FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Mexican President Offers Youth a Future, Not in Drugs, but the National Guard
Jan. 4, 2018 (EIRNS)—Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, flanked by the Secretaries of Defense and Navy, issued a call two days ago for tens of thousands of Mexican youth to join the new National Guard that is being created to help restore peace and public security to the nation.
“I am calling on Mexicans, women and men, on families, to help us ... confront together our great and grave national problems, and give you the security that it is an honorable, decent, job, with a social dimension ... a contribution to the country, to the nation, to society,”
López Obrador said in his Jan. 2 morning press conference.
With this dramatic announcement, López Obrador is setting out to recruit thousands of youth into defending their nation, before they are recruited by force or lack of options into the ranks of the drug cartel armies which have taken over huge chunks of the nation, and given Mexico one of the highest homicide rates in the world. López Obrador has stated explicitly that he has the model of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mobilization of American youth in mind.
The President, Gen. Luis Crescencio Sandoval Gonzalez and Adm. José Rafael Ojeda Duran explained that youth between 18 and 30 years old who wish to join the National Guard will receive training, labor stability, a secure and decent salary, education and professional development at military academies, housing, food, clothing and equipment, vacations, transportation expenses, life insurance, and comprehensive medical care for themselves and their families. Parents of youth who join can also receive medical care in any military facility in the country, Secretary of Defense Sandoval Gonzalez specified.
Recruitment is to begin now for the National Guard, which is to have 50,000 members when it is fully established as a separate branch of the military by 2021. They hope to recruit over 21,000 recruits during 2019. All 18- to 30-year-olds are eligible, if they are citizens, have no police record, and meet the same physical and mental health criteria required to join the military.
They will have, “most importantly, the honor of serving the nation,” the Presidency emphasized in its press release.
It is through the announcement of such measures—some more audacious, some less—at his daily 7 a.m. press conferences, that President López Obrador is laying the groundwork to successfully govern and reverse the economic, social, political and security breakdown into which Mexico was driven under the dying British liberal paradigm.
