Politics: Centralized/militarized security approach
President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s newly unveiled National Peace and Security Plan 2018-2024 is painfully short on details, especially when it comes to public security, but at least provides some clues as to the government’s priorities for the next six years.
It simply assumes that a generic fight against corruption and the new administration’s signature social policy proposals will automatically lower crime rates. It confirms the most sweeping transitional justice mechanisms about which AMLO had publicly ruminated in varying terms for quite some time, but offers almost nothing in the way of police reform or a clear role for the criminal justice system. In fact, the Office of the Attorney General, whose major overhaul Congress had hashed out with great difficulty in recent years, didn’t even warrant an afterthought in the strategic scheme of things. And the plan offers not so much as a hint as to what it all might cost.
In stark relief to this lack of specificity stand the plan’s wildly optimistic objectives and targets. It offers explicitly military solutions through a hyper-centralization of security. Its controversial centerpiece, which has sparked an outcry from organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is its intention to cobble out of the Army, Navy and Federal Police a National Guard (plus the historically unprecedented 50,000 additional officers it assumes can be recruited in the next three years) to permanently attend to police matters, all under the command of the Ministry of National Defense.
The new security plan will probably achieve very little toward stemming the country’s crisis of violence, but its political effects will be anything but trivial. If implemented in the same terms with which it is being proposed, it will mark Mexico’s most sweeping redistribution of power between civilian and military officials in seventy years, though ultimately to what end?
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