How Mexico’s Presidential Candidates Could Reshape Security Policy

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Mexico’s leading presidential candidates hold their first debate, Elon Musk comes under investigation in Brazil, and how the Falklands War led to the explosion of Argentine rock.

Designing a Post-AMLO Security Strategy

Mexico’s leading presidential candidates participated in their first debate last Sunday, ahead of general elections on June 2. Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum holds a wide polling lead in the race to replace outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Trailing her are Xóchitl Gálvez, a former senator representing a pro-market opposition alliance, and Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who represents a small centrist party.

López Obrador defies easy ideological classifications. He is popular among Mexico’s poor and bills himself as a leftist. But he has also embraced economic austerity measures and empowered the military. Sheinbaum, his protégé and chosen successor, is running largely on continuity, while Gálvez argues that the state should play a smaller role in Mexico’s economy. (López Obrador has expanded the Mexican government’s role in the energy sector.)

Gálvez also favors major changes to security policy. She opened her debate appearance by saying that she dreams of a “Mexico where we put an end to violence.” Violence and insecurity are leading election concerns for Mexican voters, surveys show. When López Obrador took office in 2018, he promised to demilitarize security forces and deescalate their confrontations with drug gangs, a policy he called “Hugs, Not Bullets.” But he arguably did the opposite.

López Obrador has often lashed out at critics of his security policies, to the chagrin of many nongovernmental organizations and researchers. Now, Mexicans have a chance to publicly take stock of his approach.

During his presidency, López Obrador cut funding from local police forces and eliminated Mexico’s federal police. In its place, he created a nationwide security force called the National Guard that was full of former soldiers. He later controversially transferred the National Guard from civilian to military control. Meanwhile, the government discreetly let criminal groups know that it sought a reduction in highly visible violence, such as shootouts on main roads, said International Crisis Group analyst Falko Ernst. Yet insecurity remained.

Sheinbaum has staked out a different approach. Although directly criticizing López Obrador’s record is risky—she relies on his base’s support to get elected—her public comments and written platform signal that she believes Mexico needs a change. The election campaign itself has been marked by a string of killings of local candidates; it could become the deadliest in Mexican history.

The leading campaigns “are being much more concrete than in past elections” about their security proposals, Ernst told Foreign Policy. In doing so, Sheinbaum and Gálvez are acknowledging the high levels of violence that many Mexicans still face, even as government statistics show that homicides have fallen nationwide for three consecutive years.

Both Sheinbaum and Gálvez say they will reempower local police forces and boost those forces’ investigative capacities. Sheinbaum has spoken of reorienting the National Guard’s tactics toward less confrontational community policing, while Gálvez said she would use the military to fight organized crime but demilitarize the National Guard more generally.

Despite the leading candidates’ proposals, many Mexican security experts remain unconvinced that true change is afoot. “There is a lack of substance on the how and why” of the candidates’ proposed changes, as Ibero-American University historian Marisol Ochoa said on a radio program on Tuesday.

Ochoa’s university is part of a civil society coalition that has launched a public appeal for a homicide reduction program in the next government. The coalition’s framework includes building a reliable crime database and implementing evidence-based crime reduction strategies, such as stricter arms control.

A future presidential debate is slated to give more airtime to the issue of security policy, which was only briefly discussed on Sunday. As the topic becomes more salient in the campaign, Ochoa’s colleague, Ibero-American University security expert Ernesto López Portillo, has argued that Mexicans should resist the urge to normalize the levels of violence around them and instead should become engaged in the policy debate.

“Without a social awakening,” nothing will change, López Portillo posted on X.

Upcoming Events

Friday, April 12: The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States holds an emergency meeting on the arrest of former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas.

Friday, April 12, through Monday, April 22: Venezuela continues hosting the latest round of peace talks between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army rebel group.

Saturday, April 13: Argentine President Javier Milei meets with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Austin, Texas.

Tuesday, April 16, to Wednesday, April 17: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits Colombia.

