How Militarization Has Undermined Mexico’s Armed Forces

Expansion of the Mexican Military

Despite its early criticism of using the armed forces for public safety and security, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) administration (2018–24) greatly expanded the military’s role in tasks that were previously the responsibility of civilian authorities. Even though evidence suggests that militarization has failed to deliver concrete security outcomes, since 2018, the Army and Navy have assumed roles traditionally reserved for civilian institutions, extending their control from national security to organized crime operations.

In fact, studies show that assigning public safety and domestic security duties to the military increases its vulnerability to corruption risks and leads to human rights violations. This brief examines the recent involvement of Mexico’s Navy in the huachicol (fuel theft) corruption scheme. Once considered a reliable institution with high social approval, this scandal eroded the military’s credibility and undermined an essential pillar of political stability.

Fuel Theft and Corruption

The corruption scandal now engulfing Mexico’s Navy revolves around its participation in reclassifying oil tanker cargo to evade taxes — an activity that appears tied to a broader network of criminal organizations with links to drug trafficking. The scandal came to light in March 2025, when authorities seized oil tankers carrying stolen fuel at the Port of Altamira in Tamaulipas. One of the vessels was transporting diesel, which is subject to a special import tax, but the shipment was fraudulently declared to customs as a tax-exempt petrochemical.

Institutional Fallout

What began as a fuel smuggling case quickly expanded, implicating two nephews of former Navy Secretary Admiral José Rafael Ojeda Durán, who served under López Obrador, both high-ranking naval officers. Navy officers are now suspected of participating in a fuel smuggling and resale operation that generated hundreds of millions of dollars over several years through Mexican land and seaports. It is also alleged that part of the illegal gains from huachicol have been funneled into the ruling party’s political campaigns.

For effective democratic governance and public oversight, law enforcement requires a well-trained civilian force that can be held accountable through robust transparency and review mechanisms. Military institutions, by design, operate with high levels of secrecy and lack traditional external oversight mechanisms. Although the recent corruption scandal is partly a result of the opacity and lack of accountability that historically characterizes the armed forces in Mexico, it also stems from the political decision to promote a militarization policy, to the detriment of civilian authorities.

Impact of US Pressure

The Navy’s participation in huachicol activities seems to have been well known in the United States before the scandal erupted. Just a couple of days after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Mexico, federal authorities arrested 14 people across several states, including five active-duty marines. Those detained included customs officials, businessmen, and six military officers, among them a vice admiral. Fuel theft has cost the state-owned oil company Pemex an estimated US $3.8 billion over the past five years.

The web of complicity stretches from the ports of Ensenada (Baja California), Guaymas (Sonora), and Manzanillo (Colima) to the Gulf coast hubs of Altamira and Tampico (Tamaulipas), and inland to Coahuila’s land ports. However, the network of military officers, law enforcement, businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats involved in the scandal likely extends far beyond what has been revealed. Moreover, the reputational damage to Mexico’s Navy has weakened public trust in the country’s armed forces.

Ending Military Role in Law Enforcement

Militarization represents a political setback for any democracy. It signals a retreat from democratic norms and creates a moral hazard by discouraging the development of effective civilian authorities. In countries where the armed forces have been assigned law enforcement duties — including Egypt or Pakistan, among others — this shift has not strengthened the military. When armed forces assume responsibilities for which they were neither designed nor trained, they risk organizational challenges, mission creep, and corruption.

Key Concerns

The widening gap between what the military is tasked to do and what it is institutionally capable of erodes professionalism, undermining both military effectiveness and internal integrity. Since the military’s rapid expansion into Mexico’s public life in 2018, criticism has centered on five core concerns.

• Unconstitutional — The Mexican Constitution outlines an exceptional and limited role for the military in times of peace.
• Ineffective — The armed forces are not trained or structured for law enforcement or criminal investigation duties, making their deployment among civilian populations ineffective as a public security strategy.
• Undemocratic — A healthy democracy should have a clear separation between the civilian and the military spheres of responsibility.
• Harmful — Increased involvement in civilian activities provides greater opportunities for internal corruption within the armed forces, as demonstrated by the Navy scandal.
• Continual — Military deployment in law enforcement creates an ongoing governance hazard by enabling the state to defer the creation of effective, accountable civilian police forces.

In addition to its economic impact, the ongoing scandal debunked a political myth and narrative promoted by the governing party that the armed forces were the only institutions that could deal with organized crime, given their reputed incorruptibility.

Historical Context and Political Agreements

Although militarization of civilian activities in Mexico has a long history, it grew considerably during the AMLO administration, to the detriment of the military’s credibility. This expansion broke a pragmatic, long-standing political agreement: The military received autonomy and high social regard in exchange for their distance from civilian politics and activities.

For decades, the armed forces were intentionally kept in a separate, protected sphere. Their prestige, stemming from their assumed superior ethics, was sustained by this distance and a certain degree of opacity, given the lack of civilian oversight mechanisms. The military were mostly not seen in public, only occasionally appearing to help in tasks such as natural disaster relief. Militarization has torn this scheme apart. The Navy’s involvement in the huachicol scandal is a direct result of the breakdown in this military-civilian political arrangement.

Corruption scandals that involve the military erode national security by causing the armed forces to lose the trust and discipline required to prioritize the national interest over internal concerns. Since the huachicol scandal seems to involve several members of the MORENA-led governing coalition, the presumed political neutrality of the armed forces has been undermined in favor of partisan motivations.

Restoring Trust and Oversight

The full political effects of the huachicol corruption investigations remain to be seen, but they have already exposed contradictions within the governing coalition’s core platform. The MORENA-led coalition asserted that using the armed forces was the best way to fight corruption and crime; the current scandal, however, collapses that core narrative. Moreover, because some suspects belong to the ruling party, the scandal could magnify the inherent structural weaknesses and alliances that fostered this corruption, rapidly spending the coalition’s own reputational capital.

Through militarization, the armed forces have become a less reliable institution and another element of instability in Mexico. As a result, today, some members of the armed forces are not only seen as participants in corruption, but also as political actors, thus losing their political impartiality — one of their most important and long-standing sources of public approval.

This publication was produced on behalf of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Wherever feasible, the material was reviewed by external experts prior to its release. Any errors are the responsibility of the author(s) alone.

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