The point, from the outset, is that a desperate measure is not necessarily an effective measure; in fact, it is often the opposite. Because despair is closer to impulse than rigor, it is an urgent defense against an extreme situation, it is a demand for immediate reaction that does not match the rational calculation of costs and benefits, with the methodical weighting of the available evidence or with medium and long-term strategic planning. Desperation is less geared to producing concrete results than to satisfying a certain need for determination; what it produces, in short, is more like a reflex than an intelligent action: it responds to the stimulus but does not solve the problem.
Taking hold of the armed forces in a country like Mexico also has the added drawback that they have never been a democratic or democratizing institution. In fact, no democracy can be considered consolidated as long as the Army has its own political power base and is not under the effective command (not only nominal) of civil authorities. When security or public works become a fiefdom of the military, civilian control over both spheres is weakened and puts the military in a very susceptible position to politicize their work. Worse still, using the armed forces with the declared intention of making irreversible public policy decisions, as a guarantee that future governments will not be able to modify them, is a bid to remove these decisions from the dispute and democratic scrutiny and to create favorable conditions for a conflict between civil and military authorities.
In the same way that preaching honesty is not an anti-corruption policy, nor is multiplying ATMs a substitute for social policy, the Army is not a substitute for security or infrastructure policy. Entrusting them as this government has done means creating areas of exception, of institutionalized irregularity, which imply a renunciation of the possibility of creating rules and processes that allow developing those policies under a more or less functional scheme of normality. Consequently, it is a capitulation, the effect of which is not to correct government failures or deficits from which the supposed need to resort to the Army in the first instance arises, but to leave them unattended as if they were incurable pathologies.
