After approving the federal government’s controversial judicial reforms earlier this month, lawmakers from the ruling Morena party and its allies are now preparing to pass a constitutional bill that would place the National Guard (GN) under military control.
And they may achieve their goal before President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ends his six-year term on October 1, delivering a much-desired second parting gift to the 70-year-old leader.
Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s leader in the House, said a vote on the reform proposal López Obrador sent to Congress in February could be held this week.
“We will discuss, and if necessary, approve … National Guard reform,” he said.
Morena and its allies, the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Mexican Ecological Green Party (PVEM), have a supermajority in the House that would allow them to approve constitutional reforms without the support of opposition parties.
Ignacio Mier, Morena’s deputy leader in the Senate, said he expected debate on the GN reform bill to begin in an upper house committee next Monday, after it is approved in the lower house of Congress.
Morena, PT and PVEM fell one vote short of a supermajority in the Senate, but managed to secure the extra vote to pass judicial reform last week.
The most controversial aspect of the National Guard reforms is the provision to place the security forces under the control of the Ministry of Defense (Sedena).
In late 2022, Congress approved a bill supported by López Obrador that amended four secondary laws and thus paved the way for the GN to be placed under military control.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in April 2023 that the transfer of control of the National Guard from the Ministry of Civil Security to Sedena was unconstitutional, a decision that angered the president.
López Obrador, who argued that the National Guard needed to be under military control to prevent corruption and ensure the professionalism of the force, then prepared a constitutional bill to once again put Sedena in charge of the security force his government created.
The GN was founded in 2019 based on the civil command enshrined in the constitution.
Opposition parties, government critics, and human rights groups have pointed to the transfer of control of the National Guard to the army in 2022 as another example of the militarization of Mexico that they say has occurred under the current administration. Human Rights Watch has warned that the government’s militarized security policies risk facilitating abuses by security forces while failing to reduce violent crime.
López Obrador has relied heavily on the armed forces during his six years in office, using various branches of the military for public security, infrastructure development, and the management of ports, airports, and customs offices, among other non-traditional tasks.
Overall, the GN Bill seeks to amend 12 articles of the constitution. Among its goals are:
- Connect the National Guard to the Department of Defense.
- Define the National Guard as a professional public security force that is part of the military but whose members have police training.
- Authorizes Congress to ratify high-ranking National Guard appointments made by the president.
- Authorizes the president to use the National Guard for purposes of homeland security and external defense.
- Give National Guard personnel the same rights and benefits as members of the armed forces.
- Empowering the National Guard to conduct investigations under the command and direction of the Office of the Federal Attorney General.
The National Guard currently has about 130,000 members deployed across Mexico’s 32 federal entities. It outnumbers police in 21 states, the Reforma newspaper reported Tuesday.
Security forces play a critical role in combating drug trafficking, including fentanyl, and have also been used by the government to curb the flow of migrants to the Mexico-United States border.
When the GN was inaugurated on June 30, 2019, then-security minister Alfonso Durazo stated that the formation of the National Guard would “mark the beginning of the end of violence in our country.”
“With full responsibility, we can say that … the worst days of insecurity will remain a thing of the past,” he said.
However, the murder rate continued to rise in the first half of López Obrador’s six-year term before declining in recent years, but remains very high.
President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum fully supports placing the National Guard under military control, as well as a variety of other constitutional bills the president sent to Congress in early 2024.
With reports from Reforma and El Financiero