Mexico approves security reforms allowing military to collect personal data

MEXICO CITY (CN) — In the early hours of Thursday morning, after two separate sessions of fierce debate that ran over 20 hours, Mexico’s lower chamber of Congress passed two laws opening up personal data to the nation’s military-run security force.

The Investigation and Intelligence Law and National Public Security System Law were two main pieces of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s security package unveiled on June 9.

The special congressional session began on June 23 and will continue to July 2. Congress will debate up to 22 total reforms.

The Investigation and Intelligence Law was approved with 368 votes. The new law establishes that the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection and National Guard may access public and private information such as vehicle and license plate data, biometric and telephone data, public property records and tax information in order to prevent or investigate violent crimes.

The law creates a new interconnected intelligence system called the Central Intelligence Platform. The database of public and private information will be shared between federal, state and municipal authorities and operated by Mexico’s National Intelligence Centre, Mexico’s civilian intelligence agency created by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018.

On Wednesday evening, the lower chamber of congress also passed the National Public Security System Law with 445 votes among barbs and insults hurled between Morena party and opposing political party members.

The law allows the creation of a National Information System, another set of registries that security institutions will have access to. The registries include national registry of arrests, criminal incidents, court orders, protective measures for women, girls and boys, and stolen and recovered vehicles. The law stipulates that the National Guard will also have access to the system.

“This new reform strengthens the political arm of the Morena cartel, a political organization that administers violence, profits from death and governs like organized criminals,” said Institutional Revolutionary Party Congressman Carlos Gutiérrez Mancilla on Wednesday during a speech at the Congress podium.

Institutional Revolutionary Party Congressman Rubén Moreira decried the fast-track approval of such significant and lengthy reforms and criticized the extreme government overreach of the reforms.

“The spy state is taken to the extreme, the surveillance of people is taken to the extreme, much of the collaboration with the states is eliminated,” he said during the congressional session.

He is not alone. Other critics without party affiliation call the new reforms “legalized military espionage.”

“These reforms are part of a package of initiatives presented to the Congress of the Union that shape — individually and jointly — a dangerous panorama for human rights,” reads a statement co-signed by digital rights and freedom of information groups, Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales and Article 19.

On Tuesday, the lower chamber of Congress also approved a new National Guard law that allows the military-led security force to carry out covert operations and allow National Guard members to run for public office.

The reform also further dictates the terms of and strengthens the country’s once-civilian-run National Guard as a military body under the Secretariat of National Defense.

“The formal incorporation of the National Guard into the Armed Forces’ organizational structure completely buries any possibility of building a capable and well-run civilian police force. This is the definitive and irreversible triumph of the militarization of public security. Any power or institution that the civilian government cedes to the Army cannot be recovered,” said Jacques Coste, historian and columnist for Expansión Politica.

Coste also mentioned the negative implications for human rights.

“The training of civilian and military police officers is different; while the former is trained to prevent and prosecute crime, the latter is trained to wage war and eliminate threats to national security. This, coupled with the fact that members of the National Guard will have military jurisdiction and their abuses will be judged in military tribunals, which guarantee impunity, opens the door to massive human rights violations,” he said.

These reforms are a larger thread of militarization in Mexico that date back to 2018 when former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador replaced the Federal Police with the National Guard, citing corruption despite campaigning on a promise to take the military off the streets.

Coste believes the reform will continue to give power to what he calls a growing “business-military elite” that began with Lopez Obrador.

“The reform would empower the military in two ways: politically, by strengthening its control over public security, and economically, by creating incentives for the president to ensure military cooperation through financial rewards,” Coste said.

Mexico’s National Guard is largely responsible for enforcing Mexico’s immigration policies and Sheinbaum sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats in February.