This Friday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador justified the deployment of the 6,060 National Guard agents in the subway facilities with the failures that had occurred in the facilities. “It serves to protect people,” he emphasized at his conference in the National Palace. López Obrador has indicated that the outages that have occurred in recent months may have been caused. “What if the acts are provoked and they want a greater calamity to happen?” he argued.
In his speech, he supported Mexico City’s head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum, who last Thursday defended that the agents’ deployment was due to the “catalogued unusual events” that had occurred at the Metro facilities in recent months. “Everything we do seems wrong to them, but we have to take care of people. If we start acting on what corrupt minorities and their thugs and spokespeople say, we would do nothing,” he declared. The president has used it to attack human rights organizations that have argued that the deployment of the 6,000 agents could be an alleged “militarization” of the facilities. He has defended that his government “will not listen” to the “accomplices” of the authorities of previous governments who, according to the president, have militarized the country. “With what moral authority do these people speak?” he debunked.
López Obrador explains the deployment of elements of the National Guard in Mexico City’s metro stations during his morning conference this Friday.Mario Jasso (Cuartoscuro)
Former Secretary of State for Public Security (2006-2012), Genaro García Luna, was also the indirect target of one of his critics when he tried to defend again the security measures implemented by the current executive branch. He has stated that when he took office in 2018, there were only 20,000 federal police (“dominated by García Luna”) “agents”. López Obrador has explained that the involvement of the Navy and Defense Ministers in public security tasks has resulted in the number of “operational” agents reaching nearly 400,000. It has announced that 19 states have more National Guard elements than state police. In Mexico City, according to the data provided, the number of agents is 20,605. “How are we not going to use the National Guard when it comes to protecting people on the subway?” he asked.
The accident on Line 3 of the Mexico City Metro, which killed an 18-year-old student and injured 106 last Saturday, brought to public attention a problem that has gained prominence in recent months through social networks : the constant failures of this means of transport, used by more than five million people every day.
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