Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
A furious AMLO revealed his political project openly: to demolish the State in order to have all the power. The President wants to reign over a country where citizens are obedient and submissive subjects surrendered to his feet, silenced and subdued. That is the “ideal state of the country” he aspires to. He does not want to be accountable to anyone and feels the force of firearms covering his back. He does not aspire to return to the old PRI. He wants to return to the 19th century.
The COVID affectation radicalized him. Or could it be that he realized the fragility of his political project and the ineffectiveness and lack of legitimacy of his supposed substitutes? Because in his absence, none of his corcholatas (his candidates to succeed him) appeared as functional and credible replacements to give effective continuity to what he considers his “historic achievement”.
The instruction to his subjects-Morenistas is to accelerate and deepen the demolition of the Mexican State. Only the Armed Forces, the Treasury, social programs, and himself remain functional. In other words, “the ideal state of things”. His opinion is that the rest of the government agencies are superfluous.
The other branches of government are functional to the extent that they obey him. When they stop following his instructions, it is a sign that they should disappear. He launched his troops to block the access doors to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation because that branch of government is governed by the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States and not by the personal desires of the President of the Republic. The Justices of the Court committed the mortal sin of not accepting subordination to any other power and defended their independence as a supreme value.
AMLO’s indication to the legislators is to demolish institution after institution of the State, leaving millions of Mexican families suffering from different existential disadvantages out of the social protection network. Disabled people, in general, are thrown out on the street, as well as children from the institutions that used to protect them from their surroundings, especially sexual aggression. It is as if the Mexican State deliberately protects pedophiles.
At the same time, it strengthens the Armed Forces to consolidate the increasingly perverse political and complicit relationship between the Presidency and the military high command, especially with the Army. It is a relationship that has exceeded the limits established in the Constitution regarding the balance between civilian and military powers and the latter’s subordination to the former. The relationship between the two is no longer clear, and much less is it clear who commands whom in the course of the decisions on public policies that are taking place, such as the massive allocation of public budget to the Armed Forces without the obligation to render accounts.
This government has also perverted the concept of national security in terms of public works, activities, and budgets to turn the Armed Forces into a parallel and secret State, legally separated from what is known as the Mexican State, according to the Constitution. It illegally spies with Pegasus on society in general.
AMLO’s effort to demolish the State involves ignoring the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, pretending to turn it into a “dead letter”. And the Morenista legislators, together with the equally smiling corcholatas, go directly to the national guillotine, invested with such ignorance that they believe grants them a non-existent moral superiority.
The public instruction to destroy the National Institute for Access to Information ( INAI) reflects a desperation to erase the traces of this government’s corruption. The elimination of institutions and bodies has a double purpose. On the one hand, the President “expropriates” those public funds for their use and disposition according to his political or personal priorities. But, on the other hand, their disappearance is justified by the corruption argument. At the same time, the whole operation of disappearing institutions is to cover up acts of corruption carried out during his administration.
AMLO says that he is fighting corruption by carrying out administrative acts that actually cover up the corruption of his administration. The emblematic case is the disappearance of the National Institute for Health and Welfare (INSABI) with the stroke of a pen, burying gigantic fortunes in the dark so that neither their origin nor their destination can be traced.
This week’s “demolition operation”, carried out by Morena to hide corruption and simultaneously strengthen the civil-military symbiosis, following the President’s instructions, seeks to bury all traces of the Morena government’s systematic corruption and to hide the smoking gun as evidence, while at the same time enlarging the role of the Armed Forces as guarantor of support for AMLO, no matter what comes.
The next step is to reduce the opposition to its minimum expression and even liquidate it, if possible. Free and democratic elections pose a severe risk to AMLO’s political project. There is a possibility of losing the presidential elections in 2024, and he knows it. That defeat, if it happens, would expose him, members of his government, high-ranking military, and some businessmen to accusations of corruption on a massive scale. He obviously wants to avoid such a scenario. To that end, he is trying several alternatives.
First, he wants to liquidate the opposition. The rehearsal in Mexico City, with Sheinbaum at the helm, of jailing opposition leaders is to test possible reactions to similar actions in other parts of the country in the coming months. How can we expect him to criticize the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua for jailing opponents when he is contemplating following the same path?
Another option is to start harassing businessmen who sympathize with the ideas of the opposition so that they stop supporting the dissent activities financially. There is the Tax Authority (SAT) as a guillotine for those who dare to challenge the presidential project.
Another way is to harass the free and independent press into submission or, flatly, its disappearance. The classic threat serves in this case. “Lead or silver” is the exact phrase. The practices of organized crime are being incorporated into the directory of methods to intimidate anyone who does not share the President’s point of view. Killing journalists is done as a practice to see how far the government can go with these techniques adopted by drug traffickers.
In fact, Morena’s “tactical” alliances with organized crime throughout the country have served to refine its terrorist tactics in the search for the submission of political, social, intellectual, cultural, and scientific actors, as well as journalists, who oppose the authoritarian drift that AMLO has imposed on the country. Destroying the opposition in any of its manifestations is, today, AMLO’s strategic objective.
All his actions to demolish the State, liquidate the opposition, and seize the country as his personal ranch, seem to be based on the deep fear that he is going to free and competitive elections with the opposition next year provoke in him. His fear? Losing the presidential election and having to face the judgment of history on his six-year administration, his setbacks, failures, and more: the rampant corruption of members of his government and family. He never accepts to be accountable for his actions and spending.
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