability in the national security of the State, but involving them in activities in which they would have to go through the institutional sieves of relations between powers.
Strictly speaking, the Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy are institutionalizing themselves based on their old tasks and new tasks, and there are several points that will have to be resolved:
1.- The cabinet secretaries are not ministers because we live in a presidential regime, but their formal appointment is as secretaries of the presidential office, with, of course, greater political values as the strength of the President of the Republic in turn. And the Secretaries of Defense and Navy are executive branch officials.
two.- The cabinet secretaries fulfill three fundamental functions: bureaucratic insofar as the personnel in their charge require the supervision of the legislature, political for their role in assisting in the power relations of the president in office and command in the military areas to be maintained. the control of the Armed Forces that defend the internal and external sovereignty of the Republic.
3.- Few have realized that the current Secretary of National Defense assumed, for reasons of administrative reorganization of his dependency, tasks that have to do with the bureaucratic administration of his dependency. This year the Headquarters of the Army was created to exercise direct command over the soldiers, freeing the head secretary of the National Defense portfolio from his dual role as administrative official with democratic obligations in a regime of precarious balance of powers and strictly military discipline. for the management of armed troops against external and internal attacks.
4.- In this context, the head of Sedena will increasingly have a more institutional role as bureaucratic-administrative head of the Defense portfolio, while the strictly military direction is in charge of the Army Commander. Therefore, the Secretary of National Defense will have to assume, by political-administrative mandate, tasks of horizontal and vertical relations and will assume greater institutional visibility, although the cost to pay will be that of being involved in aggressive confrontations with a minority opposition that bases its position on the management of confrontation.
5.- Secretary General Luis Cresencio Sandoval González paid for his institutional hazing on Wednesday of last week with the confrontation of two opposition senators who opted for scolding and insult, but it can be said that the head of Sedena more than fulfilled his baptism of fire by have maintained seriousness as a response, with the understanding that very soon he will have to present himself to appear before Congress and then he will be able to offer the answers that the circumstances of the moment merit.
6.- The other institutionalization fee that the Army is paying is the drilling of files by the Guacamaya group, but it will have to have a more rigorous institutional response in the control of national security information that was violated by international hackers.
We recommend you read:
The new structure of the military sector –Command of the Army and Joint Chiefs of Staff– has already entered the institutional framework and the senators only told the holders of the weapons: welcome to the political nightmare of the system.
policy for dummies: True politics, said Machiavelli, works in the effective truth.
The content of this column is the sole responsibility of the columnist and not the newspaper that publishes it.
#SedenaSenate #costs #democratic #institutionalization