Tag Archives: national guard

Corruption in Mexico under AMLO: Lessons from an Interview With Dr. Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez

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In July 2018, Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the Mexican presidential election in a landslide. AMLO campaigned on the promise to transform Mexican society, and his pledge to curb corruption was among the most prominent planks of his platform. Yet although AMLO remains very popular with the Mexican public (his approval rating at his 100-day mark in March 2019 was above 80% in some polls), many Mexican anticorruption experts are less enthusiastic.

I’ve offered my own reasons for skepticism about AMLO’s approach to fighting corruption in prior posts (see here and here), but to try to better understand some of the reasons why Mexican anticorruption specialists are critical of the AMLO administration, I interviewed one of those specialists, Dr. Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez, a Mexican scholar currently based at the Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Dr. Rodriguez-Sanchez, whose recent publications include Measuring Mexico’s Corruption and Corruption in Mexico, shared his view of the biggest concerns regarding the AMLO administration’s approach to corruption. What follows is my translation from our conversation (which took place in Spanish), with some paraphrasing and condensation for clarity.

Dr. Rodriguez-Sanchez highlighted five criticisms of the AMLO administration’s anticorruption policies: Continue reading →

Mexico’s National Guard: The Wrong Response to Police Corruption

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In September 2018, Mexican federal and state authorities disarmed the entire police force of the city of Acapulco because of suspicion that the police had been corrupted by drug cartels. Federal authorities certainly had reason to take action: partly due to the corruption of the police, murders in Acapulco surged to 2,316 in 2017, and police officers themselves were implicated in some of those murders. Yet rather than institute a plan to reform the local police to address this problem, the Mexican government had the military assume local police functions.

It now appears that Mexico’s popular new President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), is poised to adopt a similar solution for all of Mexico, in the form of proposed legislation that would create to create a 60,000-strong National Guard. This proposal, which has already been approved by Mexico’s congress and by a majority of the state legislatures, is not accompanied by any proposal for comprehensive police reform; rather, AMLO wants to simply replace the police by utilizing the National Guard to fight the war on crime. His justification for this approach is that the police force is simply too corrupt to do its job.

This argument is not without some merit, nor is it unprecedented. In fact, many governments around the world have opted to militarize domestic security when organized crime infiltrates the police, because of the military’s greater discipline, more hierarchal structure, and (supposed) lower susceptibility to corruption. (See here for an example from the Philippines.) AMLO has advanced similar arguments in favor of the National Guard. He has also emphasized additional safeguards: the top commander of the National Guard will report to a civilian boss, civil courts rather than military tribunals will have jurisdiction over National Guard members alleged to have violated the law, moving detainees to military installations is prohibited, and National Guard members will receive human rights training.

But despite all this, and despite the evident need to address the police corruption that contributes so much to the outrageous violence in Mexico, a National Guard is not the solution, for several reasons: Continue reading →