Mexico’s police and military have been on the front lines of Mexico’s brutal drug war for years. Is it now time to add a paramilitary force or National Guard to the mix, as President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto proposes? In the second of four posts that examine this question, Baker Institute information technology policy fellow Chris Bronk explains the differences between the U.S. National Guard and the organization envisioned in Mexico, as well as the difficult challenges ahead.
- Read the first post in the series, “A strategy shift in Mexico’s drug war?,” by Baker Institute nonresident drug policy fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence for the Houston field division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Paramilitary power in Mexico: Not your father’s National Guard
July 2012 marked the return of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to Los Pinos, Mexico’s equivalent to the White House, after two terms under the National Action Party (PAN). Mexico watchers are left to see how different PRI President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto’s policies will be from his predecessors. Of particular interest is Mexico’s ongoing, bloody drug conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of victims in the last decade.
Although drug and organized crime violence was a significant concern before the election of President Felipe Calderón in 2006, Calderón made the domestic security issue the centerpiece of his administration. In doing so, he mobilized a significant portion of Mexico’s armed forces — primarily within the army, but also the country’s air force and navy as well. Employment of the armed forces led to arrests and casualties, but it is unclear how successful they have been in making Mexico more safe and livable for its general population.
Peña Nieto’s primary answer to the internal violence problem has been to advocate for a Mexican federal militia or police force, what he labels a “National Guard.” We Americans have a very different concept of a National Guard than the one outlined by the new PRI president, and although we have several major federal police organizations, and more than a dozen minor ones (including at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Congress), our country has never had the sort of force Peña Nieto envisages.
A Mexican National Guard would be far different than the U.S. Army National Guard. The U.S. National Guard is a professional reservist military force that is organized at the state level, but managed, resourced and often employed by the Department of Defense in reinforcing the active duty military in combat operations, exercises and civil-military affairs.
In the last decade, elements of the U.S. National Guard served alongside regular army units and reservists in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, with many units engaging in multiple deployments abroad often of a year or more in duration. This is not new. During the Second World War, U.S. National Guard units were at the vanguard of many operations. The Maryland-Virginia 29th Infantry Division landed alongside the 1st Infantry and Rangers at Omaha Beach. Elsewhere, Texas’ 36th Infantry was repeatedly blooded advancing up the boot in Italy. U.S. Guard troops, now and then, serve as a militia, able to join with the regular army in military campaigns.
But the National Guard for Mexico would be nothing like our National Guard. Actually, even the Mexican army can hardly be considered much more than an internal security force, but perhaps one better suited for the barracks than the streets most of the time. The National Guard Peña Nieto speaks of would be more a gendarmerie, a sort of national paramilitary police force, with military organization and equipment, but also typically the capacity to arrest lawbreakers.
We don’t have one of these in the United States, and although the FBI, Border Patrol and Coast Guard all fulfill missions of a gendarmerie, their officers are not needed to maintain law and order in municipalities around the United States. Local and state authorities generally undertake policing, and that policing although not always perfect, is generally effective. Mexico is quite the opposite. Local and state police forces there are poorly trained, compensated, and motivated. Corruption and collusion with criminal elements is rife. Across most of Mexico, these departments consistently fail to win the public trust. Thus, federal police and military units have been the primary instruments for imposing law and order there, to whatever degree possible.
So how would a Mexican National Guard change the status quo? Setting aside matters of raising, training, and equipping such a force, which would take years, we have to wonder why there is a need for one. Perhaps the best example in favor of such a paramilitary police force might come from the experience in peace operations following civil conflicts. This is the case in Yugoslavia and Ivory Coast, where UN peacekeepers were eventually not needed, but impartial referees still are. But there are no outside peacekeepers in Mexico, nor have there been in Colombia or Peru as the violence raged across those countries in the last few decades. Government is still in control and the state has not failed.
Setting aside whether there needs to be a Mexican National Guard, its developers must acknowledge several significant issues. First of them is that not all Mexican violence is drug violence. The weaknesses of state and local law enforcement, as well as the failings of the Mexican legal system, make it difficult to achieve a desired level of efficacy. Second is the long history of friction between strong central power and distributed federal authority. It was this force that contributed significantly to the acceleration of Texas’ independence movement in the 1830s. Finally, there is the shadow of the Mexican revolution. The 2012 Mexican election signals a return to power of the party that maintained order following the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, a conflict that may have taken the lives of a million Mexicans, many of them non-combatants killed by famine or disease. We should remember the decade a century after our own Civil War. The 1960s were a period of great strife and struggle in the United States, but also great prosperity. Perhaps the 2010s will be similar for los Estados Unidos de México.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments in Mexico, overseas and Washington, D.C.