Nathaniel Parish Flannery: Does Mexico Need a New Military-Style Police Force? Nathaniel Parish Flannery - Forbes
go to original August 28, 2014

A Federal Police patrol passes through Acapulco Mexico. (N. Parish Flannery)

As the U.S. media grappled with the topic of the militarization of local police forces following the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, Mexico launched a new police force called the Gendarmerie, a military style civilian policing unit. In the U.S. many journalists and academic analysts have looked at the rise of the policeman-soldier as a cause for alarm. In her August 19 article for Vox Amanda Taub explains, “Americans have been watching in shock as images come out of Ferguson, Missouri that look more like the streets of a conflict zone in Iraq or a crackdown in China than a quiet suburb of St. Louis.” Likewise in the August 23 Curator podcast for Monocle 24 Gillian Dobias explains “The violence that beset Ferguson Missouri in the past week does have some peculiarly American characteristics, especially policemen who insist in dressing and acting like an occupying army instead of a police force.”

In Mexico, by contrast, security analysts are arguing that the Gendarmerie is unlikely to be able to singlehandedly affect a major change in the country’s ongoing struggles with organized crime and violence.

On August 1 I published an article with The World Policy Journal in which I explained that Mexico’s president entered office promising to create a 40,000 member police force that could displace the army from many crime hotspots and revert the role of securing law and order from the military back to the civilian police. In the article I explained “Pena Nieto has radically scaled back plans for the military-style Gendarmeria, which has since been downgraded to a less ambitious 5,000-member unit that will be part of the Federal Police, Mexico’s existing national police force. Instead of working to build a new heavy-duty force, Mexico is now trying to recalibrate its existing security programs and improve security coordination between federal, state and local government.” Mexico City based security analyst Alejandro Hope told me “It will be a military police that operates in rural areas. They will send them around the country. They are better trained and better paid than the rest of the Federal Police, but [the force] is too small to make a difference.”

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