Luis Rubio
Order and disorder, argues Robert Kaplan,* comprises a dilemma not dependent on the individual but on their lived experience. It took England 700 years to evolve from the Magna Carta to women’s suffrage, with many exceedingly violent struggles along the way. Democratic traditions, as illustrated by the so-called Arab Spring a little more than a decade ago, cannot be established overnight. Mexicans who lived through the epoch of the seventies’ financial crises entertained a conception of the world very distinct from those born in the era of alternation of political parties in the presidency, something inconceivable in post-Revolutionary history, although seen as a natural occurrence today. Contrasting experiences that explain distinct perspectives concerning the way the current government conducts domestic affairs.
According to Fernando Escalante,** the country underwent two significant evolutions during the past four decades, neither successful. The first evolution entailed the passing from the world of legitimate impunity that enjoyed social support because it was effective and yielded results in terms of economic growth and social peace, i.e., governability (but it ended because its viability ran out), to an inconclusive transition based on democratic forms and market mechanisms as a factor of economic organization: “the administrative rationalization of elections and depoliticized markets.” That “transition regime” was successful by many measurements, but was accompanied by undesirable consequences, such as diverse inequalities that were not resolved because an effective system of justice and the Rule of Law were never consolidated. Instead of bringing to a close the world of complicities and impunity in order to construct a foundation of security and justice for all, that regime implemented a centralist vision over a country that was increasingly larger, diverse, and dispersed and for which solutions from above would not work: rather than strengthening them, they weakened the local authorities and opened the door to the universe of extortion that has become generalized at present.
The second evolution took place recently, but one toward a new era of lack of definition. “To say populism, authoritarianism, the return of the PRI, is to say very little. Among the facts herein, there lies a blatantly statist rhetoric hand in hand with the weakening of the State… the aspiration to historical transcendence… that contrasts with a disconcerting lack-of-project.” The description that Escalante offers spells out the opacity, the electoral manipulation, and new spaces of intermediation. In sum, the search for the return to the broad margin of impunity that the old political class used to enjoy. The model that the present government has been building brings face-to-face the formal economy (requiring more State) with the informal (requiring more politics), but responds to contrasting circumstances in distinct regions of the country and societal strata. The implicit contradiction between these two worlds leads to a growing responsibility in the hands of the Army, in parallel with a systematic diminution of the capacities of the State. Escalante concludes his argument in an ominous fashion, citing Leonardo Sciascia, stating that this pertains to the “order of the mafia.”
Now that Mexicans find themselves in the process of presidential succession, the question is, what comes next? However much the President picks up the pace in an attempt to confer formality on his preferences and decisions through a hurried series of legal initiatives, it is reasonable to question whether the present moment is sustainable: that order of the mafia to which Escalante refers and that, I might add, is sustained more by the skill of the person to keep alive the attention of the population than to the functionality of his government. Could the individual who succeeds the president maintain the status quo?
Order and disorder, two sides of the same coin, and two contrasting circumstances are always present in daily life. Those living in the formal economy cannot avoid numerous encounters with extortion, impunity, and violence with which more and more Mexicans are assaulted; those living in economic informality are up against systematic barriers to their development not only due to the self-same factors of violence and impunity that the entire population endures but also because of the encumbrances that the formal world imposes upon it expansively. The success of the Mexican Tax Administration Service (SAT) in matching invoices with payments to close more spaces of tax evasion ever constitutes an unassailable barricade for informality, the latter paradoxically the president’s social base.
I return to the beginning: experiences lived over time determine the perspective held by each of us with respect to the present moment. For those who lived through the growth and stability era of stabilizer development, the violence and informality of today result in being intolerable threats to development; contrariwise, for those who grew up in the eras of alternation or political parties in the presidency and violence -two unfortunately inseparable factors- the notion of stable and systematic growth becomes an unachievable chimera.
Whosoever wins, the next president will be unable to circumvent these contrasts: he or she will have to find a way to reconcile them, a new social pact that presses toward the formalization of national life.
*The Tragic Mind; **México ayer y ahora (Nexos, abril 2023).
@lrubiof
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