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Mexican naval law advances

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By Chris Covert

Rantburg.com

A military reform three years in the making has finally won approval and is on its way to be coming law, according to Mexican news accounts.

The Mexican Ley Organica de Armada provides Mexican naval commanders with added flexibility in dealing with internal security matters. Before, the Mexican constitution restricted the Mexican Navy to two roles, mainly that of guarding the coasts and holding to naval missions inside of Mexico. The main problem is that before the law was amended it did not permit naval commanders flexibility to adapt to new missions, especially in the fight against organized crime. Even though the Mexican Constitution holds that the president of the republic is the commander in chief of the Mexican Navy, orders which placed its activities in the realm of law enforcement were legally questionable. It was a reform which was needed.

Originally the reform law was introduced by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa in October of 2009 because, as press reports noted, the Secretaria de Marina (SEMAR), or Mexican Navy, was not operating with local and state government officials in a constitutionally permitted way, according to an October, 2011 article which appeared in the online edition of El Sol de Mexico news daily.

Last Thursday the changes were approved by the full Chamber of Deputies with 386 members voting to send the new law to the executive, or President Enrigue Pena Nieto for publication.

Other than the amount of time it took to make a few changes to the laws which govern the Mexican Navy, what stands out about the changes is that it is one of several reforms advanced by the Calderon administration which was routinely blunted by politicians with the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) deputies with an eye for electoral gains in the presidential election the following year. The charge against PRI deputies has been advanced since 2011 and even into the 2012 election season.

One good example of PRI's political maneuvering was in the first debate when then candidate Pena Nieto told the Mexicans on national TV he supported political reform in the form of whittling down the massive number of at-large deputies, which keeps the Chamber of Deputies at 500 members. During the debate, Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) president Gustavo Madero Munoz quipped on Twitter: "Hallelujah! [PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto] read the PAN proposal presented in 2009 by [President Felipe Calderon] to reduce the at-large 100 deputies and 32 senators."

As humorous as Madero's quip may have been, it did little to hide the deep frustration PAN politicians have with PRI politicians in advancing reforms they see as necessary in Mexico.

A column penned by Raul Carranca y Rivas which appeared in the April, 2010 online edition La Prensa put it succinctly, when addressing another reform, La Ley de Seguridad Nacional, itself shelved since the fall of 2011, "It is lamentable to see them tangle, with the exclusion of a knowledgeable minority, over nothing less than the peace and tranquillity of the nation. It is a serious thing to delay urgent laws, but more serious is falling into the darkness of confusion and ignorance."

A second more recent reform, which has been much more controversial, and the first reform proposed by the new Pena administration, was the law that moved the Mexican national Secretaria de Seguridad Publica (SSP) from a separate agency to a sub agency of the Secretaria de Gobernacion, or interor ministry.

The SSP is the controlling agency for the Policia Federal (PF).

The new proposal, known as La Ley de Administracion Publica, would increase the power of SEGOB in a manner that made PRI's bitterest political rivals, the Mexican left and its component parties, the Partido de Revolucion Democratica (PRD), Partido Trabajo (PT) and Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) afraid of a return to the old PRI, where successive PRI presidents used their immense military and police powers against the Mexican left.

The proposal which passed the senate with 114 votes in favor was passed without controls, as PAN politician Roberto Gil Zuarth put it, to "prevent an abuse of power."

One of those controls was likely the amendment to the law that eliminates the requirement that the Mexican Senate vet all appointments to SEGOB. Because of that amendment PAN and the PRD left the senate to deny PRI and their legislative allies a needed quorum to pass the law in its state.

Both the senate and Chamber of Deputies are evenly divided, so the going for reforms advanced by the PRI has been so far anything but easy.

Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
Posted by: badanov 2012-12-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=357692