After Decade Fighting Cartels, Mexico May Be Looking to Get Its Military Off the Front Line Christopher Woody - Business Insider
go to original February 14, 2017

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks next to Defence Minister, General Salvador Cienfuegos (L) and the Navy Secretary, Admiral Vidal Francisco Soberon (R) during an event in Mexico City (Reuters/Carlos Jasso)

In December 2006, just after taking office, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed Mexico's military to the cities and countryside to take on the country's drug trade.

It was not the first time Mexico's military had been sent out to fight narcos, but Calderon's escalation — from 20,000 soldiers deployed around the country to 50,000 — marked a shift, the effects of which have reverberated around the country.

But in recent months, Mexico's military leadership, after a decade of fighting a seemingly indefatigable foe, has been increasingly critical of the tasks it has been assigned.

"We didn't ask to be here. We don't like it. We didn't study how to chase criminals," Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos said in early December. "Our function is something else, and it's been made into something unnatural. We are doing things that don't correspond to our training because there's no one else to do them."

Critical comments from the military about its decade-old domestic deployment are rare, but Cienfuegos has made similar statements before.

“Of course we have committed errors,” he said in an interview with Mexican news outlet Pulso in mid-March. "One of those was when we entered fully combat against drugs." In that interview, Cienfuegos also underscored the gap between the military's training and the roles it was being asked to fill on Mexico's streets. "The military is not intended for the work it does today," he said. "No one with responsibility for this institution is prepared to do the functions of the police."

While Cienfuegos has been one of the most high-profile critics of the domestic deployment of Mexico's military, he is not the only one.

Read the rest at Business Insider

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