What We’re Following

Musk under investigation. On Sunday, tech magnate Elon Musk was added as a subject to an ongoing Brazilian Supreme Court probe into disinformation in the country. The move follows Musk’s comments that he would lift bans ordered by the court against certain X accounts.

It was not immediately clear which accounts Musk was referring to, but in recent years, Brazilian authorities have ordered the suspension of accounts that shared messages threatening Supreme Court justices and spreading false information discrediting the country’s October 2022 presidential election.

Musk described the bans as “censorship” and overreach by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. But Brazil is not the United States: The country’s legal framework grants authorities more space to restrict speech if it meets thresholds for anti-democratic action.

Nicaragua vs. Germany. Hearings kicked off at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday in a case that Nicaragua is bringing against Germany over arms provisions to Israel. Nicaragua argues that such arms deliveries facilitate genocide, broadening the ICJ’s scrutiny of actions in the Gaza Strip to include countries delivering arms, not just those deploying them.

Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States. But unlike Washington, Berlin is subject to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. Nicaragua’s move reflects a long-term relationship between Nicaraguans and Palestinians: Before overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, President Daniel Ortega’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front received training from the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Germany rejected Nicaragua’s accusations on Tuesday as “grossly biased” and said that the Holocaust explains why Israel’s security lies at the core of German foreign policy. Germany is “doing its utmost to live up to its responsibility vis-a-vis both the Israeli and Palestinian people,” said the legal director of the German Foreign Office.

Ortega’s own human rights record is deeply flawed. His administration has suppressed opposition for years through arbitrary detentions and crackdowns on protests. His most recent targets include the Catholic Church and Miss Universe 2023.

A man rides his bike next to a mural commemorating the Falklands War, seen in Buenos Aires on March 21, 2022.Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images

Thatcher’s musical legacy. The conflict known in the English-speaking world as the Falklands War and in Argentina as the Malvinas War began 42 years ago this month. In April 1982, Argentina launched a military operation on the British-held Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, which Buenos Aires claimed as its territory. After over two months of fighting, Britain won and Argentine forces departed. Milei said last week that he wanted the islands back.

The war left a deep cultural legacy in Argentina, where the government banned radio stations from playing English-language music during the conflict. At the time, Argentina was ruled by a military regime that had been unfriendly to the rockers’ counterculture. The prohibition brought Argentine rock out from the underground and generated a music boom that would reverberate across the continent for decades.

“Various artists who had been censored under the dictatorship instead became protagonists,” music critic Carlos Iogna Prat wrote in TN.

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In Focus: Ecuador’s Embassy Raid

Soldiers guard the Mexican Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, on April 5.Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images

Last Friday, Ecuadorian police stormed the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas, who was sheltering in the building. Glas was convicted for corruption in Ecuador in 2017 but was recently granted diplomatic asylum by Mexico.

The raid prompted swift global backlash. Countries across Latin America, as well as the United States and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, condemned Ecuadorian authorities’ violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that no country can force entry into another country’s embassy.

Mexico took further measures, pulling its diplomatic corps from Ecuador. On Thursday, the Mexican government said that it had filed a lawsuit against Ecuador at the ICJ.

The raid to apprehend Glas appears to be part of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s tough-on-crime strategy. But international law experts pointed out that Mexico was also shirking diplomatic norms: A Latin American treaty on diplomatic asylum known as the Caracas Convention stipulates that people cannot be granted the protection if they have been convicted of common crimes.

An Organization of American States (OAS) resolution that passed on Wednesday acknowledged these contradictions in the Ecuador-Mexico spat, condemning Ecuador’s actions and noting that embassies “must not be used in ways incompatible with the functions of the mission.”

Pleas by the OAS, United Nations and other bodies did not appear to immediately deescalate Mexico-Ecuador tensions. López Obrador has appeared to embrace the opportunity to drum up nationalist sentiment as Mexico’s elections near.