Changes to Mexican gendarmerie signal government's public security direction

The Mexican government yesterday (11 July) gave fresh detail on a major part of its plan to strengthen the country's public security environment. Manuel Mondragón, head of the National Security Commission, confirmed that the establishment of the new national gendarmerie force will involve between 4,000 and 5,000 recruits, and will begin in early 2014. President Enrique Peña Nieto made the establishment of the gendarmerie a key plank of his public security reform proposals during campaigning prior to taking office in December 2012.

Mondragón's statement on the new federally controlled paramilitary force substantially scales back expectations about both the timing and dimensions of the gendarmerie. It had originally been scheduled for establishment in September 2013, with an initial force of 10,000 recruits and an aspiration for eventual staffing of 40,000 officers. Mondragón also clarified that all of that first batch of recruits would be drawn from civilian personnel who will receive military training, contradicting earlier suggestions that the force would be largely composed of former or retired military personnel.

The gendarmerie will come under the institutional control of the federal police, and is one part of a wider ranging reform effort aimed at boosting police operational effectiveness by a reorganisation of the current three-tier system of federal, state, and municipal police forces. This seeks to address one of Mexico's main security weaknesses: local police forces highly corrupt and heavily infiltrated by the drug cartels.

The announcement about the scaled back ambition for the gendarmerie came on the same day that the Mexican authorities released data assessing an 18% fall in murders related to organised crime since Peña Nieto took office in December 2012. A joint statement by the Secretariats of Government (Segob), National Defence (Sedena), National Security (Cisen), Federal Police (PF), and Attorney General's office (PGR) assessed a total of 7,110 such cases from December 2012 to June 2013, 18% down year-on-year. Most recently, a total of 869 murders in June 2013 was down 24% from 1,148 in June 2012. These data are likely to be contested by well-respected Mexican civil society actors – previous positive assessments of a fall in murders in April and May 2013 were strongly challenged by, amongst others, the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness and Citizens' Council for Public Security and Penal Justice.

Nonetheless, the authorities' positive message on murder trends clearly gives them some flexibility in the roll-out of public security reform plans, and will allow them to respond strongly to potential concerns over views that they are stepping back from security sector reform. More importantly, the downgrading of the gendarmerie initiative is an implicit recognition that the establishment of a gendarmerie is facing significant internal hurdles, particularly resistance from different segments of the security forces, which fear losing influence to the new special police force. It also suggests that the planned reorganisation of Mexico's current multitude of federal, state, and municipal level police forces is taking longer than expected. Alongside this is the ongoing fundamental reform of the Mexican judicial system aimed at creating an oral, adversarial trial system, which began under the previous administration of Felipe Calderón in 2008. That process is due to be completed by 2016, but as of late 2012, only 12 Mexican states had begun to use the new system.

Outlook and implications

The announcement about the gendarmerie clearly highlights that despite public rhetoric to the contrary by Peña Nieto throughout 2012, his public security policy will continue to display very significant continuity with that of his predecessor at least until mid-late 2014. However, in a change of presentational emphasis from the Calderón administration, the government will publicly avoid using confrontational language focused on specific drug trafficking organisations even as it continues to focus a militarised approach on the Mexican states most affected by violent crime. Those are currently the states of Michoacán and Guerrero, both of which have been seriously affected by the presence of criminal organisations in urban and rural areas, with high levels of violence also persisting in many of the northern states bordering the US. Their activities – especially extortion of local communities – have also prompted the rise of armed citizen self-defence groups, creating an additional and unwelcome complication for the Mexican authorities (see Mexico: 25 June 2013: Knights Templar cartel threatens to combat self-defence groups in Mexico's Guerrero state). Despite some concerns over a number of high prolife crimes in Mexico City's Zona Rosa district in June 2013 (see Mexico: 11 June 2013: Violence raises security concerns in Mexico City's La Zona Rosa), that geographical focus is unlikely to include Mexico City, which remains relatively unaffected by serious drug-related violence. That was reiterated on 10 July by Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, head of the Mexico City government, who said that drug cartels were not active in the country's capital. Moreover, the initial manpower of up to 5,000 gendarmes is not sufficient to make countrywide security gains, meaning that their deployment is likely to be focused only in areas of high cartel activity.