Mexico’s president gives military sweeping new powers
MEXICO CITY — As a candidate for president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador denounced Mexico’s armed forces and the “mafia of power” that he said controlled them. He accused soldiers of human rights abuses in the country’s bloody drug war and publicly clashed with Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, then secretary of defense.
But after taking office, Lopez Obrador changed his tune, embracing the same military leaders he had once bashed.
After Cienfuegos was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport last month and charged with drug trafficking, the president rushed to his defense, threatening to withhold security cooperation with the United States unless charges were dropped. U.S. authorities caved this week and returned the 72year-old retired general to Mexico.
It was an unprecedented gift for the nation’s insular but increasingly powerful armed forces.
Traditionally, the military has played a limited role in civilian affairs here, setting Mexico apart from much of Latin America, where coups and military governments were once common.
Under an arrangement set eight decades ago by the then-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, the military was left to its own devices so long as it didn’t interfere in governance.
Under Lopez Obrador, that wall has begun to crumble.
The president reneged on his campaign vow to end the military’s involvement in Mexico’s war against drug traffickers while vastly expanding the role of the armed forces in other civilian matters.
Troops now lead the fight against illegal immigration, the coronavirus pandemic and the widespread theft of fuel from gas lines. They run the country’s biggest infrastructure projects and will soon control the nation’s ports and border crossings.
Lopez Obrador has drawn the armed forces closer in part because they are popular.
Polls consistently show that the Navy and Army are the nation’s two most trusted institutions, thanks to their humanitarian efforts to help victims of natural disasters. They are seen as efficient, professional and comparably less corrupt than other branches of government.
“He has relied on the military because they work,” said a member of Lopez Obrador’s administration who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
But perhaps more importantly, the president, a populist who vows to transform Mexico to benefit the poor, has alienated many of the nation’s traditional power players — from its business elite to the opposition parties that retain control of various states and maintain strong constituencies within public-sector unions.
The armed forces are among the few institutions that Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, can trust.
By elevating them, he has also made himself more reliant on them.
“Everything changed simply because he now depends on them so much,” said Guillermo Garduno Valero, a professor of military history who has taught at several military and naval colleges.
The deal with the United States, tweeted Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst, “is more of a triumph for the military than for AMLO.”
Some analysts believe that Lopez Obrador’s presidency has become so inextricably linked to the armed forces that he had little choice but to lobby for Cienfuegos.
“It would have been a major blow to the image of the military and it would have been a major blow to the project of the AMLO administration that increasingly relies on the military,” said Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope.
Cienfuegos, who led the armed forces from 2012 until just before Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, was accused of protecting drug smuggling corridors and alerting drug bosses to U.S. enforcement actions.
A trial laying out the details could have implicated other military commanders still on duty. Or Cienfuegos might have flipped under U.S. pressure and testified against confederates, placing his former colleagues in danger of imprisonment.