Mexican Army’s Civilian Role Raises Concerns

When President Ernesto Zedillo named a tough army general to head this city’s civilian Police Department last year, senior officials termed the move a temporary one to crack down on crime and police corruption.

Six months later, when Zedillo appointed another active-duty army general to the nation’s top counter-narcotics post, officials again called the measure temporary and said it was made to instill discipline and integrity in the ranks of Mexico’s notoriously corrupt federal police.

Late last month, the Mexican army’s senior officer corps was tapped once more--this time to take over two civilian airports near Mexico City reportedly frequented by narcotics traffickers.

These appointments--and dozens of others in which military officers have quietly assumed key federal law enforcement posts, including the unannounced naming last year of an admiral to run Cancun’s international airport--are fueling a debate here about the worrisome new civilian role of Mexico’s enigmatic armed forces.

The Mexican armed forces were deliberately isolated from political and civilian institutions during recent decades, when military dictatorships dominated elsewhere in the hemisphere.

That arm’s-length relationship helped make the Mexican military one of the most professional, if secretive, armed forces in Latin America--an institution so separate from politics and the public that its annual budget is above congressional scrutiny. Its role in society is considered so sacred that no one outside the academic community--including Mexico’s increasingly powerful political opposition--has publicly challenged the army’s recent high profile.

But academics here and in the United States who have studied the Mexican military’s new activism in civilian affairs for the past three years are warning that the trend may compromise one of the few institutions in Mexico left largely untouched by the drug-related corruption that has corroded law enforcement and the political system.

“The military will quickly begin to reflect the problems it is being called in to deal with,” said John Bailey, a Georgetown University professor who recently wrote a paper on the subject.

Roderic Camp, a Tulane University professor who in 1992, based on 15 years of interviews and research in Mexico, wrote one of the few recent books about the Mexican military, agrees.

“It’s misguided to think that military officers are going to succeed where the police and political institutions have failed,” he said. “The major danger is that it will further compromise the military as an institution by exposing it to all these sources of corruption.”

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Senior Mexican officials say they are aware of the risks in the recent appointments--moves the academics call desperate. But they say the military’s presence is both temporary and vital to the government campaign to curb the multibillion-dollar drug trade that funnels hundreds of tons of South American cocaine into the United States each year. Zedillo has called this trafficking the No. 1 threat to Mexico’s national security.

Privately, officials concede that the federal police--now largely in the hands of senior military officers--have been rife with drug corruption.

Mexico’s then-attorney general fired about 800 federal police officers for ethical breaches last year. Still, hardly a week passes here without the arrest of a current or former federal agent by anti-drug forces.

Beyond corruption, Mexican academics and other independent analysts point to other dangers in the military’s growing presence in civilian affairs.

They warn that the new police powers granted to an institution with a history of alleged human rights abuses could lead to more such abuses in the future--especially at a time when the military is trying to suppress armed guerrillas in several states.

“We’re going from an authoritarian system to a totalitarian system,” said Fernando Tenorio Tagle, a professor at Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University. “You see the militarization all over Mexico, and it’s a dangerous trend. These military officers are not necessarily saints.”

Assessing that danger when he wrote one of the first studies on the army’s growing civilian presence in 1994, Martin Andersen, a former Johns Hopkins University professor, said that placing the army in charge of police functions “is like putting an infected bandage on an open wound.”

The Organization of American States recently provided a reminder of the Mexican army’s human rights record when the organization’s human rights commission issued a scathing report on the 3-year-old case of Brig. Gen. Jose Francisco Gallardo. The general was jailed after he wrote about a pattern of human rights violations by the military and suggested that the armed forces appoint a public ombudsman to curb them.

The OAS commission recommended Gallardo’s immediate liberation and payment of damages for his continuing imprisonment.

“I am fighting for a society and an army that is united, in which the army is respected and not feared,” Gallardo declared through a speakerphone at the Jan. 23 news conference called to announce the OAS report.

Camp of Tulane is among the many analysts who agree that the military still has a largely positive image in Mexican society. But the reason, he says, owes less to its performance than to its traditional remove. “While the average Mexican now has a fairly positive or neutral view of the military, that’s largely based on ignorance,” he said.

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Much of that secrecy is built into the relationship that evolved through this century between the military and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico since 1929.

Although there are no documents or laws defining the army’s role in society, Camp and other analysts say that PRI leaders ceded virtual autonomy to the armed forces in exchange for the military’s promise to stay out of political affairs.

PRI leaders fulfilled their end of the bargain by giving military leaders free rein in allocating the annual defense budget, which has grown from an average of 2% to 3% of the national budget through the 1980s and early ‘90s to about 5% today--an allotment estimated at about $4.5 billion a year.

The armed forces, whose numbers are officially classified but estimated by defense experts at about 229,000--up from 170,000 in 1986--were given sprawling camps throughout the country, where soldiers and sailors live, eat, sleep and drink apart from the communities around them.

These forces are trained in separate military academies, and their salaries are believed to be among the best in government service.

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For most of its members, the military is a lifetime career. Some officers have entered law enforcement after they retire, but very few have used their military careers as springboards for a second career in politics or the bureaucracy.

What is more, politicians here have also steered clear of the military promotion process, avoiding the sort of meddling and favoritism that have politicized and so embittered armies in many nations of Latin America and Asia and led to rebellions against civilian governments.

As a result, Mexico has been free from the military coups and dictatorships that prevailed for decades in Argentina, Chile and elsewhere.

But with the Mexican military’s emerging new role, that institutional distance will close--with potentially explosive results, the analysts say.

“Involving the military in police duties, especially anti-drug activities, implies serious risks,” Georgetown University’s Bailey argues in a yet-to-be-published study. “Most obvious is the risk of penetration and corruption of the military by drug traffickers. But also important are tensions and conflicts between the military and police forces, political authorities and governments at various levels.

“Military officers engaged in police functions will find themselves accountable to two sets of commanders. Acute tensions will emerge as criminal investigations begin to touch political authorities, including present and former officeholders.”

On balance, Bailey concludes: “Militarization risks provoking political backlash and serious violence and may even jeopardize civilian rule.”