Antonio Navalón
It was a flood, a binge, an orgy. The language, in a permanent homage to Cantinflas, during the last six years, was used as the greatest instrument of political agitprop in the country’s history. If someone were to compile and analyze the grammatical and organic structure of the content of the manners of speaking, they would find that for six years, Mexicans listened to constant contradictions and, on occasion, arguments without sense or substance. And all this happened without producing any scandal.
Whether we want to or not, and however we want to interpret it, future generations will ask us for an account and results of what we did with what we were given. There was a time when words and dialectics were used to govern. Today, that is over. Two weeks ago, the government of dialectics came to an end. And it is not that the wind blew the words away, but that they were used and worn out in such a way that their use as a tool of government has ceased to be effective.
To stay alive. To maintain order. Reaffirm the hegemony and strength of the State above all else. There have always been and always will be bad guys, but what truly allows the building of the history of countries and paving the roads of freedoms and rights is the unbreakable strength of a State. A strength that is above all other forces that try to undermine it and that nothing and no one is capable of threatening it, much less of attacking it. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Mexico, whichever position is adopted or how you look at it.
Twenty years ago, we knew that hunger, misery, and poverty could be exploited to nurture the largest army of assassins in the service of evil. Today, we see the fruit of that harvest. What we failed to nip in the bud has matured, not only in young people but also in the system’s structure. It was never identified that the real solution did not lie in taking away weapons or drugs – which, without a doubt, they would get more of – but in combating the thinking that led them to choose that path of evil. A thought that promised ephemeral but quick success and that made people prefer “living a short life, but well” to “living a long life, but screwed”.
The national panorama not only shows a map in which the cartels have grown and expanded so much that they are already part of the power structure, but their strength is already so important that, either by the absence of combat or by avoiding any kind of confrontation, they have managed to corner the legitimate defense forces of the Mexican State. This has led us to the fact that, when presenting any national defense plan or strategy, not only is the effectiveness of its proposal considered but it is simply perceived as something utopian or impossible to achieve. It is a tree planted in a barren land, exhausted by the indiscriminate and inexhaustible use of words.
The day chosen to present the new National Security Plan was a bad day, surrounded by bad circumstances. To ensure the achievement of its objectives, security requires effectiveness, and effectiveness requires discretion. However, as in politics, it is necessary to put names to things and interpret them correctly. It must be made clear whether the strategy, from now on—despite the 200,000 dead and all that we have had to live through—will continue to swear fidelity to the motto of “hugs and not bullets.”
This is one of the great dilemmas that the present administration faces before a people that, up to now, has had no choice but to get used to and live with the decisions made by others. A people that, unwillingly, has had to witness so many barbarities beyond imagination. To understand this, it is enough to see what happened to the mayor of Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero, and how – from what can be seen in the photographs – his assassins were able to slit his throat almost without spilling a drop of blood. One never knows when a criminal or historical event will be a watershed in the development or narrative of a country. It seems that the beheading of the mayor of Chilpancingo is a point of no return in the conception of what the loss of control by the State means in many parts of the national territory.
Barely more than ten days have passed, and we can already feel the deafening silence of not hearing him every morning. It is understood that, either by conviction or by necessity of the script, it is necessary to reaffirm the loyalty of this new administration to the true leader. However, it will be easier to understand a Security Plan – such as the one that is apparently going to be implemented in Mexico City – that gives results and allows the State to regain control over many parts of the country.
Omar García Harfuch and Claudia Sheinbaum have and will have to be judged by their results. They started well. The current Secretary of Citizen Security walk with the Secretary of National Defense, Commander Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, through the streets of Culiacan was a good message. However, we have reached a point where messages and symbols are no longer enough; it is necessary to consolidate the recovery of the State’s monopoly of force. But, beyond retaking the hegemony of force, the State must recover its operational capacity and the power to assert that its voice, decisions, and laws are made by those who run the country and have the last word.
Few elements will serve as true parameters of the success or failure of the 4T, and security is one of them. Having concluded the orgy and romanticism of words, the time has come for results. Both President Sheinbaum and her secretaries Harfuch and Trevilla must know that the continuity of the system itself will depend on how well or poorly they do in this field. In the meantime, it is good to see the secretaries of Citizen Security and National Defense working on pacification work and not only on building or contributing to the structural development of the country. It is good to see that the new Commander Trevilla is focusing more on what is really important: devising strategies to preserve the peace of Mexican citizens rather than on building civilian projects, whether in the form of refineries, trains, or airports.
We need a return to walking the streets without fear or worry to be as big a success as the iPhone. We need the army to recover the primary origin of its function and – as its motto says – to be “always loyal” to the consolidation and preservation of national defense. The fact is that, without elements that assure us of the simple fact of living, we will be abandoned to absolute defenselessness and in the hands of those who seek to establish evil in the country. In short, we need to go beyond words.
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