Mexico: less hugs, more bullets?

Dear all,

We welcome you to the Greater Caribbean Monitor (GCaM).

In this issue, you will find:

• Sheinbaum is quietly remilitarizing Mexico

• Trump’s executive expansion in securitization

• What We’re Watching

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Best,

The GCaM Team

Mexico’s president inherited a paradox: to preserve the rhetoric of demilitarization while leaning ever more heavily on the military itself.

Extra, extra. On July 1, reforms to the Ley de la Guardia Nacional formally transferred Mexico’s National Guard from the civilian Security and Citizen Protection Ministry (SSPC) to the Defense Ministry (SEDENA). 

• With that single decree, President Claudia Sheinbaum effectively eliminated Mexico’s last nationwide civilian police force—and confirmed that her government, like those before it, will rely on the armed forces to manage the country’s deepening security crisis.

Between the lines. Created in 2019 by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the National Guard was conceived as a civilian institution to replace the Federal Police. In practice, it absorbed thousands of soldiers and marines and was commanded by officers with military careers. The new reform only makes official what was already happening on the ground: the Guard was born militarized. 

• Yet the symbolic impact is significant. By placing it under SEDENA’s command, Mexico now counts four armed institutions—army, air force, navy, and National Guard—and no civilian alternative capable of providing national-scale policing.

• This move cements a 20-year trajectory in which the Mexican state, unable to reform its civilian security apparatus, has increasingly turned to the military as the default tool against organized crime.

Hidden in plain sight. Sheinbaum’s administration publicly insists on maintaining AMLO’s “hugs, not bullets” philosophy, emphasizing social programs and non-confrontational rhetoric. But policy reality has moved in the opposite direction. By deepening military control over security, Sheinbaum is signaling continuity in dependence, not in ideology. 

• Her challenge is to balance public trust in the armed forces—still among the most respected institutions in Mexico—with growing concerns over accountability, opacity, and the perception of defeat of civilian institutions.

• The reform’s political logic is also fiscal: SEDENA now retains both the personnel and the budget that previously sat under the SSPC. 

• In an era of high public spending and limited growth, control over security budgets reinforces the military’s institutional power.

Rubbed the wrong way. Mexico’s armed forces have historically operated with little transparency and minimal civilian control. Their expanded mandate—from infrastructure building to customs management, and now full policing authority—has historically blurred the line between defense and governance.

• The fusion of military and police roles could perpetuate a cycle of short-term containment and long-term fragility. Military deployments may temporarily suppress violence but rarely dismantle criminal economies or strengthen local institutions.

• The National Guard’s record underscores this: accusations of excessive use of force, torture, and criminal infiltration remain largely unaddressed. 

• The July reform, while administrative on paper, offers no new safeguards against these abuses and no plan to reform doctrine, training, or transparency.

From the archives. Observers already draw parallels between Sheinbaum’s emerging strategy and that of former president Felipe Calderón: a militarized approach wrapped in the language of state-building. The difference is that Calderón at least paired his military surge with intelligence-led operations and institutional reform. 

• López Obrador, in contrast, failed to produce measurable results despite record deployments and manipulated homicide data.

• If Sheinbaum’s government continues this hybrid path—discursive pacifism and operational militarism—Mexico risks repeating a cycle of political stability purchased through military presence, not institutional resilience.

The bottom line. Mexico’s return to overt militarism carries consequences beyond its borders. As the region’s reference point for security models, its policies influence the Caribbean Basin and Central America, where several governments already lean on their militaries to counter gangs and transnational crime, legitimazing authoritarian governments like that of President Bukele.

• If Mexico normalizes the permanent use of armed forces for internal policing, it could re-legitimize the military-first model across Latin America—undermining civilian reform efforts and accountability mechanisms elsewhere.

• Sheinbaum’s reform codifies what Mexico’s reality already made clear: the era of demilitarization is over.

• Her challenge now is to prevent the country’s armed institutions from becoming a parallel state—one that answers to itself, not to a republic. “Hugs, not bullets” remains the slogan. But in Mexico’s streets, the echo of marching boots is what still defines public security.

