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Reforming Civil-Military Relations in New Democracies pp 83–101Cite as

Mexico: A Civil-Military “Pact” Unravelling?

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Abstract

Mexico’s civil-military relations were extraordinary stable during authoritarian rule: installed as a pillar of the PRI’s control, the military never intervened into civilian politics or threatened to overthrow the regime. On the contrary, military leaderships almost unconditionally defended the regime against internal threats, thereby repeatedly taking the blame for civilian mismanagement. Coinciding with the intensifying US-led “War on Drugs”, the transition to democracy threatened to destabilize this balance and lead to open opposition within the military. Deemed the “biggest loser” in the “War on Drugs” by analysts, the armed forces have repeatedly claimed themselves unfit for the task and called on civilian leaders to improve law enforcement efforts. The analysis finds, however, that the feared “control gap” anticipated after the end of PRI rule did not materialize; instead, the tried and tested “pact” has come under severe strain in the new millennium.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The party was founded under the name Partido Nacional Revolucionario, which changed to Partido de la Revolución Mexicana in 1938 before it was renamed the PRI in 1946.

  2. 2.

    On average, Latin American countries experienced 1.6 military coups in the twentieth century, with Mexico and Costa Rica (which does not maintain armed forces) being the exceptions (Smith 2005, p. 344).

  3. 3.

    In this chapter, the terms “military” and “armed forces” refer to all military branches in Mexico. As both the army and the navy received their own ministry (Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, SEDENA, and Secretaría de Marina, SEMAR), there is no unified command. The individual branches are addressed by their respective name, if necessary.

  4. 4.

    Mexico did participate in World War II after the German Navy had sunk two Mexican trade ships in 1942, but restricted its military actions to deploying an air force squadron to the Pacific theatre. It never sent ground forces abroad or faced the threat of invasion. Decisions regarding war or peace lie exclusively with congress, which, according to Article 73 of the constitution, may declare war “after revision of information provided by the executive.”

  5. 5.

    Samuel P. Huntington called Mexico “perhaps the most remarkable example of political institutions established by the generals” (Huntington 1968, p. 255).

  6. 6.

    The only known intervention of the military in public policy regarded its criticism of a class book that depicted the army as the aggressor in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (Wager and Schulz 1994, p. 11).

  7. 7.

    Tasks and responsibilities of the Mexican armed forces are established in three national defense plans: plan DN-I concerns external defense, Plan DN-II regards internal security, and Plan DN-III encompasses civil assistance and disaster relief.

  8. 8.

    I make use of the term criminal cartel instead of drug cartel to depict the changing nature of former smuggling syndicates and the diversifying illicit activities of organized crime syndicates in Mexico. In fact, some groups such as Los Zetas nowadays generate merely 50% of their revenues by smuggling drugs. For a profound comparison of criminal cartels and their activities see (Beittel 2011), for a discussion of the term see (Velasco 2005; Astorga and Shirk 2010).

  9. 9.

    Parts of these special forces of the army, called GAFES for their abbreviation in Spanish, were later hired by the Gulf Cartel as private security. They later split from the cartel to form the infamous Los Zetas cartel, one of the largest criminal organizations in contemporary Mexico (Grayson and Logan 2012).

  10. 10.

    The number of combats between the military and cartel enforcers increased about tenfold during the Calderón presidency, from 231 in 2007 to more than 2000 in 2010 (Dudley 2011).

  11. 11.

    The U.S.-based Trans-Border Institute documented 44 cases for the same period (Daly et al. 2012).

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  1. Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, Heidelberg, Germany

    Peter Hachemer

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  1. Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Aurel Croissant

  2. Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    David Kuehn

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Hachemer, P. (2017). Mexico: A Civil-Military “Pact” Unravelling?. In: Croissant, A., Kuehn, D. (eds) Reforming Civil-Military Relations in New Democracies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53189-2_5

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