A new package tour promises to take tourists in the Yucatán Peninsula from luxury hotels to Mayan ruins with a new airline and freshly laid train tracks – an adventure brought to them entirely by the Mexican military, which is now practicing luxury tourism without fighting crime.
That an institution with a history of human rights abuses must now learn the art of customer service is just the strangest aspect of a deeper trend, as the Mexican military plays an increasingly important role in the country’s civil administration, with alarming consequences for democracy.
The entire route of the controversial Mayan train will be opened on Monday, a year after it was partially inaugurated by then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador amid criticism over its environmental impact and economic viability.
López Obrador had turned to the military to have the train built on the double – along with a series of new airports and hotels along the tracks, all of which will now also be running.
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Between trains, planes and checkpoints, the Mexican military has perhaps never been so ubiquitous. Although its presence in public life has been developing for a long time, experts mark two key moments.
The first came in 2006 with the start of the “war on drugs,” when the military was deployed to combat organized crime groups and took on a much larger role in public security.
And the second came in 2018, when left-wing populist López Obrador became president.
Before López Obrador took power, he promised to return soldiers to their barracks. Once he acquired it, he took the military’s role in public safety to a new level, giving the military roles in areas once reserved for civilian institutions.
“There were high hopes that López Obrador would overhaul Mexican security policy,” said Santiago Aguirre, director of the Center for Human Rights. “I don’t think anyone expected what would actually happen.”
López Obrador dismantled the federal police, which had been tainted by corruption scandals, and created a new National Guard to take its place: a 130,000-strong force that was nominally a civilian institution, but the vast majority of its personnel and leadership took out of the army. .
Meanwhile, López Obrador relied on the armed forces to build his most important infrastructure projects quickly, cheaply and with little transparency.
Along the way, the military has built up a portfolio of responsibilities and businesses, including airports, seaports and customs, as well as a passenger airline, the Mayan Train and a chain of luxury hotels.
“The military is integrated into the economy,” Aguirre said. “We don’t know yet how this will turn out.”
In October, Claudia Sheinbaum – a close ally of López Obrador – took over as president after leading Morena, the party he founded, to a landslide election victory.
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Shortly before coming to power, Morena used her new supermajority to amend the constitution, officially transferring the Guardia Nacional to the military, leaving Mexico without a federal civilian police force.
Sheinbaum has since shown signs that she will follow in her predecessor’s path, praising the military and announcing that the money saved by eliminating independent regulators would be used to give soldiers a pay raise. She has also emphasized the need to rebuild Mexico’s police forces and their investigative capacity.
Sheinbaum has dismissed concerns about the military’s growing power, arguing that the military is accountable to the president.
“Maybe people don’t understand it from the outside, but it is not militarization,” she told the Financial Times. “The Mexican army comes from the Mexican revolution, it comes from a social revolution, it does not come from the elites.”
While it is true that the Mexican army has a special origin and – unlike many other militaries in Latin America – has never staged a coup, it is an opaque institution with a long record of human rights abuses, according to Aguirre.
With its growing role in public security, “human rights violations will continue,” said Patricia Solís Minor, an expert on the Mexican armed forces.
Such violations — in addition to reports of corruption — are only becoming more difficult to investigate, “because the military has taken on civilian functions without taking over the checks and balances of the civilian world,” Aguirre added.
Meanwhile, the growing role of the armed forces implies an erosion of the capacity of civilian institutions – which only reinforces the government’s dependence on the military.
For now, the prospects for reversing the process and returning these tasks to civilian institutions are slim, not least because the shift has been reinforced by a series of legal and constitutional changes.
“Demilitarization is not on the horizon,” Aguirre said. “Right now, the most important thing is to maintain at least some civilian controls.”
