Mexican lawmakers approve transfer of national guard to defense ministry

With the votes of Mexico’s ruling Morena party and its allies in the senate, the constitutional reform that transfers the national guard (GN) to the defense ministry (Sedena) was approved on Wednesday, a move that has been described by the opposition as the consolidation of the militarization of the country.

After obtaining approval from both chambers, the reform bill now goes to the state congresses for debate, where Morena also has the required votes.

In a session that began on Tuesday night, a supermajority led by the ruling party approved the reform promoted in February as part of the so-called Plan C of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who leaves office October 1. The reform modifies various articles of the constitution and grants the national guard the power to investigate crimes.

"The investigation of crimes is the responsibility of the public prosecutor's office, the police and the national guard, within their spheres of competence, which will act under the direction and command of the former in the exercise of this function," the document states.

The reform states that the federation "will have the national guard, a professional, permanent public security force made up of military personnel with police training, dependent on the defense ministry to execute the national public security strategy within its area of competence."

Eduardo Ordoñez, an independent consultant on political risk and security, said the transfer of the GN to Sedena from the public and citizen security department (SSPC), on which it depended until now, is not the most relevant because in practice it was already Sedena that operated it even economically, with personnel from Sedena, [navy ministry] Semar and some elements of the former federal police, which disappeared after the creation of the GN.

The GN was created by decree in March 2019 as a civilian public security institution, as part of López Obrador's strategy to combat organized crime.

And although the government insisted that the GN was civilian because it was attached to the SSPC to counter criticism of militarization, in practice, Sedena always had control of it.

Ordoñez said the real problem with the recent constitutional reforms is that an extremely important article was modified to give the GN the role of investigating crimes.

“That is very wrong, from my perspective, it is a huge mistake because the military is not prepared to be an investigative police force,” he told BNamericas. “This force is being empowered to be an internal security force to combat drug trafficking and high-impact crimes, but also as a police force, right? They are also going to investigate crimes. As far as I know, they don’t have that capacity or that training.”

Crime investigations should be the exclusive responsibility of the public prosecutor's office and the judicial police because they are the ones that put together the files that are presented to the judges, he said. Now the GN will be able to do it, so it will be very important to see how the secondary laws that will have to be modified after the constitutional changes will turn out, according to Ordoñez.

The national use of force act of 2019 and the national guard act of 2022 are the ones that will need to be amended, Ordoñez said.

Another change that is worrying, according to Ordoñez, is that congress will be able to legislate on matters of internal security, a concept that is not defined in any law and there is no internal security legislation either.

“Another worrying change is that they are giving the GN a civilian character – by force and whatever means – and they are giving it public security and internal security missions, confusing the two terms,” he said.

“This worries me because the country will never have a federal police force of a civilian nature, and even less so an internal security law that should oversee, in my opinion, the GN as an intermediate force, neither military nor civilian. In other words, it should be a model like the French Gendarmerie or the Carabineros of Chile,” he added.

According to Ordoñez, all these changes will give Sedena huge scope to operate as a military force, or even as a construction company, with the train lines they are going to build, some of which they already operate. “No one will be able to regulate or audit them. It will be too difficult to take away all this power in the future,” he said.