Soldiers in DF?

Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City’s mayor, is resisting calls for an army deployment in the nation’s capital. Good for him. The army is the best of a bunch of bad options in lots of cartel-plagued cities, but Mexico City is nothing like Reynosa or Laredo.

In the border towns, drug trafficking is the principle driver of lawlessness, so theoretically if the army puts the screws to a handful of drug runners, they’ll go elsewhere, and the city will be safer. In Mexico City, on the other hand, you’re much more likely to be the victim of street crime than of a shootout between cartel hitmen. Even if the army was capable of eliminating every cartel member in Mexico City, it would still be extremely violent.

Then there’s the sheer size of Mexico City. There are more than 20 million Mexicans moving to and fro in the metro area. What good could a group of 2,500 soldiers (deployments are typically only a few thousand soldiers) really accomplish in a city of such size? If a cartel operator sees a group of soldiers setting up shop down the street, he doesn’t need to leave town but merely change neighborhoods to put a few million people between himself and the army. You could argue that although the army won’t make Mexico City a whole lot more peaceful, it could still help protect federal officials. However, with Tijuana and Juárez all but falling apart, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best use of limited resources.

The calls to send in the army come in response to the recent assassination of Edgar Eusabio Millán Gómez. The killing was sad, all the more so given the way he was betrayed by a man on his staff, but will the army make things any better? I don’t think so. It’s a shame that Mexico City’s police force is dysfunctional, even predatory, but a handful of extra soldiers wouldn't be an improvement.