“The entrance of the National Guard to the Metro seems absurd to me, in particular, due to the number of elements that it intends to deploy. The Head of Government announces a deployment of 6,000 elements for something that there is no evidence that the failures of the Metro are due to a security problem.
“For example, when Ovidio Guzmán was arrested, the reinforcement that the federal government sent was 130 elements,” he explains. Victor Hernandezpublic security expert and Master’s in Homeland Security at King’s College London.
In the morning conference of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the head of government announced the new measure to guarantee security of the more than 800 million passengers that move each year through one of the more than 180 stations.
“We have to protect citizens and therefore the support of the National Guard. People trust the National Guard, here the president has presented several times that the citizens have great recognition of the Navy, the Secretary of National Defense and the Guard”, argued the head of government.
Without mentioning or acknowledging that there are insecurity problems in the Metro, the head of government assured that the “incidents that have occurred in the metro” are “out of the ordinary” episodes, for which reason analysts question whether they are trying to surveillance to prevent sabotage without publicly acknowledging that it exists.
“(Now), granting that the problems we are seeing in the Metro are terrorism or sabotage, there are very few elements of the Mexican Army or National Guard that have special forces training in anti-terrorism and explosives handling, they are very few.
“It is a hyper-specialized training given by the Special Forces corps; so, even if we put all the explosives experts of the Mexican Army in the Metro, the other elements are just going to be hanging around, like spinners, walking on the platforms,” adds Victor Hernandez.
The National Guard has no training in transportation systems”
Víctor Hernández, security expert.
In the same sense of security, the retired minister José Ramón Cossio questioned the networks, asking if there are investigation folders for sabotage of the Metro facilities in the hands of Mexico City authorities.
Assigning the surveillance of the CDMX Metro to the National Guard means sabotage. How many investigation folders are open regarding each of the incidents considered “unusual”?
— José Ramón Cossío D. (@JRCossio)
January 12, 2023
