Diego Luna and Ernesto López Portillo on the Rise of Militarism in Mexico

Ernesto López Portillo is the coordinator of the Citizen Security Program at Ibero-American University in Mexico City, where he researches policing and militarism.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“The U.S.-Mexico Drug War Gets a Rebrand ” (Foreign Policy, Catherine Osborn, October 15, 2021)
“De la militarización al militarismo, ¿ciclo incontenible?” (Este Pais, Ernesto López Portillo and Samuel Storr, January 1, 2021)
“Mexico: Constitutional Amendment on National Guard Enacted ” (Library of Congress)
“Diego Luna Joins International Campaign to Stop Arms Trafficking to Mexico” (Latin America Working Group, 2011)

Archival:

Migrant Caravan: Thousands In Mexico Moving Towards U.S. Border (NBC News, October 28, 2021)
The Cancun that tourists don’t often see: soaring murders amid a bloody drug war (PBS NewsHour, January 11, 2018)
Cartel violence leaves a trail of ghost towns in Mexico (Al Jazeera English, June 6, 2021)
Merida Initiative, Drug War & Geopolitics - Iniciativa Merida, Narco Guerra y Geopolitica (greylion3000, May 4, 2009)
Bush meeting Mexico's President Calderon (AP Archive, July 21, 2015)
The Fire Next Door: Mexico's Drug Violence and the Danger to America (Ted Galen Carpenter) (The Cato Institute, November 28, 2012)
EUA: Ayotzinapa parents blast Plan Merida (TeleSUR English, April 7, 2015)
Mexican forces accused of abuses in drug war (Al Jazeera English, November 9, 2011)
Mexico makes permanent sweeping powers for military's war on drugs (CGTN America, December 22, 2017)
Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador Wins Mexican Presidential Election in Landslide Victory (Democracy Now!, July 2, 2018)
Can President AMLO's National Guard tame violence in Mexico? (Al Jazeera English, June 2, 2019)
Mexico sues US gunmakers for role in trafficking and homicides (Al Jazeera English, August 5, 2021)
WorldView: Mexico sues U.S. gun-makers; U.S. approves potential weapons sale to Taiwan (CBS News, August 5, 2021)

Transcript:

DIEGO LUNA: It's insane. It's like we live in a country with no memory where, again, statements and words and promises mean nothing, and you can just get away with whatever you want.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. This week we turn to an ongoing crisis in Central America.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: A migrant crisis. Rampant poverty. An escalating cartel violence. The American solution to these seemingly intractable problems was something called the Mérida Initiative. It was a bipartisan U.S. aid package, which lasted from 2008 up until last year. The United States, under President George W. Bush, in coordination with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, sent billions of dollars in military aid to Mexico to fight drug trafficking. The two countries agreed this was a shared problem, and they needed a shared solution.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: The strategy was to mobilize the Mexican security forces on the backs of the massive U.S. assistance package to fight this rising violence. The plan was a failure.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: After more than a decade, Mexico and the United States recently recognized this militarized approach to fighting insecurity hasn't worked. The Mérida Initiative formally came to an end in late 2021.

Our producer here at the Eurasia Group Foundation, Caroline Gray, traveled to Mexico in January to investigate and to find out why the military was so ill-suited to this challenge and what alternative approaches the U.S. and Mexico might take.

CAROLINE GRAY: While I was in Mexico City, I sat down with Ernesto López Portillo, who was one of Mexico's leading experts on the police and the military. He explained that Mexico was at the vanguard of militarism and militarization.

ERNESTO LÓPEZ PORTILLO: The military authority takes away the functions of the civil authority. That is militarism. Militarization, as we have understood it, is the militarization of security, and that started a long time ago. The military has always worked in security in Mexico, but there was an exorbitant increase with the President Calderon that later continued. Since 2007, Mexico started to rapidly increase the number of soldiers working in security faster than other countries of the region.

GRAY: But we didn't want the conversation to end there. So, we brought together none other than actor, director, and producer Diego Luna, the star of Narcos: Mexico and Rogue One, and Ernesto, to help explain what is going on and why this story is an important one for those of us in the United States. So, Ernesto and Diego, you two know each other. Tell us how you know each other.

