Politics: Policing Strains the Mexican Army
Minister of National Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos used a memorial event for soldiers recently ambushed by heavily armed criminal gunmen to complain of a lack of civilian support for the job the armed forces have had to assume since 2006 in fighting organized crime and compensating for the lack of functional police forces and local governments in much of the country. Ten years since they were pulled from their barracks to assume policing tasks, Congress has failed to make the constitutional changes needed to provide the Army and Navy with the legal authority and regulations for such an undertaking, or even to provide the funds and laws needed to rebuild the police so that the armed forces might eventually be relieved of its new tasks. In the decade since the offensive began, there have been 3,847 attacks on troops, in which 237 soldiers have been killed and 1,362 wounded.
The government does not have many options for tackling the problem. If the government is unwilling to fund the hiring of more personnel and to better equip and pay troops, then the response must be political. With several bills in the hands of legislators, it is unclear what the scope of any new laws might be in terms of the powers and resources to be provided to the armed forces. A decision to considerably expand its powers could prove counterproductive in the medium term; in the final analysis the real solution to the public security problem is the reconstruction of the police forces throughout the country, so that soldiers can return to their barracks. Providing additional budgetary resources for the army most likely would entail redirecting those funds away from the police. The result would be to prolong the army’s participation in tasks corresponding to the police and exacerbate the problems that are currently sources of discontent in the military. This creates a vicious circle.
Perhaps the solution would be to permanently transfer around 50,000 soldiers to the federal police, and retrain them as police officers. This would effectively allow for withdrawing the army from the streets and having the federal police assume responsibility for the fight against organized crime.
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