A bill passed in the Chamber of Deputies this week and due to be debated in the Senate next week is dividing aviation specialists in Mexico. The proposal, put forward by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in April 2022, envisages giving the Mexican army a power it already has: to patrol and protect the country’s skies. The law proposes using the Defense Ministry’s capacity to channel human resources, technology and materiel from the Mexican Armed Forces. Another concession to the army, which, if successful, will deepen its presence in the country’s civilian life and fuel the debate about the supposed militarization.
The initiative proposes the creation of three new bodies for airspace surveillance and protection. Although the three consist of the Infrastructure, Communications and Transport Secretariats; Marine; Treasury and Public Credit and National Defense, the law provides that the Mexican Army will coordinate the participation of all other agencies.
“It is an absolutely unnecessary law. First, the Mexican Constitution gives the Mexican Army and Air Force all the powers to encroach on airspace for security reasons. This law and nothing is the same,” confirmed María Larriva, a specialist in air transport in the country, in a telephone interview. He explains that since the 1990s, the Sedena has had 4 military installations scattered throughout the territory with radars that monitor the airspace, in addition to the fact that the civil aviation authorities share their information in real time.
Larriva assures that MPs adopted a law they did not understand, noting that 195 of the 484 Mexican MPs who attended the session abstained from voting on the initiative.
On the other hand, specialists like Pablo Casas, director general of the National Institute of Legal-Aeronautical Research, see the intention that the military should now gain more ground in the skies against the civilian authorities. “It’s the militarization of navigation services in Mexican airspace,” he says. SENEAM is the decentralized body of the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport responsible for regulating the use, exploitation and use of airspace. “With the law, Sedena is the coordinator of everything, the administrative authorities are subordinated to them,” he says.
The legal expert fears dual powers and warns that if the Senate approves it, there will be challenges in the nation’s Supreme Court. “Civil and military aviation are mixed here. It is not right to summarize them in a single law. They have to be handled in differentiated airspaces.”
Also, José Gerardo Alonso Torres, press and publicity secretary of the Union Association of Aviator Pilots of Mexico (ASPA), in a telephone interview for this medium, believes that there is no problem with President López Obrador’s initiative and assures that there is good is It needs to regulate more what the Sedena has already done. “We think it’s okay because the Sedena was created to protect Mexicans. The Sedena have already done so, but now they are giving it the character of a law. The airspace is also part of Mexican territory,” he states.
Ricardo Monreal, coordinator of the Morena bench in the Upper House, who was interviewed in the Senate this Friday, acknowledged that the law recently passed by MPs needs to be changed to improve it and that more discussion is needed to make it better to understand. “It is convenient that we summon and summon officials associated with the matter,” he said.
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