“He made it really hard for the next administration to walk everything back unless they have a wide majority in congress,” said Lisa Sanchez, head of Mexico Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a think tank that published a report called The Business of Militarization. “Their economic and political empowerment carries other risks — they’re a much more powerful force than they used to be.”

The President’s office and the Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on this article. “There’s talk that the army and the navy are involved in everything,” Lopez Obrador said during one of his regular morning press conferences in January. “It’s not about militarizing the country. It’s about relying on two institutions that are pillars of the Mexican nation and that have helped us deliver in our responsibility to govern.”

In an interview, Arturo Zaldivar, the former head of the Supreme Court who is now helping Sheinbaum design her security strategy, said that “the armed forces have always been loyal in Mexico,” but as far as infrastructure-building goes, “we’d maybe have to re-calculate the role these institutions have. It was important for them to intervene, and we’ll have to see if there’s reason for them to stay.”

“Whoever wins, Xochitl or Claudia, is going to face a lot of problems in ruling this country,” said Maria Elena Morera, activist and head of Causa en Comun AC, a nonprofit that studies security and other issues. “With the military, they have so much power now — maybe they can reach an agreement that’s good for them. But it’s going to be hard to take away all those businesses, and they were the ones who really insisted in handling the country’s security.”

The Public Budget

The program had a very official-sounding name: “National Security Government Infrastructure Projects.” But rather than funding infrastructure works that serve the public like a train line or new airport, the investment program funds upgrades and expansions of the military's footprint.

During AMLO’s administration, the Defense Ministry used the funding to build new air and military bases and remodeled and expanded military hospitals, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of military spending. It also modified a ranch to include an equine reproduction center, added a cargo elevator for a gym at its headquarters in Lomas de Sotelo in Mexico City and built a diving center in Cozumel, among other projects.

What’s also notable is that the military ultimately spent 288% more for the program than the 35.4 billion pesos, or about $2.1 billion, that Congress originally approved from 2019 to 2022. That meant the military infrastructure program accounted for 22% of the Defense Ministry’s annual budget, a leap from the 1% to 3% that was typically allocated during the Calderon and Peña Nieto years.

The Navy’s National Security Government Infrastructure Projects program, meanwhile, now only accounts for 1.5% of its ministry’s overall budget. That’s less than the 2.5% during the Calderon years and the 4.3% during the Peña Nieto era.

The Defense ministry was able to spend more than was allotted for such projects through what’s known as an amendment — a tool that lets a ministry change the budget without Congress’s approval, as is the case in many other countries. Congress is only informed about amendments in rare circumstances where the changes exceed 5% of a given governmental branch’s budget, according to Aura Martinez, an information coordinator at the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency.

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