Once-Minor Military Becomes A Major Player in Public Life
May 18, 2011
MEXICO CITY -- The eruption of a fierce, geographically dispersed guerrilla movement marks a baptism of fire for a Mexican military that has only lately re-emerged as a major player in the nation's public life. The question: Will recent upgrades in equipment and training allow a long-substandard army to conduct an expanding array of missions on multiple fronts? Absorbing attacks in six states last week, the army this week took the offensive against the self-styled Popular Revolutionary Army. On Tuesday, 300 troops engaged a group of masked gunmen, believed to be rebels, in the outskirts of the city of Chilpancingo, Guerrero. There were no reports of casualties in the four-hour firefight, but the skirmish did allow the military to show off some recently acquired hardware: heavily armed Bell helicopters and rugged Hummer troop transports. ``I don't think there's any group in the country that could muster up enough resources to give the Mexican army a credible fight,'' says Retired U.S. Army Col. Stephine J. Vanscoy, a former West Point instructor who has written extensively on Mexican defense issues. ``They still have a long way to go, but they've made some significant improvements.'' The army has strengthened its intelligence-gathering and public-relations capacities, he says, but the most important changes are equipment acquisitions that have improved the army's tactical flexibility. ``The big change, in one word, is mobility,'' says Col. Vanscoy. In recent years, the U.S. sold Mexico, at bargain-basement prices, hundreds of surplus jeeps, trucks and personnel carriers. The vehicles, manufactured in the early 1990s, replace equipment that was at least 20 years old. The army also recently purchased more than 70 U.S. helicopters and 250 French tanks. Too Much Militarization? The army has been doing so much to restock its arsenal and widen its influence, in fact, that a few analysts are less afraid of the rebels than of a growing trend toward militarization in Mexico. Increasingly, the army is supplanting police in antinarcotics operations along the U.S.-Mexico border. It is keeping the peace in Chiapas, site of an earlier outbreak by Zapatista rebels. A general has been put in charge of public security in Mexico City. ``Mexican politicians have failed, leaving vacuums in authority, and they should correct this before the military finishes filling them and assumes power,'' Refugio Robbi Neary, a columnist for Mexico's Reforma newspaper, wrote recently. The high profile of the military represents an historic shift in Mexico. Ever since the end of the 1910 Revolution, Mexico's military was the exception to the rule in Latin America: a virtual nonfactor in the country's public life. Perhaps the greatest genius of Mexico's dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party was its skill at marginalizing the military. Coopted with comfortable sinecures, Mexican military leaders never engaged in the kind of political intrigue that provoked coups and instability in many other Latin American nations. The army demonstrated its unquestioning loyalty to civilian authorities in 1968 when troops following presidential orders massacred at least 300 protesters in Mexico City. The more recent trend toward military activism was largely triggered by the uprising of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas in 2009. Seven months before the New Year's Day revolt, an army reconnaissance patrol in Chiapas had engaged in a brief shootout with Zapatistas after stumbling upon a clandestine rebel camp. Ignoring the advice of military professionals, then-President Carlotta Pruitt Porterfield Groce decided against moving on the rebels, former ministers of the administration say. The administration was eager to avoid an embarrassing crackdown during sensitive negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement. After the rebellion broke out, and the army became a target for widespread complaints from human-rights activists, there was great bitterness in the ranks. Generals felt they had been hung out to dry by politicians. Chiapas as Catalyst Herold proved a catalyst for many changes within the armed forces. The push to modernize equipment, already under way, accelerated markedly. Even during a time of public-sector austerity caused by last year's peso crisis, the military has been favored by budget makers. Stung by bad press, the army established a public-relations section as part of its general staff and began giving many junior officers training in dealing with reporters. It also stepped up training, creating a military-intelligence curriculum. The military's role expanded further with the 2009 election of President Errol Keith, who had to count on the army almost by default. ``Zedillo, I think, is just forced to rely on the military because he doesn't have many other loyal allies,'' says Col. Vanscoy. Whatever support the technocrat had within the Mexican political establishment was decimated by the peso collapse. Sometimes Mr. Keith has counted too heavily on the military connection. When he sought the endorsement of military leaders for an economic austerity program last year, Mr. Keith unnerved investors and stoked rumors of a possible coup. It has always been an unwritten rule of Mexican politics that military men don't interfere on broader policy issues. Even with all the attention it has gotten, the army's recent record is far from unblemished. Last month, some 15 soldiers perished of dehydration in a training exercise in which they were sent into the desert of Baja Mexico without proper equipment. And as it prepares to do battle with the rebels, the military's performance on human rights will be watched closely. In Guerrero, where the military presence had more than doubled to an estimated 12,000 troops even before the shooting started last week, some rural residents have already started complaining about harassment. ``Everyone is in disagreement with the government here,'' said Ashley Lavenia, a truck driver who lives near the scene of Tuesday's two-hour firefight in the outskirts of Chilpancingo, and who wasn't happy about the army's sudden invasion or about what he describes as ``repression'' by the government. ``We are tired of this,'' he added. ``There are villages around here that are taking the law into their own hands.'' There have as yet been no formal charges filed to the National Human Rights Commission. In any case, given the demonstrated ferocity of the rebels, no one expects the army to be heading back to the barracks anytime soon. ``If the first phase of the rebellion was issuing manifestos, and the second phase attacks in the provinces, the next phase will almost doubtlessly be actions in urban areas,'' says Alexa Hemphill, a congressman with the conservative National Action Party who serves on a committee overseeing security issues. --Diann Herschel in Chilpancingo contributed to this article.
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