LUNA: I'm going to start. I read Ernesto’s work. I think he's been some kind of a mentor to me because even though as a citizen, you always have a feeling of what's right and wrong, it's difficult to actually understand what creates that kind of anger. And also where to put your energy as a citizen. You need you need the guidance, and you cannot get there unless you're guided by great voices.

PORTILLO: What I have to say is, first of all, thank you very much, Diego. By starting and trying to promote the democratic reform on security, what we have learned is that it’s not enough to build good ideas. It’s not enough to work on good and profound research processes. We need different kinds of approaches. So, we need different kinds of voices and backgrounds together in order to get attention.

GRAY: I think it's important to establish why you both even care about this topic. I didn't really know, Diego, that this was an issue you cared about—militarism in Mexico. And I don't think it's an issue everyone knows that you work on, and that you've protested.

LUNA: Well, I'll tell you, and I'll try to summarize everything starting from the point when you invited me for this podcast. The first thing I thought was, “I'm the wrong person. I'm not the right person to talk about this.” I've never talked about this in English, for example. This is something I just realized when I was riding in the taxi coming here, and I just realized, fuck, I never spoken in English about this. I don't know which terms to use. How am I going to express what I naturally have to say in Spanish? And I'll tell you why it's so important to me—because it is connected to everything I care about, everything I love, and that's why it comes out in Spanish and not in English. So, I already apologize because you're going to struggle with my English, and you're going to have to help me on the way. And I might be ready to do this tomorrow after we go through this today, and I'll realize, “Fuck, what I wanted to say was this and that.”

But I grew up in a Mexico that was very different from the one my kids are growing up in. I grew up in a Mexico where the military, for me, was related to natural disasters and to, probably, a whole group of people that was always in the barracks. You could point at where they were, and it was nothing to do with my security. Nothing to do with my chance of going out to the street with the freedom to behave in the way I would like to behave. Suddenly, things changed dramatically when Felipe Calderon was in charge. When Felipe Calderon was the president, the army went out and started a war that I was witnessing. I suddenly was in danger immediately by a decision of a man, and I had to start dealing with the idea of an army that was active, that was there, and that I also had to be protected from, that was not there to protect me. If you were close to them, you were in danger; you had to run away. You know, that kind of idea, which doesn't mean we had a police I distrusted. It just meant now there were two images I was going to try to avoid as a citizen, which is the police and the army. And suddenly violence was brought to me in front of my window, in my neighborhood.

GRAY: Diego was referring to the overwhelming presence of the Mexican military in everyday life. This started increasing dramatically around 2006, with the start of then-President Felipe Calderon's war on drugs and the simultaneous rise in military aid from the United States under the Mérida Initiative. The majority of American aid was to support Mexico's military and the police—to train, equip, and professionalize them to be able to better fight the cartels and organized crime. But with that came broad and uncharted collateral damage on the lives of Mexican citizens, with no tangible results on organized crime front.

Ernesto, who currently runs the Citizen Security Program at Ibero-American University in Mexico City, thinks this is the major crisis in Mexico, one that doesn't get enough attention. And for him, it's personal.

PORTILLO: This is more than a job project for me. This is a way of life for me. This is my personal passion. I'm completely involved because this is a question of what kind of society we would like to have. We have what we call a perfect storm, because we have tripled homicides in the last 25 years, and we have the same impunity. And impunity in Mexico would be 90 percent of impunity, of violent homicides. But in some states, Michoacán, for example, today—you wouldn't believe this—we have 98 percent of impunity. That means in a number of places in Mexico, we don't have a criminal system. Ninety-eight percent of impunity means you can kill people without paying for it. So, we have a chronical weakness on accountability. We don't document. We don't have documentation in order to create a guidance—a formal, good, evaluated guidance in order to decide how to do it in a different way to stop violence.

GRAY: Since the start of the war on drugs and the Mérida Initiative, homicides have more than doubled, and the security situation in Mexico has gotten worse as Mexican drug gangs have multiplied as opposed to being eliminated. Even so, the United States and Mexico continued to increase the power and presence of the Mexican military despite the strategy's failure. But the problems don't end there. The military has been implicated in contributing to the violence as much as it has failed to stop it.

Interlude featuring archival audio

PORTILLO: I was talking about homicides, but we have seen the way violence has grown in private spaces and in public spaces. So, under President Calderon, we had a maximum of 60,000 soldiers and marines deployed. With Pena Nieto, we had 70,000, and today we have 200,000 military deployed around the country in order to reduce violence. That is a 180 percent increase in this massive military deployment.

