Why are they giving everything to the military?

Every week we learn that the president has decided to transfer a new function of the State to the Armed Forces. The militarization of public life in Mexico – and not just public security – will go down in history as the most important legacy of this government.

The regime’s spokesmen have invented all kinds of justifications, one more ridiculous than the other, to defend the growing militarization of public life in Mexico. The most abject “imagine and speculate past intentions” to conjure up jabs. Others see the growing powers of the army as an effort by the president to shield his works and policies. And, finally, the most fanatical critics see the militarization as an unequivocal manifestation of the authoritarian streak of the president and his government.

Beyond these interpretations, I would like to propose a more pragmatic hypothesis. The reality is that the president has no choice because of the disaster that he himself created in public administration.

This disaster comes in the first place from the president’s will to extirpate neoliberalism from the Mexican state. To speak of purges would undoubtedly be an excess. But the elimination of health insurance and separation insurance, salary cuts and the requirement of unconditional support for the new government forced hundreds, if not thousands of bureaucrats, to leave public service. I am not talking about the high-ranking officials of the Peña Nieto government, but about the officials who make the state function. This happened in the Ministry of Finance, in the Mexican Foreign Service, in the regulatory bodies, in the Ministry of Economy and in countless other dependencies.

As I warned in a text at the beginning of the six-year term, this weakening of the bureaucratic apparatus is by definition contradictory to a statist vision of the economy. If one wants to have a strong State that “directs” the economy, it is essential to have a government apparatus and a technically capable bureaucracy so as not to be co-opted by economic interests. For this, it is essential to create the conditions that allow attracting and keeping the most talented cadres of a society. The opposite of what this government has done.

Today, the public officials that remain – with few exceptions in institutions such as the IMSS – are political cadres with little or no technical knowledge. There are no more experts, only fanatics remain who are unable to execute or implement the president’s instructions.

Given this scenario, the president has no choice but to depend on the Armed Forces because no one else in his government can do anything, not even the Legal Department writes the constitutional reforms that it sends to Congress. We did not get here because the president is militaristic but because of his lack of vision and planning. By dismantling the state apparatus and attacking what he calls the “golden bureaucracy,” he did not realize that the only option would be to entrust everything to the military, who are not necessarily more capable or less corrupt.

As was the FTA for Salinas, the crisis for Zedillo, the alternation for Fox, the Calderón war or the corruption of Peña; the hallmark and what we Mexicans will remember about AMLO will be the militarization of public life in Mexico. The participation of the Armed Forces in all aspects of public life will be something that we Mexicans will have to live with for many years and we did not get here by chance but by incompetence.