Mexican Armed Forces in the context of Secretariat of National Defense (Mexico)

The Tlatelolco massacre (Spanish: La Masacre de Tlatelolco) was a military massacre committed by the Mexican Armed Forces against the students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and other universities in Mexico.

The massacre followed a series of large demonstrations known as the Mexican Movement of 1968 and is considered part of the Mexican Dirty War when the U.S.-backed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government violently repressed political and social opposition. The event occurred ten days before the opening ceremony of the 1968 Summer Olympics, which were carried out as scheduled.

The president of Mexico (Spanish: presidente de México), officially the president of the United Mexican States (Spanish: presidente de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos), is the head of state and head of government of Mexico. Under the Constitution of Mexico, the president heads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander in chief of the Mexican Armed Forces. The office, which was first established by the federal Constitution of 1824, is currently held by Claudia Sheinbaum, who was sworn in on October 1, 2024. The office of the president is considered to be revolutionary, in the sense that the powers of office are derived from the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917. Another legacy of the Mexican Revolution is the Constitution's ban on re-election. Mexican presidents are limited to a single six-year term, called a sexenio. No one who has held the post, even on a caretaker basis, is allowed to run or serve again. The constitution and the office of the president closely follow the presidential system of government.

The Mexican Army (Spanish: Ejército Mexicano) is the combined land and air branch and is the largest part of the Mexican Armed Forces; it is also known as the National Defense Army.

The Army is under the authority of the Secretariat of National Defense or SEDENA and is headed by the Secretary of National Defence.

The Mexican Navy (Spanish: Armada de México) is one of the components of the Mexican Armed Forces. The Secretariat of the Navy is in charge of administration of the navy. The commander of the navy is the Secretary of the Navy, who is both a cabinet minister and a career naval officer.

The Mexican Navy's stated mission is "to use the naval force of the federation for external defense, and to help with internal order". As of 2020, the Navy consisted of about 68,200 personnel plus reserves, over 189 ships, and about 130 aircraft. The Navy attempts to maintain a constant modernization program to upgrade its response capability.

The Mexican Air Force (FAM; Spanish: Fuerza Aérea Mexicana) is the air service branch of the Mexican Armed Forces. It is a component of the Mexican Army and as such overseen by the National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA). The objective of the FAM is to defend the integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Mexico. Its auxiliary tasks include internal security, assisting with public works, and natural disaster management. As of 2024, its commander is Óscar René Rubio Sánchez.

Luis Echeverría Álvarez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlwis etʃeβeˈri.a ˈalβaɾes]; 17 January 1922 – 8 July 2022) was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, Echeverría was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. He was the longest-lived president in Mexican history and the first to reach the age of 100.

Echeverría was a long-time CIA asset, known by the cryptonym, LITEMPO-8. His tenure as Secretary of the Interior during the Díaz Ordaz administration was marked by an increase in political repression. Dissident journalists, politicians, and activists were subjected to censorship, arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. This culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, which ruptured the Mexican student movement; Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría, and Secretary of Defense Marcelino Garcia Barragán have been considered as the intellectual authors of the massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed protestors were killed by the Mexican Army. The following year, Díaz Ordaz appointed Echeverría as his designated successor to the presidency, and he won in the 1970 general election.

Chetumal International Airport (Spanish: Aeropuerto Internacional de Chetumal) (IATA: CTM, ICAO: MMCM) is an international airport located in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, near the Belize–Mexico border. It serves domestic flights for Chetumal and the southern Quintana Roo region, while also supporting various executive and general aviation activities, and hosting Mexican Navy facilities. Since 2023, the airport has been operated by Grupo Olmeca-Maya-Mexica (GAFSACOMM), a holding company owned by the Mexican military. In terms of traffic, the airport handled 335,088 passengers in 2023, increasing to 433,527 in 2024.

The Mexican drug war is an ongoing asymmetric armed conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates. When the Mexican military intervened in 2006, the government's main objective was to reduce drug-related violence. The Mexican government has asserted that its primary focus is on dismantling the cartels and preventing drug trafficking. The conflict has been described as the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the United States federal government. Analysts estimate wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually.

Although Mexican drug trafficking organizations have existed for decades, their power increased after the demise of the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s, and the fragmentation of the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 1980s. The conflict formally began with President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) launching Operation Michoacán in 2006, which deployed tens of thousands of federal troops and police in a militarized campaign against the cartels initially targeted in Michoacán, Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Tamaulipas. However, arrests and killings of cartel leaders caused cartels to splinter into smaller, more violent factions, escalating turf wars and contributing to rising homicide rates nationwide. By the end of Calderón's administration in 2012, the official death toll of the Mexican drug war was at least 60,000. Estimates set the death toll above 120,000 killed by 2013, not counting 27,000 missing.