The Mexican army is given greater powers

Mexico’s military is officially in charge of the National Guard after the Senate passed the president’s plan on Wednesday, raising concerns about the country’s increasing militarization.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office since 2018, created the National Guard in 2019 and introduced the force, whose command consisted mainly of retired military officers, as a civilian security force under the control of the Ministry of Public Security, said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Associated press.

The bill making the National Guard a subsidiary of the Mexican military passed with 86 votes in favor and 42 against. Obrador told a news conference that amending Mexico’s constitution will ensure that the National Guard is not “thrown away and destroyed” over the federal police in the future, according to Bloomberg.

Newsweek contacted the Mexican government for comment via email outside business hours.

Mexico’s president disbanded the federal police in 2019 after saying he believed it was “highly corrupt and irredeemable,” and used the National Guard as a force to replace the federal police.

According to The New York TimesSpeaking about the reform, Obrador told reporters: “If, like the army and the air force, it becomes a department of the Ministry of Defense, we have the guarantee that it will remain and continue to act with righteousness.”

About the constitutional change, Ana Vanessa Cardenas, a Mexican political scientist and researcher in Chile, told the Associated Press: “It is a regression and an implosion in terms of security and human rights.”

She added: “I believe this change, together with what we have just seen with judicial reform, leaves citizens completely vulnerable.”

Obrador, who is due to leave office on September 30, has founded the Morena political party behind the effort to make the 120,000-member civilian National Guard part of the military.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday that this measure “could increase the risk of human rights violations, including torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.”

“We are alarmed that, if the constitutional reform proposal is approved, it would permanently assign public security functions to the armed forces. The potential impact of this change on the increase in enforced disappearances and impunity is extremely worrying,” UN experts said in a report. statement.

The Senate’s approval of this bill follows Obrador’s previous attempt to integrate the National Guard into the military in 2022, which was not passed after being declared unconstitutional by Mexico’s Supreme Court.

The Mexican president will be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, another member of the Morena party, and the first woman and first Jewish person elected to the position, who will take power on October 1.

When Obrador took office in 2018, he campaigned to “send the soldiers back to their barracks” as he cited widespread corruption in the national police and wanted to come up with a new plan to combat rising violence and drug crime, according to the BBC.

The Mexican president changed plans and put the military in charge of several civilian projects, including building the new Benito Juárez International Airport, distributing vaccines and school textbooks, monitoring migration at the Mexican border and cleaning beaches in coastal towns.

Critics have expressed concern that this constitutional change will signal the use of the National Guard in a fight against the cartels, as the Mexican government declared war on illegal drug suppliers in 2006, deploying the military to fight the cartels , according to the Global Conflict. Follower.

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