Politics: AMLO scores a political victory even as hackers leak massive data breach
President López Obrador achieved another political victory last week in his push to make the military responsible for public security at the federal level at least through 2028 when he succeeded in getting that reform measure passed in the Senate by winning over ten PRI senators and two from the PRD. Aside from the political effects of having broken the legislative alliance of three opposition parties (PAN, PRI, PRD), a major achievement in the president’s 2024 aspirations for his Morena party, the debate on the militarization of public security intensified in two aspects: its implications for security and the political consequences of empowering the military beyond the current presidential administration, which concludes in 2024.
Nowadays it has become common practice among state governors to pay the armed forces to assume public security tasks, an arrangement that both frees state governments from the cost and arduous task of rebuilding state and municipal police forces and provides them with someone else to blame. But the administration’s efforts to paint the military as the country’s savior on the level not only of security but also for a wide array of other civilian tasks and businesses were not helped last week when a group of hackers infiltrated the Ministry of Defense and published millions of emails that detail the military’s growing influence over the civilian government, its attempts to evade cooperation on a major human rights investigation and its spying on journalists using the spyware known as Pegasus. The data breach also detailed the military’s own internal probes and suspicions that powerful government officials are linked to organized crime networks, including drug cartels.
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