Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Everything is ready for the September 16 show: the National Guard will be presented as part of the Army.
In the Chamber of Deputies, Morena approved, fast-track and without discussion, the administrative reform that turns the National Guard, a civilian police force according to the still valid Constitution, into an arm of the Army. Although they say it is not, this fact is, in essence, the confirmation of the militarization of Mexico. And even more serious: it announces the prolegomena of a new civil-military regime in Mexico, outside and in contravention of the Constitution.
Two facts confirm this. First, the legislative act contravenes and ignores the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States. The act flagrantly violates the rule of law in Mexico. However, the Morenista majority in the Chamber of Deputies is calm because it feels legitimized to carry out such law-violating acts. Why? Because it considers that the Army’s bullets support it. An Army willing, according to the Morenista opinion, to shoot against whoever questions the decisions of the Legislative Power that empower it, even if they are illegal. That is militarism. It is a reform that inserts the new Army police into the heart of the State’s decisions.
Secondly, the Supreme Commander of the Mexican Armed Forces, the President of the Republic, promotes, celebrates, and endorses the subjugation of the Constitution. From the highest spheres of political power in Mexico, they are sure that they can ignore the laws of the nation to consolidate their political project. In the President’s opinion, it will be the culmination of the structural changes as his historical inheritance to future governments, which, he assumes, will belong to his party.
His reading of the legal and democratic mandate won at the ballot box, however, does not mandate him to disregard the Constitution and rule by force of arms. That is called dictatorship. And he did not win that right in 2018.
When he announced a couple of years ago that the structural conditions of his “transformation” were concluding, he did not say it in vain. For future governments, it will be almost impossible, for economic reasons, to change or cancel the construction of the Felipe Angeles airport, the Dos Bocas refinery, and the Mayan Train due to the degree of progress of the works and the phenomenal economic cost incurred. In addition, among other “transformations”, he promises to change the country’s energy paradigm, create a new political regime made up of civilians and military, and consolidate an electoral body administered by his party.
This would be, in his opinion, the great work of government, the so-called 4T transformation. His strategy is reminiscent of what some said about the threat of bankruptcy of the big Wall Street banks and financiers during the 2009 crisis: “Too big to fail”. The idea was that the project was so big that the only viable alternative was to inject more money so as not to cause a bigger defalcation. In our case, it can be said that AMLO has invested so much public money in these works that it is no longer feasible to lose the investment, even if the works are poorly conceived, poorly executed, and rotten with corruption. Therefore, he will leave the next government a cursed inheritance.
His intention, however, is fundamentally political. He is rebuilding the political system with the inclusion of the generals in his government scheme. He is designing, in fact, a new civil-military regime. It is a modality of ” a new authoritarian statism” learned mainly in Cuba but taking traces of Venezuela and Bolivia in the process. The main thing is to turn the generals into commercial and political partners of the civilian rulers. Once on board, they will not want to lose what amounts to free and almost unlimited access to public resources and the option of doing business of their own. Hence the generous but apparently unexplained handing over of trains, airports, seaports, and civil construction works to the generals. Under the justifying umbrella of national security, they have absolute freedom to dispose of public resources without rendering accounts to any official instance about their expenses, contracts, or profits. What is totally sacrificed in this scheme of government is transparency. Who will dare, in the next government, to demand that the armed forces account for their expenditures and particularly their profits?
The intention to create a new political regime explains the recent visit and presidential accompaniment of the Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy to Cuba. They went to observe the system in action and witnessed the central role played by the Cuban generals in maintaining political control on the island: they were also defending their private economic interests. It is a system of a massive and intricate design of mutual complicity.
However, there is a crucial difference between Mexico and Cuba. In Mexico, we have the luxury of democratic elections and political alternation. In Cuba, there are no democratic elections, and there is no alternation by constitutional provision. Because of this difference in the electoral systems, the last great “transformation” that AMLO requires to consolidate the civil-military regime is to twist the electoral system so that he has absolute control over the elections, preventing the democratic game that facilitates the alternation in power. Under the electoral scheme proposed by López Obrador, alternation should disappear from our lexicon forever. However, it should make Mexico have a convincing democratic façade (which does not generate too many claims from Northern neighbors and Western society, for pragmatic reasons) but which in reality consolidates the civic-military regime without alternation. If the PRI system was always formally democratic, although it was ruled by a single party, as we all know, why would it not be possible to create something like a “new guided democracy” in Mexico led by a government composed of civilians and military that never loses elections?
Just as the PRI governed with meta-constitutional powers (López Portillo Dixit), why couldn’t another López, now Obrador, declare the return of meta-constitutional powers to Mexico, transformed into the legal justification of a civil-military coalition and sheltered by a strategic thesis of National Security?
The circumstance of the decay of respect for the Constitution and the rule of law is a product of the intention to impose a new political regime. He is preparing to build a new simulacrum of a regime with a political structure that is formally democratic but, in practice, is an authoritarian design. He leaves it to the next government to propose a new Constitution.
The President took the Secretaries of National Defense and the Navy to Cuba to confirm the viability of the proposed regime change in Mexico. That trip was the civilian and military honeymoon of that model of governance for Mexico.
The great irony is that, at the end of the Cold War, Cuba will achieve what Fidel Castro could never have imagined: implementing his governance model in Mexico through a Mexican copycat. The issue for both governments is not ideological nor about socialism or capitalism. They don’t care about that. The goal is to have similar civil-military regimes governing both countries. There is no greater fraternity than that: authoritarian elites raising their glasses in complicity and glory as they toast to eternal power.
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