Politics: Political control trumps security
Society’s growing alienation from all manner of governmental and political institutions is a major factor at the heart of the broader political crisis that paved the way for López Obrador’s overwhelming electoral victory July 1, a crisis greatly deepened by the past few years of corruption scandals on a seemingly unprecedented scale, and a government totally ineffectual in security matters even as violence spiraled to new historical highs.
Mexico’s next president has been long on promises to root out corruption and transform the country, but short on details about how he intends to achieve such lofty goals, and that is especially apparent on the level of security policy, a matter to which AMLO appears to have dedicated little attention. Some of his initial proposals for re-engineering the entire system of government appear designed to concentrate vast powers in the hands of the president, such as the decision to name what are clearly political appointees to directly oversee all federal spending and transfers in each of the states.
One aspect of Lopez Obrador’s plan we can applaud in principle is the idea of re-establishing a public security ministry, especially considering the disastrous results of outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto’s decision six years ago to reduce it to the status an interior ministry department. But the organigram that is emerging appears to suggest an arrangement in which considerations of political control are being given priority over any plans to rectify the severe institutional deficiencies plaguing the security and criminal justice systems in Mexico. While it was a serious mistake to saddle what had long been the most politically important and powerful ministry (Interior) with almost all the nation’s security concerns, little attention appears to be given to how the revived security ministry might address the main structural causes of rising insecurity, issues that the administration doesn’t even appear to be budgeting for. Instead it is to take over politically sensitive intelligence agencies, including the Cisen, that of the Federal Police, and the finance ministry’s own financial intelligence unit, a concentration of power that could be easily abused for purposes of political control.
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