Politics: AMLO’s winning ways with the generals
During his 2018 election campaign, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador frequently took polemical shots at the country’s armed forces, painting them as machine-gunning citizens left and right, and regularly promising that under an AMLO administration the troops would no longer be used to repress the people.
But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the presidency. Following the elections it became increasingly clear that the president-elect was planning on permanently assigning the job of public security to a National Guard under the command of that same military. And since taking office he has assigned the Ministry of Defense an expanding array of tasks, contracts and other opportunities through which to supplement its federal budgets.
Expediency is a major consideration for passing civil security tasks to a military that previous administrations increasingly used as a shortcut for repairing deficient civilian police forces ostensibly on temporary bases. Budgetary constraints can always be used to justify rewarding the armed forces business opportunities with which to supplement the funds Congress authorizes them in each year’s budget especially in a country that assigns a smaller percentage of GDP to the military than any other in Latin America and only a minor fraction of what comparable countries in the region provide their armed forces. It is also one of only two countries in this hemisphere to have never had a civilian minister of defense.
But these approaches pose major risks to civilian control over the military, and create conditions in which the credibility of the Army and Navy could become enmeshed in problems of corruption.
This closeness between López Obrador and the armed forces is not necessarily a negative development. A conflictive relationship between the President and the country’s military institutions would clearly posed serious governability problems. And the AMLO-military rapprochement is not entirely surprising given the ways in which the Army’s nationalist bent and relative estrangement from socioeconomic elites dovetail with AMLO’s own political inclinations.
But there lies another serious threat: To the extent that the economic and political interests of the government and the armed forces align, they could become a permanent source of political support for the president against his enemies.
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