Mexico‘s Military: From Veto Player to Governing Partner?
Mexico’s military has not seized power, it has acquired it by invitation. Under former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and current officeholder Claudia Sheinbaum, the military has become an indispensable partner in governing Mexico. It polices the streets, builds infrastructure, runs airports and customs, and manages state enterprises.
In its path to democratization Latin America built its transition away from military dictatorships by limiting the armed forces’ role in political decision-making and strengthening civilian control. Today, elected governments are drawing militaries back into the everyday work of the state – not through takeovers, but delegation. As governments transfer an expanding range of state functions to the armed forces, however, formal civilian control can coexist with growing dependence on military capacity.
No military officer has held Mexico’s presidency since Manuel Ávila Camacho left office in 1946, and the armed forces have remained formally subordinate ever since. But subordination never turned into marginalization and the military kept considerable autonomy, using its influence mainly to defend its own institutional turf. Earlier governments had militarized gradually, deploying the armed forces to support existing civilian police institutions. López Obrador broke with that approach: he dissolved the Federal Police and built a new security force, the National Guard, out of military personnel, training and command structures, while also expanding the armed forces’ administrative responsibilities beyond security. What emerged was a growing dependency: as more responsibilities and resources were placed in military hands, the government became increasingly reliant on the armed forces to perform functions that civilian institutions could no longer provide on their own. Sheinbaum’s decision to build on that foundation suggests this dependency is becoming institutionalized rather than reversed. The question now circles around accountability: what kind of de facto power does a formally subordinate military hold once it becomes indispensable to governing?
From emergency to permanence
Mexico’s current model emerged from a security crisis that successive governments failed to resolve. In 2006, Felipe Calderón put the armed forces at the center of the “war on drugs,” expecting that military capacity could make up for weak police institutions. Violence nevertheless escalated, while the civilian security system remained fragile. Peña Nieto’s National Gendarmerie later remained a small division of the Federal Police and never became a viable alternative. These failures made continued reliance on the armed forces appear increasingly unavoidable.
By 2018, deploying soldiers had become the default answer to insecurity. AMLO had campaigned against this approach, promising “hugs, not bullets” (abrazos, no balazos), yet his government created the National Guard to take over the security functions of the disbanded Federal Police. It was presented as a civilian force, but it drew its personnel, training and command structure from the military. Instead of reducing the state’s dependence on military capacity, the reform institutionalized it.
López Obrador then extended this model beyond public security. Military institutions took on responsibilities in migration, customs, infrastructure, transport and state-owned commercial activities. Their presence was no longer confined to emergencies. It became part of citizens’ everyday dealings with the state, from border crossings and airports to major public works.
Sheinbaum’s rollout of the National Guard reform in July 2025 and her decision to hand military engineers additional railway projects indicate no attempt to restore the previous boundary between national defense and civilian administration. By keeping the armed forces as a preferred tool for policy implementation, she is turning AMLO’s political choice into a lasting governing arrangement. What once started as an emergency response has become embedded in the institutional architecture of the Mexican state.
More responsibilities, more power?
Growing militarization does not automatically mean growing political power. The armed forces can still be simple implementers, executing decisions civilian leaders make. The balance shifts when those responsibilities give military institutions lasting control over resources, revenue, information and the machinery of implementation, making governments dependent on capacities they cannot easily rebuild.
Mexico’s BTI score for Effective Power to Govern, which assesses whether democratically elected authorities can govern without interference from unelected veto actors such as the military, has remained at 6 out of 10 since 2016. This stagnation suggests that the military is not a veto player that blocks or reverses government decisions. Rather, it has become an equal partner in respective areas of government.
This dependency represents a gradual transformation within civilian government, not an abrupt democratic rupture. The BTI 2026 Mexico Country Report shows how this transformation has taken shape in practice. It documents military involvement in customs and in the construction and operation of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport and the Maya Train. In 2023, a Defense Ministry company also assumed control of four additional airports, and Sheinbaum has since kept those assets under military management.
What makes this arrangement politically significant is the kind of leverage it creates. Customs posts put military officials at the gateway to trade flows, public revenue and commercially sensitive information. Airports and railways come with budgets, technical expertise and authority over public assets that private businesses rely on. Military-run companies generate revenue of their own, and AMLO tied profits from the Maya Train and several airports directly to military pensions, a link Sheinbaum has not undone. Civilian infrastructure has, in fact, become bound up with the armed forces’ own institutional stake in it. Unwinding that would mean reallocating resources and rebuilding civilian expertise that governments spent years letting atrophy.
The legal framework has also moved to accommodate this. Until September 2024, Article 129 of the Constitution limited military authorities in peacetime to functions tied directly to military discipline. Its revised wording instead permits whatever functions the Constitution and laws enacted under it establish. This gives existing responsibilities a firmer legal basis and allows future governments greater scope to extend military participation in civilian administration.
Who holds the military accountable?
A de facto governing partner must also be held accountable. Yet formal military subordination makes that responsibility difficult to pin down. Civilian leaders assign the tasks and carry the political responsibility, while military institutions make the operational decisions and administer the public resources. The Maya Train illustrates this problem. Now administered by a state-owned company under SEDENA, it recorded operational losses of 2.56 billion pesos in 2024 (123,5 million euros), while federal auditors have also identified excessive payments and deficiencies in its construction. Yet the project was initiated and financed by the civilian government, built through responsibilities distributed across civilian and military institutions, and is now operated by the military. When such problems arise, accountability is dispersed across the institutions that designed, built and now administer the project.
Accountability starts with access to information, and this is where the record is weakest. Mexico’s military is by most accounts its least transparent institution: the armed forces and the National Guard routinely withhold complete arrest records and other information on the use of force that they are legally required to disclose. This prevents courts from investigating effectively, Congress from evaluating military performance and citizens from knowing how coercive authority is exercised. Military personnel have also faced serious allegations of torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, yet few soldiers have been convicted in civilian courts for abuses against civilians.
The case shows how such opacity can become political influence. López Obrador reopened the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 teacher-training students, and a presidential commission later classified it as a “state crime.” But as the investigation indicated possible military involvement, government support weakened. The special prosecutor resigned, international experts reported interference meant to shield military officers, several arrest warrants were withdrawn and access to military records stayed restricted. The BTI 2026 Mexico Country Report also states that government cooperation dropped once investigators started asking for information that could implicate military involvement.
That dispute over access to sensitive military information involving the case remains unresolved under Sheinbaum. In February 2026, a federal court ordered the Army to release 853 pages of intelligence records from 2014 that SEDENA had previously denied existed. Sheinbaum, however, maintains that the military has already provided all requested information. Her government therefore appears reluctant to push the military further, as bringing potentially sensitive information to light could put an increasingly important governing partnership at risk.
A new model of military power
What is evolving in Mexico is not a linear military veto. The armed forces do not need to dictate presidential priorities to shape governance; controlling resources and implementation does the work instead. This structural and administrative influence has transformed them from an instrument of government into something closer to a de facto governing partner.
The armed forces have steadily expanded into the social, economic and political life of the Mexican state, well beyond their original security mandate. That expansion has come at a cost: rights violations, impunity and an erosion of oversight have grown alongside it, while accountability mechanisms have not kept pace.
A coup remains unlikely. The more realistic scenario is quieter. For now, the armed forces remain formally subordinate to the state, but the armed forces’ expanding weight means civilian authorities increasingly govern in name only, unable to act without military cooperation. That, in the end, is what kind of ‘partner’ Mexico’s armed forces have become: neither a veto player poised to obstruct, nor a coalition partner negotiating as an equal. The military is a capacity the government can no longer function without.
