Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Mexico is experiencing a severe crisis at the end of six years. The situation is further complicated by the inability of its leading promoters to recognize it.
A vignette that unveils this incapacity was López Obrador’s last Government Report. And it is not because he totally lacked any sense of elementary self-criticism. It is because of the picture of brilliant lies he described about the country that confirms the fantasy character of the ruler.
Truly, the king walks naked. The child who would tell him so was missing. Public security was solved, the health system is better than in Denmark, public works were concluded, the dirty war was taken care of, public finances are as never before, and the country has the highest employment rate in the world. The list of aberrations and lies is long. Others will do the exact accounting of how many lies per minute.
However, the problem is that the ruler leaves the country in a severe state of deterioration, and the reasons for the crisis are plain to see.
The arrest/extraction of Mayo Zambada caused the drug trafficking pus to explode and spill over the López Obrador government. AMLO cannot get out of that stench, as dangers are lurking. What will they say about him and his list of agreements with drug traffickers arrested in the United States? He will be ex-president in a month and will no longer have immunity.
That is why it is so important to place his assets within the new President’s cabinet and maintain the loyalty of the military high command. It is also essential to destroy the Judicial Power immediately to prevent it from acting against him and to eliminate the National Institute for Access to Information to control all the information from the government archives on budgetary deviations during his administration.
But the end-of-six-year crisis goes far beyond López Obrador’s night terrors. The peso’s devaluation is around 20%, and once the judicial reform is approved next week, it could reach a 50% devaluation. Given that the yield of the CETES is around 10%, and with a downward perspective, a 20% devaluation in the currency’s value leaves this great savings “instrument” for international funds turned to dust. We can expect a massive exit from the market at any time, starting this week.
Public finances are in question, considering that AMLO financed his administration’s decisions -making the mega-works and mass distribution of social support- with a historical indebtedness of the country. Not with savings, as he falsely claims, nor with fiscal resources, but with debt. He could have bought the elections, but he plunged the country into the morass of recession, over-indebtedness, and falling tax revenues.
The security crisis is growing out of control. The strategy of letting drug trafficking pass has left the country defenseless. He argues the drop in lethality during his government. But it is because they let the narcos move into expanded territorial occupation. This government leaves the country with six years with more deaths from violence than any other. There is nothing to boast about and everything to fear: columns of narcos will begin to circulate within the country’s major cities within a short time, with impunity.
If these elements were not enough to define the end-of-six-year crisis as serious, AMLO added the new tone of a severe but low-intensity conflict with the United States and Canada. Moreover, it is a conflict that has nothing to do with what is being said (energy, CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC) but with the danger that the President of Mexico personally feels because of Zambada’s arrest and what he might say about AMLO and his sons for their dealings with the cartels. AMLO’s fight with Biden is an act of self-defense, even if it gets the bilateral relationship between its legs. He does not care. The critical thing for AMLO is his personal salvation.
Putting Mexico’s relationship with the United States and Canada on hold puts the new President in a difficult situation. Will she have the political fortitude to normalize bilateral relations, or will she submit to AMLO’s dictates, in this case (as in all others)?
That is the end-of-six-year crisis: a monster created by AMLO and inherited by Sheinbaum.
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