In the morning of August 8, 2022, the president announced that through an agreement he would arrange for the National Guard (GN) It depended on the Secretary of National Defense. True to his convictions (“don’t tell me that the law is the law”), with an agreement he intended to amend the Constitution, the Supreme Court stopped him, but now, with the qualified majorities almost in the bag, the Guard will move to the National Defense because if it remained in the Ministry of the Interior or in the Ministry of Public Security it would become corrupt, warns the President Lopez Obrador.
Behind the decision to place the GN within the Ministry of Defense is the idea that the military is incorruptible. Unfortunately, there are countless examples of military personnel who have strayed from the path of honor, colluded with criminals, become corrupted or violated human rights.
Ancient history? The rebellion of the most powerful faction of the Army to carry out a coup against President Carranza, which ended with his assassination. Another more recent one? General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, anti-drug czar, at the service of “The Lord of the Skies” or the “gafes”, members of an elite corps of the Army recruited by Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel, who became Los Zetas, the bloodiest criminal group. And in these very days, Julio Almanza, president of the State Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fecanaco) in Tamaulipas, denounces how corruption has worsened since the military took control of customs.
Before becoming President, López Obrador warned many times about the risks of involving the Army On the issue of security: “It is not with the Army that the problems of insecurity and violence can be resolved,” he said in April 2010 and later, on the eve of assuming power, he warned: “The Army should not continue to be exposed, we have to return to the Army as the police become more professional, I think it will take us six months…”
But it was not only López Obrador who warned about the risks of militarize public securityso did some leading figures of the 4T, suffice it to recall that speech by then-Senator Manuel Bartlett: “…it is the militarization of Mexican ports and they are moving towards the regularization of the occupation of the Mexican Army in the country, in our country, and we are going to live under a military regime, that is what they are doing… They are taking Mexico to a military-police regime… And our children, and ourselves, are we going to live under a military regime?”
In those days, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, today’s presidential spokesman, joined the chorus: “Being able to justify that the military appropriate, let’s say, the streets, the public space and can do police work, contravenes the Constitution, is unconstitutional and contravenes the democratic history of this country; it is about establishing the bases of a dictatorship“But all these heroes remain silent today.
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