AMLO expanded Mexico's military. It built airports instead of reining in murders

The Shadow Budget

There are several other, less transparent ways that Mexico’s armed forces receive funds to oversee infrastructure works.

The Defense and Navy control trusts in which they or other entities can deposit money without being required to disclose where the funds came from or how they’re being used. At the end of 2023, trusts administrated by the military held 81 billion pesos, compared with 7 billion pesos at the end of Peña Nieto’s government in 2018, according to nonprofit Mexico Evalua.

Given the lack of disclosure, there’s no way to know how much of the money in the trusts is accounted for in the budget.

“The exorbitant sum of it all and the risk of double counting are exactly why they should tell us what’s in there,” said Sanchez.

Then there are contracts. Between 2019 and 2022, the Defense Ministry received an additional 191 billion pesos through agreements with other federal ministries for public projects including the Maya Train, according to the nonprofit Mexican Institute of Competitiveness, known as IMCO.

Contracts are rarely made public and increasingly difficult to track, given Lopez Obrador’s near dismantling of transparency watchdog, the National Institute for Access to Public Information and Data Protection. IMCO obtained the information through government information requests and legal challenges.

“We’re facing an opacity monster,” said Paula Villaseñor, the former head of IMCO’s Effective Government division. “It’s incredibly hard to know how much money and contracts they have.”

Sara Velazquez, the lead author of a report called “National Inventory of the Militarized,” said the military receives money from so many sources that it’s nearly impossible to trace all of it.

“I think even they don’t know how much money they get every year,” she said.

Record Murders

Mexico’s official crime statistics are known to be far from exact. The country’s “cifra negra,” or the estimated share of crimes that go unreported, reached 92% in 2022, according to statistics agency Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia. Homicides, though slightly down from the first few years of Lopez Obrador’s administration, are on track to end up the highest ever in a presidential term. The Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Publica (SESNSP), which is separate from Inegi, has counted 170,959 homicides with intent since AMLO took office through February of this year.

The president has acknowledged that homicides have surpassed those in previous administrations, but he casts blame on the violent country he inherited. Homicides fell 7% between 2021 and 2022, and dropped 4% between 2022 and 2023, which Lopez Obrador said was a direct reflection of his security strategy.

“It’s crazy to think that what we used to consider a violent year was one with 20,000 victims of homicide with intent,” said Lilian Chapa, a public-policy analyst who served as an adviser to SESNSP. The registry counted 29,705 homicides with intent in 2023.

National Guard Does It All

Last year, security consultant Manuel Garza witnessed the biggest heist he had seen in two decades. A shipment of mainly electronic goods worth nearly 17 million pesos was traveling along the highway from the port of Veracruz through the central state of Puebla. The person monitoring it on a screen suddenly saw the dot freeze.

An alert was raised when the dot hadn’t moved in over 40 minutes, said Garza, who is being identified using a pseudonym to protect him from retaliation. When the company’s private car came to check the scene, the truck’s security team of two armed guards were nowhere to be found.

The National Guard showed up 30 minutes later. When the truck’s driver called from the neighboring state of Hidalgo, he said he and the two guards had been tied up. But the National Guard didn’t take down the witnesses’ statements. For that, the security company had to go to the local prosecutor’s office. They got back nothing else from the heist.

The episode is emblematic of how the military has frequently taken a halfhearted approach to law-enforcement responsibilities it inherited when the Mexican government did away with the Federal Police in 2019.

The National Guard had a total headcount of about 104,000 at the end of 2022. That includes 17,419 members drawn from the disbanded Federal Police and 1,050 new recruits. However, the majority of the force is made up of soldiers and marines on loan from the Defense and Navy. The troops were given new uniforms and armbands, but little to no training on how to do police work.

That has led to plummeting arrests as many National Guard members prefer to turn a blind eye to whatever crime is happening before them than go through the motions of properly arresting a suspect and filing the report correctly, according to Chapa, the public-policy analyst. Seizures of illegal drugs and weapons have plummeted as a result.

Guillermo Montes, who also asked to use a pseudonym, was one of the marines transferred to the National Guard. He saw many of his fellow guardsmen make mistakes when they intervened at the scene of a crime because they had no idea how to track down robbers or respond to 911 calls.

One of the hardest things to do, he recalled, was present evidence in front of a judge. Often, their cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, since they hadn’t been fully trained on the protocols of filling out police reports.

“The armed forces are not trained to be police,” he said. “We followed in order to help, but we were lacking many of the things that the police know.”

Lopez Obrador didn’t always back such broad use of the armed forces. He had been vocal about sending the military “back to its barracks” since losing the 2006 presidential election against Calderon, who had the armed forces take to the streets to fight cartels. That resulted in more than 103,000 homicides during his administration.

“We can’t solve the country’s insecurity and violence with the army,” Lopez Obrador said in a video dated 2010. “We can’t use the military to make up for the civilian government’s shortcomings. It’s important we don’t give the army excessive faculties — we can’t accept a militarist government.”

But it didn’t take long for him to change his mind. In regular meetings during his transition into office, the Defense Ministry’s top brass laid out how corrupt the Federal Police was and how the military was the only institution worthy of his trust, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The Federal Police were plagued by reports of abuse of power, torture and corruption. Last year, Genaro Garcia Luna, who had been in charge of Mexico’s battle to root out illegal narcotics and vanquish drug kingpins, was convicted by a federal jury in New York of helping Sinaloa cartel members import and distribute drugs in the US. His defense has requested a new trial.

Though AMLO initially presented the National Guard as a civilian force, it’s effectively operated by the Defense Ministry, and its budget is routinely transferred to the military. In August 2022, Lopez Obrador issued a decree to place the guard under the Defense Ministry.

In April 2023, Mexico’s top court said that decree was unconstitutional, and gave the government until Jan. 1, 2024 to return the operation of the guard to the civilian ministry.

AMLO has said he would abide by the court’s order, but in February, he sent a new proposal to Congress to officially move the National Guard to Defense. Congress has yet to pass it.

“We’re living in two worlds,” said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, former member of Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission and head of Universidad Iberoamericana’s Citizen Security program. “The world of the constitution that says public security is a civilian matter” and “the world of reality, where the National Guard is, under every indicator that we have, strictly military.”

Money and Power

Sheinbaum has said she intends to consolidate the National Guard, and following AMLO’s footsteps, that it should operate under the Defense Ministry.

Meanwhile, Galvez has said the military has been asked to do too many things unrelated to their core mission.

“They shouldn’t be building trains, patrolling parks or handing out books,” she said at an event in Campeche in March. “A large part of the country is in the hands of criminals these days, we need the military to return to its national security activities.”

Mexico’s militarization isn’t exclusive to the federal government, according Causa en Comun's Morera. Military and Navy officials now oversee public-security ministries in 17 of the country’s 32 states. Sixteen of those states are ruled by AMLO’s Morena party.

For whoever wins Mexico’s presidential election on June 2, the key question will be how to deal with an empowered, enlarged and wealthy military that has taken over hundreds of tasks that used to be in the hands of civilians — and that has more revenue streams than ever — while reining in the record-breaking number of homicides.

“They’ve overused a perverse blanket called national security,” said Senator Alvarez Icaza. “Now the dilemma is, how do we take away all the money and power that Lopez Obrador gave them?”

—With assistance from Maya Averbuch, Rafael Gayol and Michael O'Boyle.