Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
For those who believe that the recent violent actions of organized crime are “irrelevant”, as the President says, they should calm down and make a new evaluation. The President says it is not terrorism and that this is just the pretext Washington wants to intervene in Mexico. Spoiler: Washington already intervenes in Mexico and does not need that pretext to act in our territory and the rest of Latin America if that were the case.
The Royal Spanish Academy defines “terrorism” as follows: “1. domination by terror; 2. succession of acts of violence executed to instill terror; 3. criminal action by organized gangs that, repeatedly and usually indiscriminately, seeks to create social alarm for political purposes.”
In recent weeks Mexico has witnessed or experienced firsthand a series of actions by “criminal gangs” (sic) that carried out “acts of violence” that succeeded in “instilling terror” among the directly affected society. For example, the increase in the use of car bombs by organized crime in different modalities is reported. One is the explosion of a parked vehicle, and another is the activation of the explosive by remote control after having summoned the police forces to provoke more deaths. Social psychosis spreads when residents arm themselves against criminal gangs in thousands of communities nationwide. Crime also kills journalists to instill terror among local reporters. The less information society has about the actual facts of organized crime, the more helpless and vulnerable citizens feel.
Car bombs, armed villagers, murder of journalists; what else can help us define terrorism in Mexico? Disappearances of people are multiplying; clandestine cemeteries exist throughout the country and confirm the existence of a lucrative market of kidnapping, sale, and human trafficking, the sale of organs for hire, and children’s prostitution. The almost total impunity of these acts, and omissive or complicit officialdom, only increase the social feeling of impotence and helplessness in the face of criminality.
Anything else? Now it is confirmed the existence and use of armed drones that launch explosives, even missiles, remotely. The war expands throughout the country with this weaponry, along with more femicides, which is a phenomenon that accompanies an increasingly violent society. Violence against women grows to the extent that patriarchal society endorses it.
President López Obrador’s verbal violence and actions against Xóchitl Gálvez are the most recent expression of the confluence between criminality, violence, and politics. The President endorses, every day, that he legitimizes violence in society and politics. Mexico is a country permeated to its last corner with violence. And the President is the one who fires the first bullet when he uses the mornings to authorize violence in politics.
AMLO wants to destroy, beginning now, the threat he sees that Xochitl represents for Morena in the 2024 elections.
The recent violence of organized crime throughout the country is in agreement, not to say “in coordination”, with the message from the mañanera by the President of the Republic. The presidential endorsement of violent acts “to impede the advance of conservatism” goes through the implicit and sometimes explicit agreement between the Presidency and organized crime. Both seek the continuation of Morena in power. The President would say it is to continue “the transformation,” while organized crime needs Morena in government to root the business and resist the onslaught of the United States (and the rest of the world) to eradicate its existence.
Any threat to that new “national order of things” is dangerous to AMLO, Morena, and organized crime. And Xóchitl represents a real possibility of cracking that deep alliance of interests committed to the continuity, defeating Morena in the 2024 elections.
Because he considers her a mortal danger to his interests, AMLO’s violence against Xóchitl will surely continue. She has shown enough ability to confront the President, exposing his dishonesty and mediocrity directly.
The necessary question is: until when can this level of confrontation between the President and the main woman opposing his government continue, and what consequences will this violence, propitiated by the State and with the complicity of organized crime, have on the 2024 electoral process?
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