La Jornada
November 9, 1999
by Gilberto López y Rivas

In 1995 the United States and Mexico began one of the periods of greatest rapprochement in military cooperation between the two countries. Since then, more than three thousand Mexican soldiers, members of elite forces within the Mexican military, have been trained in U.S. military academies. Besides that, there is the substantial amount of military aid the U.S. has given our country.

Every branch of the U.S. state security apparatus has thrown itself into assisting and training Mexican security forces, now controlled by the military via the Federal Police Force. Aside from the training offered by the Pentagon's military schools, the FBI has given classes to federal and state police in Mexico.

Even the CIA has taken part in this wave of assistance to the Mexican military and police security forces. According to the book Drug Politics: Dirty Money and Democracies by David C. Jordan, ex-U.S. ambassador to Peru, the CIA took it upon itself to train a secret group named C047, responsible for investigating and combatting rebel groups in [Mexico]. The CIA itself has drawn up a plan for Inter-secretarial Coordination in the U.S., called the Mexico Pilot Project, to make refined intelligence about Mexico available to the president of the United States and his national security staff.

In that sense, it is a fact that Mexico has become subordinate to the U..S.security agenda ,and that Mexican government has chosen the armed forces to go forward with preparing all security agencies for an emergency situation, like a large-scale social rebellion.

The armed forces continue the process of internal modernization that will give them greater autonomy and ability to confront threats to internal security from a regional perspective. The forces will largely be concentrated in Chiapas, Tabasco, Guerrero, Veracruz, and Oaxaca, where one forth of land forces are based, divided into 11 military zones with a total of 27 infantry batallions, four calvalry regiments, and two artillery regiments.

In 1995 the Mexican army had 130,000 men. Now it has 40,000 more. In that same year, the army had a single Special Forces Aerial Unit (GAFE), now it has 70. Those forces added to the 4,000 soldiers already in the rapid response brigade, which is organized into one assault batallion and two batallions of military police.

The Mexican Army has expanded into other areas, like the struggle in waters within Mexican national territory. Once there were no Units of Special Amphibious Forces, now there are, particularly in South-eastem Mexico, which has an abundance of rivers, inlets, lakes, and swamps. The air force has improved with the creation of Special Forces Air Squadrons, composed of air-transport units, strengthened by U.S. helicopters UH-60 Black Hawk and MD-500, as well as Russian MI-8 helicopters.

Very different from the highly centralized system before 1995, the command structure in the Mexican Army has undergone a process of decentralization. The new system grants the commanders of each of the 41 military zones sufficient autonomy to make decisions as to logistics, training, and the mission of the special forces.

Nine generations of soldiers are being educated in the context of Mexico's subordination to the strategic security interests of the United States. In its zeal to keep its relationship with the U.S. on the best of terms, the government has followed in lock-step the requirements and priorities demanded by Washington.

The Mexican State has responded with the police and military to the outbreaks of rebellion in the country, instead of putting in practice a long-term social and economic policy to alleviate the social tensions and ill will; in order to to eliminate the violence by paramilitary groups, white guards and hired killers, so as to carry out a profound reform in the administration of justice.

Without democracy, the security forces that have been created during the present administration--whether police, military, militarized special forces, or paramilitary groups---will end up becoming the repressive arms of an authoritarian government that seeks nothing less than the disappearance, at any price, of the armed insurgency within national territory as well as the potential dissidents in grassroots organizations and opposition political parties.

It won't matter if the army has the military capacity to go ahead with a counter-insurgency program if the authoritarian and anti-democratic policies of the government stimulate the proliferation of more armed groups. The key to de-activating the time bomb of a widespread armed rebellion is the democratization of the country and the disappearance of authoritarian forms of government, a thesis the group in power finds difficult to accept.

translated by Cliff Olin