Claudia Sheinbaum’s arrival to the Mexican presidency was presented as a triumph of technical rationality, of knowledge over voluntarism, and of civility over noise. However, beneath the academic trappings and the moderate image of a scientifically trained head of state, a worrying inertia lurks: the unstoppable advance of the Armed Forces as the structural axis of real power in Mexico. The second stage of the transformation became the path to consolidating the project of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, after wanting to eliminate the Armed Forces in 2018, ended up handing them over. Sheinbaum has deepened the merger.
The incorporation of the National Guard into the Ministry of Defense is proof of this. For the first time in the country’s modern history, public security became, constitutionally speaking, the responsibility of the Army.
Analogies with the governments of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto are irrelevant. Their defense secretaries lobbied for the passage of a law that would provide them with a legal framework to protect them for carrying out public security duties in the face of the police disaster, under the assumption that at some point they would return to their barracks. That paradigm no longer exists.
What was approved this week will leave them in charge of public security until sometime, who knows when, the law is amended and command and operations return to civilians. This constitutional reform was promoted by two leftist governments, in a political and ideological contradiction, when they chose to rely on the Armed Forces, whom they made complicit in their project by handing them power, projects, and responsibilities that had always been civilians’, giving them good money through the budget, and allowing some to enrich themselves through bad money through public works commissions.
For a politician like López Obrador, as slippery as an eel, lacking ideological solidity, and with a PRI background, it’s no surprise that whatever he said, he said another. But Sheinbaum, whose parents were leftists and, as she says, a daughter of the generation of ’68, marked by the Tlatelolco massacre by the Army commanded by General Marcelino García Barragán, grandfather of her star secretary, Omar García Harfuch, her surrender to the Army is a betrayal of her essence. Using the Armed Forces as the only entity capable of confronting organized crime has a practical justification; handing over public security to them is a consequence of a gradual cession of power.
Unlike what happens in countries like Egypt or Burma—where the Army governs openly—in Mexico, López Obrador and Sheinbaum built a hybrid and dangerously opaque model.
The president is a civilian, but increasingly, the country’s strategic decisions regarding security, infrastructure, surveillance, and even the economy are in the hands of the Ministries of Defense and the Navy. What began under Calderón, continued under Peña Nieto, accelerated under López Obrador, and was consolidated under Sheinbaum without institutional resistance.
The National Guard stopped pretending to be civilian, as it was originally intended, and reaffirmed its military essence. The country’s most important airports, trains, and ports, along with customs, are now under direct or indirect military control. State-owned companies operated by them manage public resources without accountability. And now, under the new public security legislation, they will have access to the most sensitive citizen data.
Under their growing power, a surveillance state with a civilian face is being built. López Obrador’s argument for surrendering to the Army was efficiency. The eternal “Yes sir” of then-Secretary of Defense Luis Cresencio Sandoval made the military more trustworthy for the former president, who appreciated their lack of protest and their involvement in everything the rest of the cabinet shirks. But this efficiency came at a cost: the silent dismantling of the civilian power that balances democracies.
Every time a general administers an airport, a civilian loses the opportunity to exercise public oversight. Every time an officer distributes medicine or oversees a construction project, career civilian service is replaced by military loyalty.
Their power is not subject to congressional scrutiny, nor is it accountable to the courts, nor is it accountable to the citizens. Sheinbaum not only validated this logic but institutionalized it by leaving the National Guard under the command of the Defense Ministry, supporting the new Intelligence Council without civilian oversight, and remaining silent about the military’s budgetary opacity, thereby sending a clear message: the future is built with them, not with civilian institutions.
This isn’t just a matter of public safety. It’s a transformation of the power model. A country where the Army builds, monitors, administers, investigates, and collects funds, but is unaccountable. A country where civility becomes a mask for the actual power of arms. Military power doesn’t need coups or marches in the streets to conquer the state. It’s enough to build its bases silently, from within, with contracts, data, and surveillance. We didn’t want to realize that by the time we want to regain civilian control, it may already be too late.
Mexico has not yet reached the model of countries where military power is formal and absolute. But as we move toward progressive militarization, civilian presidents delegate real power to the army, especially in key areas such as security, surveillance, infrastructure, and the economy. This process, if not reversed, could seriously reduce the ability of civilian power to control the armed apparatus and turn Mexico into a hybrid state: electoral democracy with covert military oversight.
The current Mexican model is closer to a hybrid state like Turkey, El Salvador, or Morocco, which maintain a democratic facade but with militarized institutions, intrusive state surveillance, and weakened checks and balances.
Unless this trend is halted, in a few years we could find ourselves with a democracy without substance, in which the president is merely the visible figure of a state dominated by the military elite.
Source: elfinanciero
