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Mexico’s National Guard, Created to Fight Crime, Is Deployed to Capital
By Paulina Villegas and Elisabeth Malkin
Mexico’s president, facing intense pressure to bring record-breaking homicide rates under control, has begun to deploy the country’s new National Guard in Mexico City.
“We need more presence and protection for the citizens of the capital,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week as he announced the deployment.
While the crime rate is still relatively low in the capital compared with much of the country, it has been rising, and two high-profile killings in recent weeks have focused political attention on the problem.
But critics, including human rights groups, warn that the use of the National Guard — a militarized police force created out of Mexico’s army, navy and federal police — could lead to abuses.
Despite the government’s assertion that it is a civilian agency, the National Guard was rolled out on Sunday at Mexico City’s military parade grounds, under the command of an active military officer.
Critics say the force is ill-equipped to carry out policing.
Late last year, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of the president’s, said her city did not need the National Guard. But faced with rising rates in crimes like homicide, kidnapping and robbery, she agreed that the force could be deployed throughout the city, beginning with 2,700 Guard members in special operations and street patrols.
The kidnap and murder of a college student last month, followed by the murder of a young Roman Catholic deacon, drew intense news coverage. So did Mr. López Obrador’s decision to dismantle the previous government’s anti-kidnapping strategy, one of the only measures against crime that had begun to show success.
But Mayor Sheinbaum said the decision to deploy the Guard had been under discussion for some time. “This isn’t a decision we took yesterday or a week ago,” she said. “This is a task we have been developing for several months.”
On Sunday, three white pickup trucks bearing the National Guard’s insignia and carrying officers holding guns drove along an avenue at the edge of the city in a show of force.
Ms. Sheinbaum’s security strategy also includes strengthening the city’s police force. Since she took office in December, the city has increased police salaries and hired 3,000 new officers. The police force is planning to increase the number of officers by almost 50 percent, to 24,000, she said.
Mr. López Obrador said last week that his government had originally considered it unnecessary to send the National Guard to Mexico City, which has a largely functional police force of its own.
But progress has not come fast enough, the president said.
Homicide rates in the city of almost nine million people have jumped as much as 50 percent in some months, compared with a year earlier, although in other months they have remained relatively stable. In May, for example, there were 157 homicides; in May 2018 there were 98.
Luis Wertman, the director of Trust and Citizen Impulse, a civil organization that focuses on security issues, agreed that violence was rising and blamed past city administrations, which he said failed to pay enough attention to security and crime prevention.
Still, he argued that the National Guard was unnecessary. Mexico City has one of the country’s best-trained local police forces in the country, and the deployment of militarized forces could prompt a backlash in the famously liberal city, he said.
While other cities have been accustomed to a military presence over the past dozen years, since former President Felipe Calderón first sent the military to fight drug gangs, the capital’s residents are wary of the armed forces — a legacy of the military crackdowns on student and opposition protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Wertman said.
“Historically, Mexico City has rejected the military patrolling of the streets,” he said.
Francisco Rivas, the director of Observatorio Ciudadano, a crime watch group, lamented what he described as the “effective militarization of public security,” and said the deployment left many questions unanswered: “questions about training, accountability and specific objectives.”
Mexico City residents, worried about rising crime rates, may initially welcome the National Guard forces, he said, noting that government has “told us it is the solution to our problems.”
“But it can turn out to be counterproductive,” he said.
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