The mayor of Mexico City announced that 6,060 National Guard officers will be posted in the city’s subway system after a series of accidents that officials suggested could be due to sabotage. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said mechanical problems in recent months may have been due to “not normal” causes. She appeared to suggest on Thursday, but did not say, that it could involve some form of sabotage. “In recent months, incidents have been occurring that we categorise as not normal,” Sheinbaum said, adding that she had asked President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to dispatch the quasi-military National Guard and he agreed. The mayor said Guard officers would be posted at subway stations “and some other facilities” in the system and would be there “for some months”. She did not explain how the Guard officers, mostly drawn from the army and assigned to law enforcement, could help control a situation that appears to be caused by maintenance, design or operational flaws. Mario Alberto Hernandez, the head of one of the city’s 195 subway stations, said that “this decision is more about politics than anything that would be useful here”. He described the system’s lack of spare parts as so severe that “they are cannibalising old, discarded trains to get spare parts”. South Korea’s subway murder case prompts review of anti-stalking law The move also touched on the national debate over Lopez Obrador’s habit of relying on the military for everything from law enforcement to infrastructure construction projects. The Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez human rights centre said the announcement “is concerning, because it is obvious that this agency reproduces the military’s problems with a lack of transparency and excessive use of force”. Rights group Amnesty International expressed concern about the decision, calling for a “guarantee that public security tasks are carried out by civil institutions”. The subway system said the officers would not be armed, but internet users wondered whether adding 6,000 more bodies to the mix will worsen the severe crowding often seen in the city’s trains and subway platforms. Accidents on the subway have been a recurrent embarrassment for Sheinbaum, who is considered the most likely candidate of Lopez Obrador’s Morena party to succeed him in the 2024 elections. Like the president, Sheinbaum often ascribes setbacks to a conservative conspiracy against her. Lopez Obrador was somewhat more specific, saying the Guard would be there to prevent “provoked”, or intentional accidents. “What we want is for there not to be psychosis, for people not to have to worry about some accident in the subway, and that it could have been provoked,” the president said. “If they call that militarisation or whatever, then we will take responsibility for that,” he said. The latest accident came Saturday, when two subway trains collided while between stations, killing one person and injuring dozens. Local media reported there had previously been signalling problems on that stretch of track. In May 2021, an elevated section of the subway system collapsed, causing 26 deaths and injuring nearly 100 people. An investigation blamed deficiencies in construction, and 10 former officials have been charged with a form of manslaughter, injury and damage to property, but none have been jailed. Poor welding, a lack of maintenance, antiquated electronic systems and the city’s frequent earthquakes and soft soil conditions have all been blamed in the past for problems on the subway, but sabotage has never before been seen as a cause. Several wounded in knife attack at Paris railway station But in the last several days, Sheinbaum said, there had been three “not normal” problems found on subway cars or tracks, including the failure of a tire “that had just been inspected”. The city’s subway cars run on both tires and rails. Mexico City’s metro system is North America’s second largest, after New York City’s. It has 226.5km (141 miles) of track and 195 stations. It serves an average of 4.6 million passengers every day. With tickets costing the equivalent of 25 cents, it is also one of the cheapest subways in the world and has suffered from insufficient budgets for years. The tech publication Rest of World reported this week that current and former subway workers say the metro system’s communication network is so bad that they must rely on messaging apps on their mobile phones to keep in touch between train operators and avoid accidents. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Reuters
