Why the Mexican Armed Forces aren’t going back to their barracks any time soon
Content warning: this article contains descriptions of violence, torture and attempted suicide
A mannequin left outside the Secretariat de Gubernación in Mexico City
In 2009, Oscar Kabata, 17, and his friend Victor Baca, 19, were sitting at a hotdog stand in Ciudad Juarez when soldiers arrived and detained them without charge. Under arrest they were pressured but refused to confess to involvement in the kidnapping of a politician. The soldiers, under the command of General Felipe de Jesús Espitia Hernández, tortured and sexually abused the young men. Victor, apparently critically injured after days of physical abuse and likely to die, was shot in the head with a pistol. Oscar, despite being a witness to his friend’s murder, was released without charge after five days.
I heard this tale from Oscar’s mother, Laura Kabata de Anda, who has been campaigning for justice for her son and his friend by protesting outside government buildings in Mexico City for the past four years. She has left her younger son and her mother in Ciudad Juarez in order to live in a tent in Mexico City and demand justice.
Oscar, who his mother says was mature for his age and very independent before his abduction, has since withdrawn from the world. He suffers from bouts of debilitating depression and has attempted suicide multiple times. He cannot work. He cannot stand crowds or confined spaces. The Kabata family have had to divert significant resources to providing specialist psychological care to Oscar who, according to his mother, might have two good days followed by a week of not being able to move from his bed. What hurts Oscar most, she says, is the feeling that the government do not care about what has happened to him and his friend. Meanwhile, “he boils at the thought that his tormentors are enjoying life on the beach while he has to live with the scars that they have left him.”
Victor was officially a missing person for 8 years before his body was identified in a military morgue and returned to his family. Victor’s father Ivan passed away last year without ever having seen justice for his son.
Meanwhile, Oscar has been offered US$30,000 in compensation for what was done to him, but he has refused to accept the pay-out. Laura says this amount goes nowhere near covering the damage to her son’s and her family’s lives. She wants those responsible for abusing Oscar and Victor to be punished and she wants reparations that reflect the loss of her son’s past and future earnings, the costs of private therapy, and the trauma endured by their family. Last year, she received text messages threatening her life if she did not accept the money and stop protesting.
These days, she lives in a tent outside the Secretariat de Gubernación (Interior Ministry). During her years-long protest she reports that she and a few other families sharing her protest, have been harried by security forces, who have resorted to beatings, tear-gas, and cutting the guy-lines of their tents. She has been robbed, threatened with a pistol and even stabbed. She shows me the scar where, a few months ago, she cut her left wrist on the pavement outside the Interior Ministry in protest at the lack of concern for victims’ families. No one offered her assistance for five hours, by which time she was sat in a pool of blood.
Laura Kabata with Eric Guichard, whose father was killed by soldiers in Chiapas, in their makeshift encampment on the pavement.
Given the treatment that she and other protesters have received, it is perhaps unsurprising that few other families of victims are prepared to make the sacrifices that Laura has made. Laura says that the families of victims are “too afraid to speak up or they are too tired.” Nevertheless, it is an indication of the difficulty of accessing justice in the country that Mexico City is dotted with semi-permanent protests of this kind, from teachers demanding unpaid wages to indigenous groups seeking protection of ancestral lands.
Thirty-five complaints have been documented of civilians being held without charge for over 25 hours and abused during General de Jesus Espitia’s two-year deployment in Chihuahua. Neither Felipe de Jesus Espitia nor any of the men in his charge has ever been formally charged. The General continued to work for the SEDENA (Ministry of Defence) until 2020 and it has been reported that he has since retired with a pension equal to US$3,700 per month.
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In 2006, Felipe Calderón secured a very narrow and contested electoral victory and assumed the presidency of Mexico. Calderón declared he would be taking a firm hand to drug trafficking and deployed 6,500 troops to the state of Michoacan in what is accepted as the opening move of the ‘Mexican drug war.’ The Policía Federal, Calderón argued, had been corrupted by drug money and did not have the trust of the people, and thus it was necessary to deploy the Mexican Armed Forces to restore order to the country. 45,000 troops had been deployed by the end of 2008 in the escalating conflict with drug traffickers.
In the short term, this was good politics: presenting himself as defender of the people, Calderón shored-up his legitimacy at home, while helping to secure about $400,000,000 per year in military training and equipment from US from 2008 onwards. Incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also a fan of the policy. While there were no shortage of sceptics and critics at the time, few imagined how bloody and protracted would be the struggle that Calderón had begun.
It is well-documented how Calderón’s deployment of the military across the country precipitated an enormous surge in violence as drug cartels splintered and competed for territory. The Mexican National Institute for Statistics and Geography reported an average of just over 20,000 drug-related deaths per year in Mexico during Calderón’s sexenio (six-year term), more than double the death toll in 2005. The rate of deaths per year has continued to rise in the subsequent presidencies of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-present). Meanwhile, renegade special forces troops working for the Gulf Cartel saw the opportunity to start their own cartel, Los Zetas. They not only had access to greater military technology and tactics, but also pioneered the use of domestic terrorism to ensure civilian compliance.
Not only did Calderón’s policy cause a huge surge in drug-related violence across Mexico but, as Ioan Grillo shows in his book El Narco, it failed to slow the movement of drugs through Mexican ports and across the northern border. Furthermore, the Mexican drug war exposed Mexican citizens to a new threat: abuse by the army and navy that had been deployed in the name of public security. Mexico's National Human Rights Commission received over 5,700 complaints of human rights violations by the military relating to 2007 to 2011 alone. From 2013 to 2020, there have been a further 3,799 complaints of abuses by the military. Human rights abuses perpetrated by the military have included torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. According to Human Rights Watch, “one of the main reasons military abuses persist is because soldiers who commit human rights violations against civilians are almost never brought to justice.” As of 2014, cases brought against military personnel for abuses of civilians have to be tried in civilian courts. However, complaints are regularly investigated by military police and rarely lead to charges.
