Do “normies” watch late night TV?

And Mulino has already made his strategic decision: US is the preferred partner…🤷🏻‍♂️

9/ These Latin American examples show the pitfalls of turning soldiers into policemen. They often blur institutional boundaries, weaken civilian policing, and chip away at democratic norms.

8/ Effectiveness vs. legitimacy: Militarization can reduce visible crime in the short term but often degrades investigative capacity and police professionalism, which harms long-run security. #Mexico’s expansion of military roles beyond security further weakens civilian institutions.

7/ Rule-of-law trade-offs: States of exception or NIAC (non-international armed conflict) labels, as declared in #Ecuador, can lower rights protections and judicial scrutiny.

6/ In #ElSalvador, sustained militarized policing consolidates executive dominance, sidelines judicial oversight, and habituates the armed forces and police to extraordinary powers.

5/ Outcomes on crime are mixed; the governance trade-offs are clearer. #Mexico’s security policy under #AMLO normalized military roles far beyond policing, concentrating budgets and administrative tasks in the armed forces and weakening civilian agencies.

4/ Repeated internal missions expand military leverage over civilians. #Brazil’s GLO (Garantia da Lei e da Ordem) gives the presidency a legal on-ramp to grant soldiers temporary police powers. While GLO should be “episodic.” The practice has become a feature of Brazilian democracy.

3/ Militarized policing is politically attractive yet institutionally costly. Publics often trust armies more than police, which tempts executives to deploy soldiers for street crime and order maintenance. That choice tends to raise the risk of abuses, blur accountability, and slow police reform.

2/ Domestic deployments of military forces risk undermining civilian control and normalizing the use of force in everyday governance. Latin America provides plenty of evidence for the corrosive effect of militarizing public security. www.crisisgroup.org/latin-americ...

Deploying the National Guard to DC over crime rates that are actually falling isn’t about safety—it’s about politics. Militarizing domestic policing erodes civilian control & normalizes troops in the streets. That’s a dangerous precedent in a democracy.