Sheinbaum and the long shadow of the army

Demonstrators paint a wall demanding the army hand over 800 documents in the investigation of the Ayotzinapa case during the tenth anniversary march commemorating the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico City, September 26, 2024. © Pablo Perez.

Opinion • Dawn Marie Paley • October 3, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Claudia Sheinbaum made her first speech as president of Mexico on Tuesday, promising to continue the policies of her predecessor to build the second floor of his project, which is known as the Fourth Transformation.

With regards to security she echoed Andrés Manuel López Obrador on point after point, promising to address to the root causes of violence and by providing opportunities to young people and to center intelligence and investigation, coordination between state and local police forces, as well as strengthening the National Guard. Her inauguration took place days after the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school in the state of Guerrero.

“We will guarantee the reduction of high impact crimes,” said Sheinbaum. “We will not return to Felipe Calderón’s irresponsible war on drugs, which continues to hurt Mexico,” she said, ignoring the fact that the war continued unabated since 2006. During AMLO’s six-year term, more than 195,000 people have been killed and over 50,000 disappeared, or about one disappearance an hour. Even though he promised to make finding the disappeared a priority, there are over 72,000 unidentified bodies held at morgues across the country.

Constitutional changes passed by the senate last week—as parents of the disappeared students protested outside—give the Secretary of Defense permanent operational and budgetary control over the National Guard, Mexico’s equivalent to a federal police force. The 130,000 strong force will now carry out criminal investigations, even as its members benefit from military courts. 

Students carry a mock coffin during the march during the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students in Mexico City, Sept. 26, 2024. © Pablo Perez.

Over the past weeks we’ve heard senators and other elected officials make a barrage of arguments about why Mexico is not being militarized, and Sheinbaum doubled down on this message in her first speech as president. “Whoever thinks the National Guard being under army control is militarization is totally wrong,” she said.

In her final cabinet appointments before taking office, Sheinbuam named General Ricardo Trevilla Trejo as Secretary of Defense and Admiral Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles as Secretary of the Marines. Trevilla Trejo, a graduate of the School of the Americas, has a profile in strategic communication (watch for the army in telenovelas) and was the head of the Combined General Staff of National Defense, a new division of the army set up by López Obrador. For his part, until his promotion, Morales Ángeles was in charge of the Trans-Isthmus Corridor, demonstrating the centrality of armed-forces run infrastructure projects in the new administration. 

Also notable in Sheinbaum’s cabinet is Omar García Harfuch. He was named as among the officials that fabricated the “historic truth” about the disappearance of the 43 students in 2014. García Harfuch—whose grandfather was Secretary of Defense during the Tlatelolco massacre on October 2, 1968 and whose father was an intelligence operative during Mexico’s dirty war—is now the Secretary of Public Security and will be a key interlocutor between Mexico’s civilian government and the armed forces. His pedigree, as well as his efforts to spin the tale of what took place in Iguala on September 26, 2014, are a testament to where his loyalties lie.

In her speech before heads of state and congress, Sheinbaum promised to build double the amount kilometers of train lines than what was built—often by the army—during AMLO’s administration. For his part, Trevilla Trejo said the army would continue to be a “strategic ally” in the building of infrastructure projects over the next six years. In a second speech on Tuesday in front of her supporters in the Zócalo, Sheinbaum vowed continued investment in Mexicana Aviation, which she called “the peoples’ airline,” even though it is owned and operated by the army. There can be no doubt that the armed forces will continue to be major contractors during Sheinbaum’s administration, and that the militarization of daily life and key infrastructure will continue apace.

And while Sheinbaum spent a great deal time on women’s empowerment and equality during her first presidential speech, she didn’t speak of Ayotzinapa until her second appearance in the Zócalo. The many victims of the war that was ramped up by Calderón and continued by Enrique Peña Nieto and López Obrador went unmentioned. 

For Ayotzi, for the future

Five days before Sheinbaum took office, even lines of young men in red t-shirts and kerchiefs advanced shoulder to shoulder down Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue. Another group of students with their faces covered, counted together from one to 43. Young women students, their hair in french braids, walked solemnly in the rain. “Take the truth out of the bases! Ten years later, justice for Ayotzinapa!” read a banner at the front of another student group. “Extradite Tomás Zerón to México! End the genocide of the people of Palestine by apartheid Israel!” 

