Militarism in Mexico: Another Unforeseen Result of the Drug War
In 2012, during his second failed campaign for president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised repeatedly that, if elected, he would send the Mexican army back to its barracks within six months of his inauguration. The country’s militarization was a political issue since 2006, when former president Felipe Calderón, who narrowly defeated López in that year’s election, resorted to the army to combat the increasingly powerful drug cartels.
During his third campaign in 2018, when he finally won the presidency, López remained a critic of Mexico’s militarization, promising to use the warm embrace of criminals instead of ammunition to overcome the country’s persistent security crisis. Since taking power, however, López has not only maintained the army on the streets; he has also increased its power and widened the scope of its activities.
Under López, Mexican soldiers still fight the drug war, and they still fight in vain if you consider the cartels’ unassailable profit margins. But they are also building infrastructure, most visibly, the Tren Maya railway scheme, López’s grand projet on the Yucatán Peninsula. Additionally, the army is in charge of customs duties at ports and airports, gasoline and fertilizer distribution, school textbook deliveries, and the provision of hospital materials, among other mundane or strictly logistical tasks that, even in many Latin American countries, fall well outside the military sphere.
In 2019, López created the National Guard, a new branch of the armed forces that, he assured, would be run by civilians. Instead, the guard has remained under the army’s command. Today, it is a force of 113,000 regulars (compared to 215,000 in the army proper) that carries out federal policing functions and, according to López, will remain under army control until 2028. The growth of the armed forces, with all of their augmented power, journalist Ivabelle Arroyo writes, has made Mexico “a country of soldiers.”
What caused López’s radical volte‐face regarding the military’s role in Mexican society? According to Guillermo Guevara, a security analyst, López, whose own approval ratings remain well above 60 percent, realized he could exploit the institution’s overwhelming popularity. With nearly nine out of 10 Mexicans approving of the army’s performance according to a 2020 poll, it constantly outranks the police, politicians, congress, the political parties—all of which are perceived as irredeemably corrupt—and even the Catholic Church.
There are at least two reasons behind the army’s extraordinary popularity. On the one hand, there is what Arroyo calls Mexico’s “olive green myth,” an official narrative of the army’s heroism—introduced to children in primary schools—that stems from its origins as the “constitutionalist” side in the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the country’s formative event in the 20th century. On the other hand, in recent decades, Mexicans have often witnessed media footage of army personnel rescuing people in natural disasters zones, or delivering much needed supplies in marginalized areas. As a result, Arroyo explains, the population regards its soldiers as “efficient, loyal, disciplined, and willing to sacrifice their lives for others.”
Academics and commentators have settled on the term “authoritarian populism” to describe López’s governing style. I don’t mean to echo the vogue. “Demagogy,” philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “is the word democrats use when democracy scares them.” What is true is that the army’s perceived altruism—and the humble origins of recruits and officers alike—complements López’s relentless promotion of himself as the Mexican people’s tribune, its elected redeemer. The army, he says, “is the people in uniform.” All of which obscures the many ways in which military men—and particularly the army’s top brass— have come to enjoy privileges that are hardly within the reach of the populus.
The army, Arroyo recounts, lobbies Mexico’s congress and changes laws for its own benefit. It also receives a constant slew of lucrative government contracts. So far, public opinion has looked the other way, as occurred after several high‐profile cases of army members’ abuse of their armed power. One vital question, however, is how long the army’s popularity can withstand a growing array of corruption scandals within the institution.
Nonetheless, corruption within the armed forces has been rife across Latin America. More specific to Mexico has been the military’s hold on the ministry of defense, a unique scenario among the region’s largest countries save for Venezuela post‐Hugo Chávez. Until López’s presidency, the unwritten rule was that the generals named to head the defense ministry would stick to their brief and keep clear of politics. Hence the shock when General Luis Cresencio Sandoval, López’s defense minister, called for the public to support the “national project” and Mexico’s current “transformation,” terms easily interpreted as euphemisms for the López‐army alliance.
The largest protests against López so far have not concerned the president’s militarism, but rather his plan to enfeeble the National Electoral Institute. Many consider this institution to be an independent pillar of Mexican democracy since the year 2000, when seven decades of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to an end. For López, the institute is a bloated bureaucracy manned by the smug, overpaid functionaries who, he claims, stole the 2006 elections from him.
The president does not appear intent—or, for that matter, able— to change the constitution, which forbids reelection, so as to remain in power. But a newly politicized electoral system could allow López’s party, Morena, to dominate Mexican politics much in the vein of the PRI of yesteryear. This mock democratic system, which Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once called “a perfect dictatorship,” seemed to be a vestige of Mexico’s past. Now, López could ensure that it also plays a role in its future.
Warnings about Mexico’s pivot to autocracy under López abounded well before his presidency (a good example is Roberto Salinas León’s 2019 policy report for Cato). However, the degree of militarization during the last four years has surprised even some of López’s longtime critics. No one should forget, however, that the Mexican army only began to recover part of the political might it exerted in the past as a result of the Washignton‐led war on drugs. Along with hippopotami roving along the Magdalena River, the rapid militarization of Mexico is yet another of the drug war’s unforeseen consequences.