Generals at the Gates: Military Power and Social Change in Mexico, Dawn Marie Paley, 2026, Verso
Writing in the Journal of Democracy towards the end of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term, Will Freeman argued that thethen Mexican president’s most enduring legacy would not be the social justice-inspired “fourth transformation” he had promised, but a new and disturbing dependency on the military.
Freeman, a fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, was right to be alarmed: like a bloated state within a state, Mexico’s security establishment has grown ever more obese on state largesse to enjoy almost totally unaccountable power and privilege.
More importantly, as the scholar points out, AMLO merely enhanced a process whereby the military has become as important to governance itself as any of the Mexican state’s civilian bureaucracies—and in policy areas such as domestic security, even more so.
Scholars are quick to point out how unique the modern Mexican military is in comparative Latin American terms—unlike countries in the Southern Cone, for example, never having been responsible for a direct coup and, on paper at least, subject to civilian control.
But like a chameleon in possession of an invisibility cloak, this has not stopped the generals behind the scenes amassing vast corporate power, huge influence over politics, and a level of impunity that has allowed their murderous corruption to continue unabated.
Military officers have recurrently been implicated in cases of drug-trafficking and disappearances: in September 2022, for example, three army officers including a general were arrested in the 2014 case of 43 students who disappeared from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in Iguala, Guerrero, and who were almost certainly massacred.
The case became a cause célèbre as one of the most notorious examples of recent times of official corruption—through links between security officials and drug cartels—behind what the UN has called the “alarming” scourge of disappearances that continues to lash Mexico.
It also involved wholesale and mostly successful efforts by the military to hide information from the official commission created to investigate the disappearances.
Journalist Anabel Hernández later wrote an astounding exposé of official complicity, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students, directly implicating the military, police and politicians in this massacre and the explicit cover-up that ensued.
There have been many other examples in recent decades of military corruption: frequent links between high-ranking military officers and drug cartels; customs fraud and fuel smuggling; money laundering; shady contracts issued with no need for public tenders; as well as countless human rights abuses.
In the “Introduction” to her excellent study of this overlooked institution, Generals at the Gates, Dawn Marie Paley points out that the military’s power, autonomy and ability to evade scrutiny has meant that scholarship of it has been neglected.
This is a view shared by such august members of the academy as the historian Roderic Camp, who has written two books about Mexico’s military yet told the author he finds the ongoing silence about them puzzling.
Paley observes that, as a result, journalism has filled the gap: and a case in point was celebrated by the UN just this week with its praise for the work of Mexicaninvestigative reporter Zorayda Gallegos ahead of International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.
Gallegos is a force of nature whose brave achievements include an agenda-setting exposé of sexual abuse within the Mexican military that has earned her threats in a country where journalists face constant, deadly risks in the face of official indifference.
In 2025, Gallegos published a series of articles in El Universal, brought together by the Pulitzer Center, under the title Sexual violence in the barracks: an X-ray of impunity, lifting the lid on structural sexual violence and abuse throughout the country’s military.
Her reports tracked more than 520 women who reported sexual offences over a 12-year period—from rape, harassment, and sexual abuse to assault—with just 3 per cent of those cases ending in a conviction and the other 97 per cent leading to no effective sanctions.
The brave work of Gallegos provides hard evidence of a broader structural problem in Mexico relating to impunity that draws our attention to the staggering portfolio of power and property now amassed by its military with little or no official oversight.
This theme is at the heart of Paley’s excellent and timely book, in which the author begins by sketching out the gains accrued by the security forces under AMLO, whose presumably noble motive was to end violence following the disastrous militarised war on drugs.
In the first months of López Obrador’s term, the army was given the task of mobilising and overseeing a new national guard proposed as a civilian-run, national-level gendarmerie, a force of over 130,000 that today remains under its control.
To enable this, the administration conducted a complex constitutional exercise to obviate existing prohibitions on soldiers participating in non-military activities during peacetime.
The armed forces were also put in charge of the construction and operation of railway lines and airports, seaports and customs houses, hotels, parks, museums, an airline, and more.
These developments can be seen in the context of the growing financial muscle of the military, whose funding enjoyed staggering growth under AMLO.
Paley notes that in 2018, Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defence (SEDENA) spent $5.8 billion but by 2024 it was receiving $11.6bn, while funding for the Secretariat of the Navy (SEMAR) rose threefold in the same period to $6.8bn.
By mid-2024, SEDENA was in control of two megaprojects: the Felipe Ángeles Airport outside Mexico City and the Tren Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula, as well as other ventures related to logistics, infrastructure and tourism.
SEMAR was handed control of the existing Mexico City International Airport and Trans-Isthmus Corridor in Veracruz and Oaxaca, alongside other logistics and tourism infrastructure.
Such military expansion into key sectors of the economy has no precedent in Mexican history: in December 2018, the generals did not have majority ownership in any state-owned companies, but by 2023, they were running 30 such companies across multiple sectors.
In particular and with the active encouragement of the US, the Mexican military through the national guard has been given a much more prominent role in policing the northward movement of migrants since 2019, often with brutal consequences.
A 2025 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants criticised changes allowing the army and national guard to take on the dual role of combating organised crime, namely drug-trafficking, and migration, that is, human trafficking.
This risks a failure to distinguish between migrants in transit and individuals associated with criminal groups, the UN agency said, and hence the use of the military to manage migration “exacerbates the dangers leading to disappearance, including enforced disappearance”.
Paley argues that together all these changes in the status and roles of the military amount to the redefinition of a “pact” first forged between the generals and Mexico’s post-revolutionary state in the postwar period but strained to breaking point by the 21st-century war on drugs.
The first pact under the PRI delineated the parameters of Mexico’s civilian-military system in a way that produced the appearance of democracy and demilitarisation even as the armed forces let rip a brutal counterinsurgency strategy in the 1970s in support of the ruling party.
Paley writes: “The drug war escalated the violence, and for the last twenty years armed groups have inflicted collective trauma and spread terror around the country. But instead of sending the soldiers back to their bases, Mexico’s leftist leaders have empowered the armed forces beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
“Today there’s a new military pact in Mexico, one that is connected to the creation of a huge new police force under army control and a series of new business ventures and state administrative functions being run by admirals and generals.”
As if to underline what is at stake for Mexico’s democracy, we need only consider what happened in February 2025, when 55 prisoners accused of being narcos were summarily transferred to the US in a move widely interpreted as a sacrificial “offering” to appease Donald Trump.
As Paley notes, these were not formal extraditions, flew in the face of existing protections against the possibility that the men could face the death penalty in the US, and worse still had reportedly been decided in secret by a shadowy “security cabinet” led by the armed forces without the knowledge of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Paley writes: “Who, then, is in charge? The new military pact is in its infancy, and the power of Mexico’s armed forces continues to grow …
“The new economic opportunities opened to the armed forces have been granted in perpetuity, and the constitutional changes expanding their size and field of action are permanent. There is no clear path out, especially in a context in which there is little precedent for saying no.”
While the author clings to a sliver of hope that civil society organisations—and in particular those led by or representing feminists and family members of the disappeared—will continue seeking justice even if they do not find it, there is a resignation to her tone about the future.
As with Will Freeman, and casting a dark shadow over its democracy, Paley concludes: “I have no doubt that reversing the expansion of military power will prove to be one of the most difficult tasks facing Mexico in the years to come.”
Please help the Latin American Review of Books: you can subscribe on Substack, make a donation through Stripe . . . or just buy us a coffee
BUY THIS BOOK: UK/Europe
Categories: Mexico