A woman holds a banner with the portrait of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the word “JOKER” during the tenth anniversary march commemorating the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico City, September 26, 2024. © Pablo Perez.

On September 26, hundreds of students from Mexico’s rural teacher training schools participated in a massive march demanding the return of the 43 students 10 years after their disappearance. Parents of the 43 led the march aboard the bus they use to travel around the country in search of their children. 

Journalists and photographers snapped photos as the march made its way down Reforma toward the Zócalo. Members of near-extinct unions, ongoing social struggles, marching bands, individuals and civil society groups swelled into the streets, as vendors hawked plastic ponchos and umbrellas. Every few minutes, chants and cries were punctuated the boom of a thunder rocket, sending soundwaves through the crowd.

In a country openly hostile to them, the students made their readiness to continue to struggle for justice for their 43 disappeared comrades clear. They are part of a new generation whose politicization and education is intertwined with the horrors their predecessors experienced in September of 2014. Protests, sometimes militant, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud, always laced with rage and sadness, have been ongoing in the wake of the disappearances. Supporters gather on the 26th of every month, and yearly on the grim anniversary. 

In the lead up to the ten year anniversary, parents of the students demonstrated outside the 27th Battalion in the city of Iguala, as they’ve been doing sporadically over the past decade. Police sprayed tear gas as a truck rammed the fence surrounding the military base. The Independent Group of Expert Investigators ended their investigation last summer in the face of the Secretary of Defense’s refusal to hand over 800 intelligence documents concerning the disappearances. 

Last week was the first time cement barricades were installed to block access to Mexico City’s Zócalo, which slowed the arrival of marchers and discouraged many. As those who could squeeze past the barriers trickled in, parents of the 43 students took the stage. “The [government of López Obrador] said they would solve the case, but chose to protect the army and turn their back on the case of Ayotzinapa,” said one of the mothers of the 43 students as rain continued to fall on the demonstration. Shouts of “traitor” rose up from the crowd.

As the parents of the 43 took turns speaking, they promised to continue in struggle. “We’re not going to give [the incoming government] the same kind of time we gave to the person who unfortunately betrayed us, who betrayed his word,” said a father of one of the 43 students.

The role of the army

As president, AMLO achieved the enthusiastic support of the armed forces for his so-called fourth transformation. But money and new business opportunities weren’t enough to buy their loyalty, which was also contingent on the betrayal of his promises to find the 43, end the war, and bring justice to victims around the country. 

Throughout AMLO’s term, record numbers of troops patrolled the country, and the war on the people—disguised as a war on drugs—continued unabated. The budgets of the marines and the army spiked, and they were given many new opportunities in the construction and operation of critical infrastructure including railways, airports, and an airline; in the administration of ports and customs; and in policing migration (six migrants were killed by the army in Chiapas on October 2). 

Crosses that say “Ayotzinapa” are carried in the rain by students during the tenth anniversary march commemorating the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico City, September 26, 2024. © Pablo Perez.

Throughout his presidency AMLO denigrated activists, and over the last year expanded his hostility to the parents of the 43, questioning their motives and suggesting they were being manipulated by their lawyers. 

All the while, he held up the army as “the people in uniform,” and chalked up their involvement in the disappearance of the 43 as a case of a few bad apples within the force. Available evidence shows they were tracking the events in Iguala that night in real time, that the marines tampered with one of the key crime scenes, and that one of the disappeared students was an active duty soldier and informant. 

When López Obrador took office in 2018, legislators interrupted his inaugural speech by counting from 1 to 43, after which he promised to make progress on Ayotzinapa. On his third day as President, he signed a decree creating the Commission for Truth and Justice in the Case of Aytozinapa (COVAJ). But as journalist John Gibler documented, that investigation was blown up from the inside once it started to touch members of the military.

By comparison, during her first speech as president Sheinbaum stayed mum on the case, and legislators did too. If her first day in office is any indication, she’ll do more than AMLO to downplay the role of Mexico’s Armed Forces in sustaining the fourth transformation, focussing instead on issues that are popular with voters.

“The supreme commander of the Armed Forces is a civilian and a woman, and we will never give an order to repress the people of Mexico,” said Sheinbaum in front of supporters in the Zócalo on inauguration day. But the army’s refusal to share the missing documents that would help to find the 43 students tells us something else: that in Mexico it’s the generals who decide, not the president or her party.