Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
On the day López Obrador received his investiture as constitutional President of Mexico on December 1, 2018, in the Congress of the Union, he went to Mexico City’s Zócalo to receive a baton from Carmen Santiago Alonso, representative of 68 indigenous peoples and the Afro-Mexican people. In this ceremony, the new president of Mexico was told that “We respectfully ask you to allow us to perform a purification ritual so that all your wishes come true…and that Mexico will live from today a transformation in which the indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples will be included”. They gave him the ceremonial sacred stick “that keeps the wisdom of our ancestors”.
According to newspaper accounts of the day, the ceremony had an emotional moment when, while wailing and sobbing, one of the traditional healers prayed in his language, which caused López Obrador to kneel to receive a wooden carved crucifix. The traditional medicine man asked the crowd to repeat indigenous prayers with him.
The “ceremony” was very different, if that is what one can call the event in which López Obrador handed over the same “baton of command” to his presidential candidate for Morena on September 8, 2023. A partisan meeting preceded that event closed to the public in which the President would have called for unity in the Morenista ranks before the beginning of the 2024 presidential campaigns. Afterward, and squeezed in the restaurant door, with Morena leaders making an uncomfortable bulge behind his back, López Obrador handed the baton to the person who could succeed him as President if she wins the elections on June 2, 2024. Claudia Sheinbaum raised the wand as if to say: “Now I am in charge here”.
It was a frugal, cold, and partisan event, without the emotion of that event five years earlier when the representative of 68 indigenous peoples and the Afro-Mexican people celebrated, in their traditional language, the expected advent of the inclusive transformation of Mexico. The recent “ceremony” of power transfer was completely westernized, castellanized, and without the packaging of the emotion of ancestral wisdom but framed in an exercise replete with multiple political calculations.
The President’s action of handing over the indigenous baton to a female candidate in a partisan event immediately provoked indignation and repudiation on the part of the indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. What the President of Spanish origin does not understand is that the baton is a symbol given by the indigenous and Afro-Mexican groups to the hands of the representative of a new federal government. Therefore, it is not permissible for that official, on his own initiative, to dispose of the baton and hand it over, with all its meanings and symbolism, to a possible successor. The decision to hand over the baton to another person for his representation corresponds solely and exclusively to the indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. It is not a delegated power that the government representative has to go around distributing among his friends, relatives, or supporters.
Mr. Ortela Santiago, the traditional medic who participated in the delivery of the baton on December 1, 2018, to the President of Mexico, categorically stated that “as a representative of the ancestral traditions, I want to say that the baton is not just any instrument and should not be used as I have seen on social networks, without the consent of the guardians of the sacred traditions, for us it is an offense.” Ortela Santiago let it be known that the baton must be returned in the same way it was given, through a sacred ritual for the closing of the cycle, which will be done before representatives who were in charge of the delivery of the wand, complying with the law of reciprocity of their culture.
Questioned by journalists about the offense committed against indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples, the President lied when he said that he had been authorized to deliver this scepter to Sheinbaum Pardo.
Fast-forward. The baton of command is no longer an object of dispute between the indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities with the President but a very central issue in the now open political struggle between López Obrador and Sheinbaum. I believe that neither President López Obrador nor Claudia Sheinbaum thinks about the future of the indigenous or Afro-Mexican communities, except in their speeches that others write. Then, what is the axis of that struggle, and why is the baton of command symbolically at the center of the debate?
The heart of the dispute concerns whether Sheinbaum will be the decision-maker in her government, in attention to her political project. Or, conversely, whether she will be López Obrador’s puppet in power, heeding the instructions and indications he transmits to her.
The events in Mexico City create an aura of uncertainty around the question of a possible maximato as the outcome of the political process to come. Will it be López Obrador, and not Sheinbaum, who will really determine the policies to be followed in the next six-year term? A notorious case is how Sheinbaum has adopted, as a discursive axis of her campaign, the election by popular vote of the Justices of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation as a way to subordinate the Judiciary to the Executive. Coincidentally, this is the central political proposal of López Obrador’s government. The outgoing President is the one who apparently dictates the policy to be followed by the one who aspires to take the reins of the nation in the name of the 4T.
On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore what has just happened with the nomination of Clara Brugada as Morena’s candidate for head of government in the capital. Claudia Sheinbaum had instructed Omar García Harfush to be her successor in the government of Mexico City. The rebellion against her proposal was overwhelming. The most important Morenista political groups in Mexico City came together against the supposed owner of the baton. They challenged and defeated her. They exposed Sheinbaum’s real weakness. They demonstrated that the power of the Baton of Command is not inherited; it is built. There is no other way to understand what just happened. It is relevant, considering that Morena sees Mexico City as its starting base for any political action at the national level.
But there are clear indications that the President was complacent with the promoters of the rebellion against Harfush’s candidacy and, consequently, against Sheinbaum’s moral authority and political strength. Did the President use this incident (Harfush’s ill-advised candidacy) to weaken Sheinbaum, to raise her and give her an artificial life, but now dependent on him? The hypothesis has solid grounds when considering López Obrador’s past and present political practices.
Taking advantage of the symbol of the baton to make clear who holds power, López Obrador obviously aspires to influence significantly the life of a government headed by Sheinbaum. He wants to be the moral censor and captain with the compass to guide the Morenist ship along his proposed route.
What a powerful López Obrador and a weakened Sheinbaum offer us is a government anchored on the shared baton. Until contradictions annihilate one or the other…or both.
The indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities should know that the use given to the baton they handed over to the president threatens Mexico with deep division, not union because López Obrador will respect neither the ancestral indigenous wisdom nor the pledged word of inclusion. He has demonstrated that, by nature, he destroys everything he touches.
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