Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The massacre of five young men in Tamaulipas at the hands of a military detachment is the absolute refutation of everything AMLO has said about his official strategy against organized crime. And it comes at the worst moment: when the U.S. Congress is moving towards demanding military intervention in Mexico in the absence of strong defensive action by the Mexican State.
The President assured in his “mañanera” (daily morning press conference) that the actions of “kill them in the heat of the moment” are no longer carried out in his government. But what happened in Tamaulipas was a “kill them in the heat of the moment” action. And he is incapable of recognizing that reality in order to defend the military leadership, the military murderers, and his own fantasy about what is happening in the country he is trying to govern.
The President has repeatedly said that there are no more massacres in Mexico as “there were before”. But the reality, and the recorded data, disprove this. Criminal violence in the country is growing by leaps and bounds. During Calderón’s six-year term, 120,000 deaths were registered in the same period (terrible!). But with AMLO, there are already 147 thousand murdered by criminals. And the President swears that things are going much better with him. All human beings lie at some point, but not all of them as repeatedly and systematically as López Obrador.
The massacre in Tamaulipas occurred at the hands of the military and in AMLO’s administration. Public opinion has witnessed for days the events where the military intimidated the unarmed civilian population. By mid-2021, Zeta magazine had counted 851 massacres during López Obrador’s six-year term, resulting in 3,876 deaths among men, 276 women, and 124 minors. Other media reported 250 massacres between January and June 2022. Despite these provable facts, the President insists: “no more massacres in the country, but clashes between gangs”.
Obviously, by this time in 2023, Mexico has surpassed the number of more than a thousand massacres in the country, and counting, as demonstrated by the massacre in Tamaulipas. And this data does not include femicides, homicides, kidnappings, extortion, human trafficking, and a wide range of criminal activities fed by governmental paralysis.
SEDENA has announced that four of the elements involved in the massacre in Tamaulipas have been detained and placed at the disposal of the military justice system and that it has requested the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to investigate the “incident”. Tragically, the CNDH, once an instance of international credibility, is today perceived as an instrument of an internal faction of Morena, the President’s political party. It has lost its most precious value: independence and autonomy in its actions. The President’s political interest guides all actions, decisions, and resolutions of the CNDH.
In cases such as the current one, international human rights organizations recommend that all judicial investigations of the military involved go through the civilian criminal system, not the military. This is because the general criterion is that public security matters should not be militarized but fall within the civilian sphere.
Behind the massacre in Tamaulipas, the face of the underlying debate that this case reveals can be seen. The militarization of public security leads to systematic abuses by the armed forces, which are not trained to appease citizen conflicts or to be proximity police. For this reason, in 2022 alone, 577 complaints of illegal abuses against the National Guard and 428 against SEDENA were registered before the CNDH. Both institutions are involved in assassinations, forced disappearances, torture, and arbitrary detentions.
The massacre in Tamaulipas is the portrait of the failure of López Obrador’s policy of militarization of public security. His response is shameful and empty rhetoric, using lies to evade his responsibility.
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