On the campaign trail in 2012 and again in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) sought to address public concern about the abuses of the military by promising a new direction. He proposed sending the armed forces back to their barracks and replacing the corrupted Policía Federal with a new national police force, the Guardia Nacional. In 2012, he promised that the military would be off the streets of Mexico within 6 months if he came to power. He lost that election, but six years later he campaigned successfully for the presidency declaring that “we must remove the army from the streets. The army is not prepared for this function, it is outside their remit [which is] to defend national sovereignty.” Furthermore, AMLO presented himself as the figure who would assist families in their quest for truth and justice regarding their abused, disappeared and murdered relatives. As president-elect, he promised a permanent dialogue with the families of victims and that the Interior Ministry would work hand-in-hand with families to achieve justice.
Perhaps the biggest test of the current administration’s commitment to victims and their families has been the Iguala mass-kidnapping. In September 2014, 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero while returning from a protest, in a mysterious case that continues to cause outrage in Mexico. While body parts of two of the students have been recovered it is unknown where the remaining students have gone, though it is widely believed that they are not alive.
“They took him alive! We want him back alive!”
In 2018, AMLO ordered a new investigation into the disappearance and the previous cover-ups. The report found that the military acted in concert with local police and the Guerreros Unidos cartel in the disappearance of the students. Following its publication this year, 80 arrest warrants were issued. One colonel, accused of ordering the execution of 6 of the students days after their disappearance, has been arrested. However, 16 other arrest warrants for soldiers have since been withdrawn leading to the resignation of the special prosecutor who led the investigation in October of this year. The Financial Times reported that “the outside experts’ report said the army violated orders from López Obrador by blocking access to its intelligence files. They also accused the federal prosecutor’s office of hindering the investigation.” Whether or not AMLO is able to control the Armed Forces, it seems his appetite for holding them to account has subsided since taking office.
Further evidence of the dangers of AMLO’s close relationship with the SEDENA is offered by the case of General Cienfuegos. The retired General was arrested in Los Angeles in 2020 on drug trafficking charges, after a lengthy and top-secret investigation by the DEA. AMLO managed to have Cienfuegos released by calling in a favour with the Trump Administration, presumably to appease Mexican Armed Forces top brass who were threatening to cease collaboration with the DEA if Cienfuegos was tried in the US. The General is now a free man in Mexico and nobody expects he will see the inside of a courtroom any time soon.
AMLO is also working to rehabilitate the image of the Mexican armed forces by diverting their efforts away from military acts. Yet, far from sending the army and navy back to their barracks AMLO’s administration extended the range of tasks in which the military are involved, so that they now act as security against oil theft for Pemex (the national oil company), supervise the construction of Tren Maya (the proposed train network being built in the south-east of the country), and are tasked with building an ecological park in Mexico city.
Indeed AMLO has made no secret of his close working relationship with the military. It seems he has been working to rehabilitate the image of the Mexican armed forces by diverting their efforts away from military acts. AMLO is clearly pleased to have found a large, efficient workforce, which he can rapidly mobilise, and without the need of lengthy planning processes. In 2020, AMLO deployed an additional 16.5% of Mexico’s military across the country. While a controversial austerity has been imposed on many areas of the state, 2022 saw a 22% increase in the budget for the army compared with 2021.
Soldiers escorting an oil truck leaving Dos Bocas refinery, Paraíso, Tabasco
Aside from these duties having little to do with defending national sovereignty, using the military in this way impedes the development of civil institutions with transparent and accountable processes that are necessary for good governance. The same day that I spoke to Laura at her encampment, AMLO held a rally to celebrate his first four years in office. In a nearly 8,000-word speech claiming the achievements of his administration, he made no mention of justice for the families of victims of abuses of state power. He mentioned the military once, in passing, to note how soldiers assisted in the construction, expansion and modernization of airports in various states. The previous month, congress – dominated by AMLO’s MORENA party, voted in favour of a bill to allow the army and navy to be deployed across 16 of Mexico’s 32 states until 2028.
AMLO’s move to restructure the police also looks like a step towards further militarization. As AMLO promised in his 2018 campaign for the presidency, the Policía Federal was disbanded and replaced as the principal national police force by the Guardia Nacional in 2019. In its first year, the Guardia Nacional recruited roughly 24,000 ex-Federales, almost 60,000 former soldiers, and 16,000 from the navy. Despite the constitution mandating that the Guardia Nacional be a civilian police force, the Guardia Nacional has developed as a military organisation not only in that it is composed primarily of trained soldiers, but also in its leadership. Their desert-camouflage uniforms add to the perception that this is a combat force. As of last year, the government has begun the process of officially reassigning control of the new police force from the Ministry of Security and Civilian Protection to the Ministry of Defence.
National Guards with a bag of KFC in Villahermosa, Tabasco
AMLO insists that the Guardia Nacional must be administrated by the army because the discipline and values of the army will ensure against the temptations of power and money to corrupt his new police force. In the first two years since its inception in 2019, the Guardia Nacional has received an average twenty complaints per month of human rights abuses committed by its officers.
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Laura Kabata voted for AMLO in 2018, but now she feels badly let down. She wonders how many more families will go through what she and her son have gone through at the hands of the armed forces before public security in Mexico means public safety.
“We believed in him, but he betrayed us … The Mexican military has its foot on the neck of the Mexican people so that we continue to comply … and the violence continues. I am afraid, not for myself, but for my people. The military have become more powerful during this sexenio than ever before. They are untouchable.”
