The issues of militarization and militarism in Mexico are increasingly debated with greater depth and specificity. Not always well-intentioned, some works are used to bash this or that government. There are also those who refuse to accept the phenomenon. However, the numerous essays, articles, reports and other materials still lack a complete x-ray of the people and groups that are and were in charge of military institutions throughout the country, from the local level to the highest echelons. This and other lack of information is largely due to the hermetic nature of these institutions, the impossibility of accessing their archives and the risks that this implies; practices that, under the argument of security, help to guarantee impunity.
The first thing to point out is that militarization in Mexico must be seen as a historical process, expressed in multiple dimensions and scales, linked to the accumulation of capital, but also to a tendency to reinforce the imperial centers, authoritarian logics and policies of control and counterinsurgency.
In Mexico, the political power of the armed forces has been present throughout the 20th century. Although there was no military dictatorship, the military has been a central part of political decision-making and a fundamental body in the constitution of authoritarian Mexico. The armed forces did not remain the same throughout the 20th century: they went from being an army emanating from the Revolution to a repressive apparatus of the class that became dominant after that revolutionary process; and from a national and popular army to an army with strong ideological and logistical influence of the US with its counterinsurgency and geopolitical agenda. According to the report of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past (Femospp), from 1953 to 1996 at least a thousand military personnel were sent to take training courses in the US, trained in counterinsurgency techniques and national security indoctrination. Some of these military personnel participated in the State crimes of 1968 and 1971 (https://n9.cl/b2964).
The broad and complex network of power that the military forces shaped throughout the country is expressed in different ways in the national territory, and it is in Chiapas where we can observe some of its various expressions. We see there, for example, military men converted into a ruling political elite, who administered the state and transferred power structures to family members and close associates. Military allied with caciques, landowners and landowners who armed their white guards and exploited native populations. Absalon Castellanos Domínguez will be one of the clearest representatives of this ruling military elite.
After the Zapatista uprising (1994), we observe three other expressions of militarization in Chiapas: 1) that of the Mexican Army as a counterinsurgent force, 2) that of paramilitarism promoted by the Army, and 3) that of the emergence of criminal groups associated with the Army itself. Let us briefly review this process.
The response of the Salinas de Gortari government to the Zapatista uprising was to send thousands of troops to the region, and to deploy air and ground attacks, even using existing or new military special forces. One of these elite groups are the Special Forces Air Mobile Groups (Gafes), formed between 1988 and 1994 to modernize the Mexican Army. Trained abroad, they acquired counterinsurgency skills, so in 1994 the Gafes were assigned the mission of delivering a surgical strike against the Zapatistas. Years later, Arturo Guzman Decena, Arturo Lazcano Lazcano and other members of the Gafes defected and founded the bloodthirsty criminal group Los Zetas.
But the Army not only acted as a counterinsurgency force and an embryonic armed wing of organized crime. To support its work, it created paramilitary groups to try to eliminate Zapatista communities, as stated in the 1994 Chiapas Campaign Plan: “To secretly organize certain sectors of the civilian population, among others, small ranchers and individuals characterized by a high sense of patriotism, who will be employed on orders in support of our operations” (https://n9.cl/qdg9r).
In recent years the military forces in Chiapas have also become involved in the construction industry -Mayan Train- and as migratory police through the National Guard.
Whether as a political elite, as a counterinsurgency army, as an embryo of paramilitary and criminal groups, as militarized police, or participating in the construction industry, the process of militarization in Chiapas has followed a long path with disastrous results for the people of the state.
Original text by Raúl Romero published in La Jornada on December 10th 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.