Scenes from Sonora: Angry at the Army

Milenio reports from Sonora:

"Get the army out of Navojoa", "Enough of the abuse", said the posters held by mothers who refused to give their names for reasons of security.

One of the women said that they are not against the army fighting drug-dealing gangs, but nevertheless she said that the soldiers go to far and commit violations against the innocent civilian population.

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We must put a stop to the abuses because the situation has gone out of control, with the pretext that they are searching for narcos, the soldiers arrest innocents, beat them up and once they prove that they are innocent, they free them, the interviewee said.

These kinds of demonstrations are relatively rare (and some of them have been set up by criminal groups), so I don't think we are facing an imminent erosion of army prestige. However, the longer the army is on the streets doing police work, the more frequent you'd expect these protests to be. All the more reason for the army to be more aggressive about addressing this sort of thing aggressively and transparently.