GRAY: Diego laughed at that.

LUNA: But from sadness. That laugh is not—because there is one thing that is incredible. And sorry to interrupt, but just to talk about what Ernesto is saying, it is ridiculous. The biggest democratic win happened recently, and I'll say the biggest because it’s probably the first where people actually went out and voted. It's not the first. It will be the second, I would say, where it was clear no matter what the opponents tried to do, the person who won, won by far enough to make sure it was clean. It was democracy. It was people voting and putting someone there, and that person got their say.

Interlude featuring archival audio

LUNA: One of the first things they have to do is fight corruption and impunity, and it's put all the military back into the barracks. And make sure the military stay there where they belong. And three years later, we have the numbers Ernesto is talking about. So, telling people you're going to put the military back where they belong, that they won't be handling stuff they shouldn't, and that security is not going to be in the hands of the military—because we are talking about human rights. Because every kind of disaster in terms of abuse, and again, human rights—it's always been the military, and we have great examples all over Latin America of what happens when military get to power. We do have those examples—horrible examples. We have communities of different countries living in Mexico, from Chile and from Argentina, that we're running away from at this moment should the military get full power. We have those examples, and you can win an election by saying, “I'm going to put them back. I'm going to take them away from the streets.” And you win an election, and then it’s that same impunity which allows you to do the exact opposite.

Interlude featuring archival audio

LUNA: Promises mean nothing in our country. The word of those in power means nothing. It's insane. I'm hearing what Ernesto is saying, and I go, “Shit. I voted for this president for the exact opposite.” The exact opposite. It's insane. It's like we live in a country with no memory where, again, statements and words and promises mean nothing, and you can just get away with whatever you want.

GRAY: Violence is increasing in Mexico, and yet the military presence is increasing. And you’d think it would be the opposite because they're there to help maintain security or are supposed to be. But that's not the case. What is going on here that is making violence worse?

PORTILLO: When you have the military increasing violence in order to protect the people, what is really happening is that we have more violence. And some scholars have studied this by using statistics in order to prove this, so, we can say that sometimes military intervention provokes the opposite of what it's supposed to.

Now, that is not the only problem we have there. Let me let me give you some other figures. From December 2018 to June 2021, Mexican armed forces received 1,742 complaints through the National Human Rights Commission for violations such as torture; forced disappearances; disappearance; cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment; and arbitrary arrest. These include 487 complaints received by the National Guard, 914 by the Army, and 341 by the Navy. Of these, only 16 have resulted in a formal recommendation—one of the one for the National Guard, seven for the Army, and eight for the Navy.

GRAY: As more resources get poured into the military to fight violence, less resources and attention get paid to civilian institutions, the key to creating accountability and maintaining a functioning democracy.

PORTILLO: We know perfectly that the military empowerment is the civilian disempowerment. We have to understand that the militarization of security and the militarism of the whole political system is, first of all, a civilian crisis. So, we do have a lack of strong civilian institutions, and that's why we have the military doing that, and we haven't said this today. This is quite important because it's happening in Mexico, and by the way, it’s happening in most of the region—civilians giving more and more power and resources to the military and depending on them more and more often in order to create governance.

GRAY: This violence isn't Mexico's alone, from the Mérida Initiative to the trafficking of firearms and assault rifles across the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. policies have helped exacerbate violence in the country.

LUNA: I think basically what I learned when I was in Washington is that a huge percentage of the bullets found in Mexico in one of what they call the Narco killings—these massacres that would happen in the middle of the street—you could find the bullets and trace the story of that bullet to find a legal cell in the States.

Interlude featuring archival audio

LUNA: That is, again, benefiting an industry and benefiting some people and creating violence somewhere else. At the same time, there's a market in the States that is generating and creating violence in Latin America. And then there is a need to create a wall and a border that will stop these illegal substances from coming into the States. And then there is support of a military system that is also benefiting someone and an industry. And all of these benefits had nothing to do with Mexicans, nothing to do with Mexicans. And it's ridiculous because suddenly you realize you're living in a violence they point out to be our violence, and you go: This is not our violence, as Mexicans. This violence belongs to all of us, belongs to someone buying cocaine in the U.K., belongs to someone buying an illegal substance in the States, belongs to someone making a business out of selling guns.

