Politics: An insufficient new National Security Plan
President López Obrador has long argued that his security proposals constitute a “new paradigm” that break with the actions of the two presidential administrations that preceded him and incorporate general aspects of his political project, an approach embedded in both the government’s national development, and peace and security plans. Early this month the administration published what ideally could have served as a much more substantial and detailed approach to public security, but it proved to be yet another exercise in illusory policy recipes.
The Sectoral Citizen Security and Protection Program for 2020-2024 suffers from the same line of thinking that underpins this administration’s earlier attempts at articulating security strategies. It is a voluntarist thesis that sees security policy as a byproduct of social policy, with poverty relief and the fight against government corruption largely consisting of the moral example set by the country’s paragon of austere living serving to attack the structural roots of insecurity and violence. The approach is clearly inadequate and in some instances completely erroneous for developing serious security policies and efficient strategies for lowering violence and building peace.
To its credit the program released this month largely bypasses such recipes and at long last offers priority objectives along with specific goals. But one of the more pervasive problems with the program is the extent to which its drafters betray their lack of familiarity with security issues. A strikingly deficient analysis helps to explain the very imprecise language they employ. There is often no concurrence between the manner in which objectives are formulated and the specific contents of the corresponding strategies and actions.
The plan maintains a total dependence on the armed forces for tackling security issues, including the National Guard, an ostensibly civilian police force overwhelmingly comprised of troops on loan from the Army and Navy, whose number will have to be dramatically increased to meet the goal of almost doubling the number of Guardsmen and deploying them throughout the entire country by 2021.
It fails to offer specific strategies or even actions for weakening and dismantling the country’s numerous criminal organizations, much less serious proposals for strengthening state and municipal police forces. Accordingly, it sets such limited goals that for many key indicators the target is little more than maintaining the status quo.
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