Mexican Armed Forces Take Control of Customs by Orders of the Federal Government

"Redlogarythm" for Borderland Beat

Source: Archivo Digital Colima

Last Thursday, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) announced that the customs system will undergo a radical change with the elimination of the Customs' General Administration (Administración General de Aduanas, AGA).

The AGA will be replaced by Mexico's Customs National Agency (Agencia Nacional de Aduanas de México, ANAM), a new administrative body controlled both by the SEDENA (Army) and the SEMAR (Navy).

The announcement took place during AMLO's ritual morning conference, although it had been published a day earlier (14th) in the Federation's Official Diary.

The new customs body has been created and modelled through a decree that establishes this new agency as a decentralized administrative body of the Federal Secretary of Finance and Public Credit (Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, SHCP).

Among other generic duties, its main task will be "to organize and direct the inspection services to apply and enforce the fulfillment of legal rules regulating the entrance and exit of merchandise from national soil".

The reform of Mexico's customs system might be labelled as an intent by the Federal Government to address a matter of public security and one of the country's top causes for public insecurity.

Mexico has 49 custom posts and it is through these points that the drugs, migrants and illicit assets managed by organized crime abandon the country. It´s also through these customs that the weapons, money and contraband used by the paramilitary cells of criminal organizations enter the country.

Old solutions, not a new initiative:

The creation of the ANAM is nothing more than the materialization of another of AMLO's promises. Back in July 2020, he announced in a meeting held at the State of Colima, one of the main entry points of chemical precursors and fentanyl coming from Southeast Asia, that the customs, ports and border facilities would be operated by the Armed Forces in an attempt to curb the rampant situation of corruption inside the AGA.

Thus, the creation of the ANAM is the culmination of a process that started not with AMLO but during the Administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, when the SEMAR took control of certain ports of the Pacific coast, although they were isolated operations that were not conducted through an homogeneous body controlled by the military.

As a matter of fact, one of the ANAM´s most interesting facts is that its founding Decree admits and promotes the membership of elements belonging to the Armed Forces, both in active service (third paragraph of the Considerations) and in retirement (Article 8).

Thus, although the Decree does not state that the ANAM will be operated by the military, it leaves an open door to such possibility. In its Article 5.6, it says that it will be possible for the new customs agency to coordinate with the Armed Forces and National Security Institutions to "preserve security in the nation´s points of access."

Furthermore, any doubt regarding the involvement of the SEDENA and the SEMAR into the new ANAM was cleared when Andrés Manuel López Obrador attributed a direct role to the armed forces in the management of the agency.

"Of course it depends of the SHCP. Nevertheless, at the operative level, it´s going to be the Armed Forces the ones responsible for the administration of customs", he said.

This decision marks a new paradigm shift in Mexico's never-ending route towards what we could call a process of socio-economic militarization.

Once seen as the executive arm of the Federal Government, in charge of the repression of social movements that had gone too far or of certain manifestations of organized criminality that could not be controlled, the Mexican Armed Forces, especially the SEDENA and the SEMAR, have been used as patches with which to stop the constant leakages and failures of the Federal and State plans and offensives against organized crime. Thus, the Mexican Army has become a useful accessory to deploy when any other solution has failed.

Although useful in the context of the brutal conflicts that are currently consuming certain zones of Mexico (such as Michoacán, Sonora, Chihuahua or Guerrero) it is very dangerous to use the Armed Forces, whose goal is and will always be the use of violent force against a certain enemy, inside a country that is not involved in an officially declared armed conflict. 

Although the temporal use of the Army can be justified in extreme situations such as States of Emergency or natural disasters, we should not forget that the Mexican Army has been deployed in the streets on a daily basis for 15 years, since the beginning of the so called "war on organized crime" launched in 2006 by Felipe Calderón.

The use of an institution conceived, designed and organized for the use of force for strictly civilian purposes is a new step in the slow but constant route towards the militarization of the Mexican society. 

The creation of the ANAM isn´t new, though. There have been previous instances of military intervention in the management of strictly administrative areas.

We could evoke, for example, the militarization of certain ports like Manzanillo (in Colima) and Lázaro Cárdenas (in Michoacán) in a desperate effort to end with the industrial trade of chemical precursors coming from Asia and minerals such as iron ore extracted by organized groups from open-pit mines and exported to the South-East. It was a total failure.

Although dozens of custom officers were detained or dismissed, the military authorities that took control of the facilities could not prevent the flow of illicit goods, either by negligence or complicity with criminal structures.

In July 2020, AMLO announced the militarization of ports and customs, provoking again an enormous debate around the economic effects of such a measure.

Since then we had heard periodic rumors about the militarization of sea facilities, but they had not been specified in any serious measure. 

The militarization plan had a victim: Mexico's Communications and Transport Secretary, Javier Jiménez Espriú, who resigned for SEMAR's intervention in the customs system.

A route to nowhere?

It´s too early to decide whether the control of the customs system by the Armed Forces through the ANAM will mean a reduction in the quotas of contraband entering and coming out from Mexico.

Nevertheless, the perspectives and potential success of such a plan are darkened by the evidence of previous similar failures and by the proven venality of certain elements of the Armed Forces, especially the SEDENA.

Another sign of continuity is the permanence of the former AGA head, Horacio Duarte Olivares, who will also be the head of the ANAM once the change of offices takes place.

Certainly, if AMLO wanted a paradigm shift, he could have very easily dismissed Duarte, whose tenure as head of the AGA has been marked by constant recriminations of the President himself, who has recognized that the AGA has always been rotten to the core.

Nothing will change in Mexico until there´s a change of scope in the way of addressing security problems.

Although AMLO's administration earned respect from almost every reasonable agents by recognizing that violence has a socio-economic reason as a cause, his civic speech of "hugs, not bullets" does not hold in a context in which the Armed Forces are constantly absorbing new and more powerful duties, becoming one of the nation's new arbitrators.