SAN LUIS POTOSÍ — As Mexican National guardsmen were busy training to learn new methods to limit street violence, they began to, well, fight among themselves.
The National Guard, founded in 2019 as a better-trained, more disciplined gendarmerie corps to fight organized crime, confirmed that videos circulating of the sordid incident were real — and training in San Luis Potosí in northern Mexico, had “gotten out of control,” Azteca television and La Jornada newspaper reported this week.
Footage of the session shows it began well enough, with one group of officers acting as rioters and others fending them off with plastic shields. At one point two colleagues appeared locked into a real fight, which led to some flying kicks — and it wasn’t clear anymore if this was part of the training — and one officer going to the back of the defensive line to give his peers a piece of his mind.
The two groups then devolved into the kind of mêlée that they were being trained to defuse, with whistling and calls by female officers to call it off. The National Guard stated Internal Affairs would investigate the matter and vowed it would not tolerate any conduct “degrading the institution’s image.”
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