Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
President López Obrador lives obsessed with a dangerous fantasy, which leads him to govern with daring and destructive actions. It is as if he has a voice speaking in his ear about a supposedly magnificent historical legacy that awaits him if he meets certain requirements. Then, he turns and looks at the magnificent five with whom he is supposedly competing: Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, Benito Juárez, Francisco I Madero and Lázaro Cárdenas. He firmly believes that he will make a sextet with them. Of course, they are dead, and he is alive. He listens daily to the hoorays and cheers, claiming to be recognized as a new hero of the Homeland.
This fantasy defines him and determines his actions. His historical error begins when he believes that the fact of having received a majority of votes in 2018 can interpret it as a mandate that makes him “heroic.” And that this vote means that he can do with the country whatever he wants, without limits.
His supposed “exceptionalism” allows him to ignore the Constitution and the rule of law whenever he deems that it gets in the way of his plans. It so happens that a country can live a process where a part of the population is willing to overthrow the bad government by force of arms, and, therefore, there is a partial or total suspension of the effects of legality. But this is not the case in Mexico.
Four of the five heroes chosen by López Obrador sought access to power by force of arms. Only one of them, Juarez, succeeded fully and was able to change the Constitution with a parliamentary majority. The fifth, Cárdenas, carried out the work of oil expropriation, always respecting the law of the land, without violence. He modified the terms of the Constitution with the majority support of the legislators of his time. The nationalization of the oil industry was the culmination of a union and workers’ movement of many years ago, demanding better living conditions and respect for their contractual conditions from the foreign companies.
All of these conditions are absent in Mexico today. The only armed movement in the country is drug trafficking, and the federal government is apparently determined not only to let it continue to exist but even to grow in strength and territorial dominance. In other words, the government is reconciled to coexist with an illegal movement that daily attempts against the Constitution.
In today’s oil industry, the government endorses and allows union bossism to go ahead with its plans to invest in an industry whose longevity will be determined by the worldwide reconversion to the generalized use of renewable energy sources. For the time being, the authorities have decided to ignore this global reconversion process, stimulating and accelerating the use of fossil fuels to their maximum capacity.
He intends to turn the electricity reform into his historical “feat”, similar to the oil expropriation. He denounces the Spanish as the conquerors and exploiters and their companies as engaged in an attempt to “reconquer Mexico”. In doing so, he seeks to cloak his bill in a historical context, giving it a sense of epic heroism. This is an aberrant pretense when what is being discussed is how to provide Mexico with more and cheaper electricity in a context of respect for the environment. The idea of the “reconquest” is nothing more than a publicity and political propaganda ploy to confuse the public.
To crown his work of government and to be able to claim his inclusion within the quintet of national heroes defined by him, López Obrador has decided to make his “revolution” by declaring the Fourth Transformation of the country. It is understood that the first three were violent transformations: the Constitutions of 1824, 1857, and 1917. With Cardenas something else happened. Then, is it understood that the Fourth Transformation will be violent, like the previous ones, or by the Constitution, without violence?
It is evident that López Obrador, in line with our times, is opting for a hybrid model to try to consummate his fantasy of being considered the best President in the history of Mexico. He applies actions that are not yet openly violent, but he promotes violence, and neither does he carry out actions following the Constitution and the legality in force.
He uses unusual forms of violence to advance his agenda in the political arena; the most evident is the encouragement of social polarization and the promotion of hatred as an instrument of political mobilization for his own. He promotes the War of Binomials: rich against poor, foreigners against nationals, good countries against bad countries, honest against dishonest, corrupt against non-corrupt, loyal against disloyal, traitors against patriots, good journalists against bad ones, righteous intellectuals against perverted intellectuals.
It must be said: he has succeeded in poisoning the social fabric with his bitterness. Verbal violence quickly moves to other spheres of direct action in society. Social relations between individuals and groups are rapidly breaking down. The growth of femicides and violence against children is a clear social expression of the polarizing effect of the presidential discourse he exerts every morning. Violence is present in elections, business, sports, families, Congress: in everything.
But violence is also expressed in the official policy of his government by promoting the progressive militarization of the country, in all areas of national life. Military forces, regular and irregular, are silently taking over the country. Mexico City is experiencing this phenomenon notably through the establishment of National Guard barracks (yes, that security corps that the President intends to turn into a branch of the army) in all its municipalities, acting as an army of occupation. What is the President looking for by occupying Mexico City with armed soldiers, when the local administration has the largest police force in the country? And where are the voices that previously protested against militarization?
In this national environment of violence, the President systematically violates the law and the Constitution. When the Constitution says that the President should not intervene in the electoral processes, he does so in an open and devious manner, ignoring legal precepts; it serves to emphasize that the President considers himself above the law. He orders his legislators to violate the law by approving appointments of officials who do not comply with the requirements of the law, such as the Governor of Banco de Mexico. He uses the armed forces for tasks outside their constitutional mandate and uses the pretext of national security to violate all existing laws on regulation, legal certainty, environmental protection, transparency, and due process. He ignores the law or uses it as an instrument to persecute his opponents, internal and external.
The President makes agreements with organized crime groups to supposedly seek social peace. However, his considerations only incite more violence and suffering of the more than half a million internally displaced due to unrestrained violence.
The war promoted by López Obrador is not one of national liberation but rather shows signs of being a war of social oppression that does not liberate but instead enslaves.
And all this happens while López Obrador fantasizes that his legacy will honor him as the best President of Mexico. With more dead than ever, growing poverty, and so much violence and bitterness, Lopez Obrador’s dangerous fantasy leads the country down the gorge of countries that, having so many possibilities to grow and be successful, finally end up stuck in the row of the backward countries of the world, without progress and trapped in cycles of despotism, poverty, and oppression.
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