Deputies generally approve the reform of the National Guard

Georgina Saldierna and Enrique Mendez

Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday September 3, 2022, p. 7

With a bitter debate about the role of the armed forces in public security tasks and mixed accusations about the responsibility for the crisis of violence in the country, the Chamber of Deputies approved this Saturday in general the presidential initiative to allow the Secretary of the National Defense (Sedena) assumes the operational and administrative control of the National Guard (GN).

The verbal confrontation between benches forced a recess at midnight, but this allowed an arrangement between the benches to reduce the reservations from 300 to 70, as well as the number of speakers.

At 1:16 am, the Organic Law of the Public Administration that gives Sedena control of the GN was approved with 265 votes in favor and 221 against the opposition; 15 minutes later, changes to the National Guard Act, with the same vote.

The reform to the Organic Law of the Army was voted at 1:40, and 10 minutes later all the benches, except the Citizen Movement, endorsed the Promotion Law with 458 votes in favor. After voting on the transitory articles, the particular discussion began at two in the morning.

While Morena argued that these legal transformations do not modify the essence of the 2019 constitutional reform -which authorized the establishment of that police force-, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) proposed to the icing caucus a change to the Constitution to extend the participation of the military and sailors on the streets until 2028, that is, four years more than authorized.

For him tricolorwith that modification it would be given constitutional and legal support of public policy in the medium and long term. As of Monday, the proposal will be reviewed in the Constitutional Points Commission, and Morena agreed to analyze it from the outset.

Throughout the day and until the debate began, at 8:00 p.m., the parliamentary groups of Morena and the PRI held various dialogues to try to reach an agreement on the Executive’s initiative, which proposes changes to the organic laws of the Federal Public Administration and the Mexican Army and Air Force, as well as the laws of the National Guard and promotions and rewards.

Morena’s coordinator, Ignacio Mier, and Sergio Gutiérrez Luna led a lengthy lobby with PRI members Rubén Moreira and Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas. As a result, the tricolor he did not present a single reservation and agreed to vote only in favor of the promotion, which in essence proposes to homologate the time of service of the Mexican Army and Air Force personnel assigned to the GN, as if they had rendered them in the barracks.

The discussion began at eight o’clock at night, when Morena announced on the platform that his bench and his allies agreed to assume the Executive’s initiative as their own. Mier asked for a waiver of all the paperwork, so the reform did not go through commissions.

Article 21 of the Constitution defines that the GN It is an instrument, a civil police institution attached to the Secretary of Security and with coordination functions of the national security strategy. With the reform, we give administrative certainty to more than 113 thousand of its members.

As part of the postures, the PAN members went up to the platform with photographs of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Mario Delgado, in the context of the 2017 discussion of the National Security Law, in which both held posters that read no to militarization.

The president of the Constitutional Points Commission, Juan Ramiro Robledo (Morena), argued: There is a need right now, in plain view, for the armed forces to continue what they are doing with the permission of this Congress..

The panistas warned: See you in court!