Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy of empowering military commanders with a shower of projects and contracts without any oversight of public money is a direct plundering of the public assets and wealth of the Mexican State and, therefore, represents a plundering of the Mexican people. The other part of this plundering is the appropriation of decades of that same national wealth in the form of committing the public budget to subsidies for unprofitable businesses that will be sustained with the treasury, such as the Mayan Train that will never be profitable, the Transisthmian train, the small airports given to the Army, even the AIFA airport, the Dos Bocas refinery and its “airline” Mexicana.
All these businesses will have to be subsidized due to their essential impossibility of being profitable in the real world, unlike the fantasy economic world that only exists in the President’s mind. The economic model that AMLO wants to impose when he leaves power postulates that it will be the people who will pay with their taxes an eternal debt by subsidizing these mega-projects, including the indebtedness generated by the 2024 budget that will only serve Morena to try to win the presidential election.
López Obrador has devised a model of operation of the Mexican State that will end up stripping the country of its great wealth, as it will be inevitably oriented to finance mega-projects managed in property by the military.
And here lies the threat. AMLO calculates that no government in the future will dare to take away the military’s newly discovered wealth, transferred tax-free to their bank accounts.
The President’s bet is of unparalleled perversity. He will leave power having threatened us with a coup d’état if a future government discovers that all his works oscillate between uselessness and non-profitability ad perpetuum. He is convinced that the military are so greedy for wealth that no one can ever take it away from them. He learned this from his many trips to Cuba, his conversations with Maduro of Venezuela, and the history of the new military bourgeoisie in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay after their coup d’états. There is much to learn from the Latin American experience of the “distribution of the national wealth” following the military’s presence in power.
The perpetuation of his party’s power and glorifying his personal figure depended on how much he managed to corrupt the military. Ultimately, this is the real political project of AMLO, the 4T, and Morena. It ends in a model of management and administration of the State based on the threat that, if the properties of the Army are touched, which will no longer belong to Mexico, there will be retaliation by the Armed Forces in defense of their personal wealth and of the institution against any reform. Today, the President of Mexico is using the Armed Forces, of which he is constitutionally the Commander in Chief, to threaten all the citizenry that if there is no obedience to his orders, there will be a violent retaliation.
It is clearly a threat that if Mexico dares to vote differently from what he wants, there will be a very high cost to pay. Ultimately, it is an electoral threat, without a doubt.
In this context, the recent event where the President of the Republic publicly bowed his head before the military commanders is relevant. He recognized them, especially General Cienfuegos, for his role in constructing a new governing power in Mexico, even if it is totally alien to the constitutional principles that govern us.
That General, the one who made a pact with a drug trafficking group, and the new military commanders, with their notable permissiveness and passivity in the face of the overflow of organized crime throughout the national territory, are the most striking legacy of the six-year term of López Obrador. This is how the transformation offer he proposed leaves us: a State in the hands of the military, controlling the public budget without transparency and, therefore, the next government of the nation.
What a damned inheritance AMLO leaves us as a country, and what a problem we will have to solve among all of us in the immediate future if Mexico intends to survive as an independent and democratic nation!
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