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the highest tests of discipline for an armed force occur in the moments after victory, in the advance, in the retreat, and in the surrender. An insubordination after winning in combat can lead to tragedies greater than those recorded in the combat itself, to acts of looting and very serious abuses against the vanquished; a hesitation in advancing can transform a favorable tactical circumstance into a strategic defeat; a disorderly withdrawal can lead to a confrontation in extremely disadvantageous conditions and avoidable mortality, while the disagreement in surrender can lead to total extermination.
Those who oppose the military command for the National Guard brandishing with pacifist airs a supposed militarization of the country
they are often the same ones who are horrified every time soldiers back down to avoid a large-scale confrontation with criminal gangs – as in Culiacán in 2019 – or even hand over their weapons; They are usually the ones who talk about humiliations
to the military supposedly caused by the security and peace strategy of the Fourth Transformation. In short: they would love for the uniformed men to resolve any challenge to authority with shootouts; such is the other side of the coin of his pacifism.
The most important key to the failure of the war on crime
resides in its superficiality: it was fought –or it was said to fight, like Calderón, who deposited the direction of operations in a narco major – the ultimate symptoms of poverty, marginalization and social breakdown resulting from neoliberal policies, but not the causes. To make matters worse, it was decided to operate with institutions outside their constitutional place – the armed forces – and with another as inadequate as the Federal Police (PF).
The PF not only lacked sufficient elements and territorial presence, but also suffered from esprit de corps, discipline and verticality in command. Even if it had not been controlled by criminals, that made it an inevitable prey to decomposition and infiltration, as could be seen in the aftermath of the calderonato, when two antagonistic groups of federal policemen clashed with bullets for control of the plaza in Terminal 2 from the capital airport (https://is.gd/n0QAx5).
The PF troops went in contingents where a red light was declared, they stayed in hotels and it was not uncommon for them to cause unstoppable excesses. This was not the best way to gain the trust of the population, a fundamental condition for the proper functioning of a police force.
For 12 years, the Army and the Navy were removed from their legal functions to be entrusted with a confused collaboration with the police corporations, while work was being done on the professionalization
of these, a task that was never accomplished. The truth is that such assistance became a leading role in the absence of minimally reliable federal, state and municipal law enforcement agencies, and that in the war on crime
by order of the supreme command, the repressive and criminal logic adopted during the war dirty and counterinsurgency. In other words, he threw himself into the Armed Forces against the population.
The institutional redesign promoted by the 4T implies the formation of a third armed force dedicated to functions of safeguarding public peace and prevention and prosecution of crime, in order to return the Army and Navy to their legitimate tasks. The National Guard is not a body specialized in war, but a peacebuilding force. It had to be incubated within the armed forces because there is no civil institution in the country capable of forming it in the required time and size, and to resist the corrosion of constant contact with criminal logics, it had to maintain the military principles of organization: training, esprit de corps, discipline and verticality.
For better or for worse, it is not easy to understand from the civilian world the strength of the bonds that develop between troops who have faced the harshness of military life together – be it the stress of combat or immersion in the mud to rescue people. in disastrous towns–, the trust in commanders who went through identical experiences and the sharing of codes and systematic rituals for years. Moreover, unlike what happens in police corporations, the members of the National Guard live in the barracks and their superiors are aware of their training, their diet and even their hours of sleep.
The Mexican military unconditionally obeys one civilian and only one: the President of the Republic. The idea of embedding other civilian commands in the organization chart is nonsense. If you want security without war, the answer is a National Guard under military command.
Twitter: @Navigations