The Trump administration has deepened the securitization process by transforming social and migratory conflicts into matters of national security, thereby expanding executive discretion under the language of defense.

In perspective. Despite several congressional counter-initiatives—such as War Powers resolutions—the legislature has failed to reassert its constitutional control over the administration’s decisions regarding the use of force. This vacuum has allowed the Executive to stretch the legal threshold of militarization. The outcome is a structural reconfiguration of American governance, where security prerogatives overshadow legislative oversight. Under Trump, militarization has broadened from overseas counterterrorism to domestic and regional arenas under Article II.

• Since 2019, Congress has tried to curb this drift through War Powers resolutions and efforts to repeal legacy AUMFs—the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—but none have produced a durable or binding constraint.
  
  

• The Executive has stretched existing authorizations to cover non-state actors and quasi-domestic operations—for example, Venezuela and internal National Guard deployments—lowering the threshold for the use of force.
  
  

• The Supreme Court has largely refrained from direct intervention, preferring minimal friction with the expansion of presidential power in cases involving government agencies or redirecting tension toward conflicts between the states and the federal government—as seen in Roe v. Wade.

Between the lines. Trump’s foreign policy advances a visible reordering of geopolitical power globally, amidst tensions within the U.S. political system. The Supreme Court has signaled a preference for restraining the administrative state rather than the Executive itself, reducing agency autonomy while leaving presidential discretion in security and foreign affairs largely intact.

• The fragile Republican majority has created a permissive legislative environment in which legal thresholds for the Executive are stretched through practice.
  
  

• The Court’s conservative leanings and reluctance to fracture executive authority operate as a stabilizing mechanism for national power, on the premise that a strong reaction could destabilize geopolitical expectations.

What follows. This securitization outreach is supported primarily through legal mechanisms and—secondarily—through soft power instruments. The administration circulates decontextualized clips of migrants or vessel attacks to frame a specific narrative on national security, without a verifiable chain of evidence that Congress can evaluate.

• Shifting strikes across multiple narrative fronts maintain an epistemic fog that sustains domestic support and extends influence abroad. This blurs the reach of international law over U.S. actions outside its formal jurisdiction.
  
  

• Nonetheless, the narrative resistance of non-aligned states can—and has—been used to fragment political debates over U.S. foreign policy.
  
  

• President Petro’s recent claim that Colombians were killed in one of the strikes reinforces an empirically unverifiable counter-narrative against military expansion.

In conclusion. Deference from the Supreme Court and the executive’s use of soft power spectacle blur the legal perimeter: policies gain momentum before they are ever contested institutionally by Congress.

• The result is a worrisome shift from rule-based authorization to practice-led normalization of executive force—in a shifting geopolitical environment where the limits of law, both domestic and international, are tested through opaque chains of evidence.

What We’re Watching 🔎 . . .

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize [link]

Kostya Manenkov, Regina García Cano and Geir Moulson, AP News

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela, a move the Norwegian committee said honors “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid growing darkness.”

Machado, long disqualified and forced into hiding after Venezuela’s disputed 2024 election, is recognized as a unifying figure in a fractured opposition. The prize places Venezuela’s democratic crisis back on the global stage after months of repression, mass arrests, and the exile of opposition figures. Machado dedicated the award to “the suffering people of Venezuela” and called for international solidarity, underscoring how the country’s political impasse is again intersecting with regional stability and U.S.–Latin America relations.

Peru Ousts President Amid Crime Surge [link]

Mitra Taj and Genevieve Glatsky, The New York Times

Peru’s Congress voted 122–0 to impeach and remove President Dina Boluarte early Friday, citing “permanent moral incapacity” after a deadly shooting at a Lima concert and growing outrage over her failure to curb rampant crime. Boluarte, already the most unpopular leader in recent history with approval near 3%, lost support from the right-wing and centrist blocs that had kept her in power since 2022.

Her ouster follows months of spiraling gang violence, corruption scandals, and allegations that she obstructed investigations into organized crime. Boluarte’s government declared repeated states of emergency but failed to contain extortion and contract killings. Congress president José Jerí will serve as interim leader until the April 2026 general election, in a country where every president since 2016 has been impeached, jailed, or investigated—and where political instability remains the only constant.