Mexico and the Lessons from a Human Rights Catastrophe: The Militarization of Public Security

[TomSea]

Mexico and the Lessons from a Human Rights Catastrophe: The Militarization of Public Security
Daniel Wilkinson

One of the most vexing questions Andrés Manuel López Obrador will face as president of Mexico is what to do about the country's armed forces. For more than a decade, they have engaged in a "drug war," with disastrous results for human rights and public security, and a corrosive impact on the rule of law. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the military is operating throughout much of Mexico with little or no effective control by civilian authorities. The Interior Security Law passed last year, if implemented in its current form, will only make matters worse.

President Enrique Peña Nieto inherited this catastrophe from his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, who within weeks of taking office in 2006 deployed Mexican troops en masse to confront organized crime in several parts of the country. The deployments were initially presented as temporary to support civilian police forces that found themselves outgunned by powerful and ruthless criminal organizations. But by the end of the Calderón's presidency, they had become permanent in many places, with the armed forces effectively substituting for—rather than merely supporting—the police.

The legal basis for Calderón's policy was dubious. Article 129 of the Constitution establishes that "in times of peace, no military authority will perform functions other than those that are strictly related to military discipline." The Calderón administration justified using the military by citing a 1996 Supreme Court ruling that the military could participate in public security activities at the request of civilian authorities. But that ruling established a clear requirement that the military serves an "auxiliary" role, supporting civilian forces, not replacing them. That is not what has happened.

Read more at: http://www.latimes.com/espanol/mexico/la-es-mexico-and-the-lessons-from-a-human-rights-catastrophe-the-militarization-of-public-security-20181005-story.html