GRAY: There is a problem with accountability, it seems, on both sides of the border. The United States avoids accountability for the guns being sold to Mexico, which helps fuel massive levels of killing and violence, while Mexico fails time and time again to account for the crimes committed by its own military and its National Guard.

PORTILLO: There's a very interesting example, a very recent example, of the way we are dealing with this institutional resistance to accountability. In December 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights instructed Mexico to create an external observation and accountability body for the National Guard. Lopez Obrador refused to comply, arguing that the existing controls—all of them internal—are sufficient. So, this is the normal way of doing things in Mexico—to continuously resist any kind of external mechanism of accountability. For example, the National Guard at this point has no incidents recorded on use of force—no incidents recorded at this point. That is just impossible in any kind of institution that uses force anywhere around the world. So, this is a very difficult problem. This is a systemic problem.

GRAY: Despite millions of dollars in funding the best U.S. training, and years of concerted effort, the Mexican military seems no closer to solving this issue. Perhaps that's because the issue isn't about tactics or manpower or equipment. It's about something else entirely.

LUNA: The center of everything is this inequality. When you're talking about everything you said, you'll end up talking about inequality and the huge distance in Mexico between those who have and those who don't, and a country that gives complete freedom to a few and that restricts the choices and the possibilities of the rest, basically, to a point where people are surviving—as simple as that. That's why it's so easy to go out on a campaign and win an election in our country because the issues are so simple, so clear, so there. Justice doesn't mean the same to every Mexican. Choices are not there for a huge chunk of our population. And it's also so clear that so little have so much that they're not the willing to sacrifice any of that. It's so easy to point out what needs to change in a campaign to win an election, but at the same time, it's so difficult to bring that change because you would have to shake the country in a way those in power don't want.

GRAY: I ended the conversation with Diego and Ernesto by asking them how we move forward, how Mexico and the United States can work together to build human security without an overreliance on military solutions.

PORTILLO: My answer—I think we can we can answer that with optimism, despite everything. Tomorrow, there will be presented a new report that shows eight different municipalities that have had good results on reducing crime. And I'm telling you this because the difference between a failed public safety policy and a good security public policy is very clear. And the difference is the way institutions work with the people. What we need is a functioning state, working for the people and with the people in a local—and this is this is absolutely imperative—in a local perspective. We don't have to invent anything. This is the way citizens' security works in democracies. And when you have problems, it’s because institutions go far away from the people, and you have that problem in the States in many, many police institutions. And that's why you now have your own crisis, because you need to again come back with these institutions, to open these institutions for the public, and to work with them, building a diagnosis with civil society, building ideas to solve the problems and implementing those ideas together. That's what you need.

LUNA: I definitely think we have to work together, but not from a perspective of intervention at all. It's like, we have an issue in common. Let's start by legalizing drugs and dealing with the market, in order for one of the issues to be solved. The violence is not going to stop. But as long as there's a market, there's going to be a need, and there is going to be a business happening. And we're going to be paying the consequences. But I think it's about working together. It’s about respect. It's about understanding. And it's about willingness to change.

GRAY: Ernesto, any parting thoughts?

PORTILLO: We have a major crisis. We have to think about the people and especially the people who have no means to defend themselves. The USA and Mexico have to create a different way of working together by creating, again, a systemic accountability approach, working together and at the same time, giving all necessary resources to local communities and governments in order to create new ideas. We will never get the peace we want by using force and the military as primary resources. Again, this is not rocket science. What you need is to open the institutions to work with the people.

GRAY: Ernesto, Diego, thank you both so much for joining us.

PORTILLO: Thank you very much for this opportunity. We had a very good conversation, I think. Thanks a lot.

LUNA: Thank you for having me, and thank you for letting me connect with Ernesto again. Even though it was in English, I love every opportunity to listen to him. Speaking in Spanish.

GRAY: You can learn more about Ernesto's work at the Citizen Security Program by hitting the links in our podcast description. And if you don't already know or follow the work of Diego's production company Le Correinte del Golfo, you should check it out. They produce some pretty incredible documentaries and podcasts and the like about the major issues we're facing in our world today.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to the entire None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thanks to our producer and guest host Caroline Gray, our associate producer and editor, Luke Taylor, and thanks also for research and archival support from Lucas Robinson and Frank Schneegas. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org.

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