Antonio Navalón
I suppose that, if I had been a citizen in Caligula’s or Nero’s Rome, over time, it would have been complicated to explain – as it is today – where the endurance capacity of the people ends. And as in the Roman era, today, bread and circuses continue to be the drug for the irrational; I would like to know what it is that makes educated, prepared, hopeful people with the strength to work and transform their reality and that of their surroundings, end up being a kind of broken toys in the hands of elements that govern by whims, genialities or – as they are in power – they make their barbarities incomprehensible realities but followed to the letter by masses who are always afraid to be what we are.
Everything can get worse everywhere. We only need to look at England, the United States of America or Mexico to realize that – whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not – we have been living in a state of senselessness for too many years. It is an absurdity that can be seen in the political, economic, and international spheres but which, above all, can be seen in a constant, which is to make what is neither understandable nor logical appear, with a certain sense of rationality and logic, as good and desirable.
Hate is the only merchandise that, at this moment, is trafficked with absolute freedom and without paying tariffs of any kind in most of the countries of North America, especially in Mexico and the United States. Anything can happen. From the fact that any morning on a Chicago street, one of the protagonists of the Black Lives Matter movement looks at you as if you were guilty as if you had been one of the owners of the plantations where their ancestors were enslaved. Or until a series of white police officers in the middle of the night, upon seeing a colored boy – as was the case with Jayland Walker – runs out with nothing in his hands, becomes a shooting contest until they discover more than forty-five bullet holes in his body.
As far as we are concerned, an event that I find appalling, terrible, and one that will be remembered as the years go by, has received minimal comment. The fourteen members of the Mexican Navy who participated in the arrest of drug lord Caro Quintero were not killed by a sophisticated attack from a state-of-the-art missile or a drone, nor were they killed because they had found a way to introduce a suicide bomber into the helicopter. The fourteen died for a reason as execrable, as terrible, and unforgivable as the fact that they had run out of fuel. That is a responsibility difficult to forgive, difficult to ignore, difficult to forget, and that transcends bad luck or lack of foresight. That is a State crime. In the meantime, we dedicate ourselves to watching with astonishing normality everything that happens, even though everything that happens is an attack against reason.
Nothing will justify that the funeral of the fourteen deceased sailors was not presided over by the Commander in Chief of the Mexican Armed Forces, just as nothing will justify – no matter how much time passes – that those men died. And even less so when the reason was simply that either a fool, a stupid, or someone misunderstood the so-called republican austerity and killed them by not providing them with enough fuel to go and return after fulfilling their mission. Another thing that is very difficult to understand is that a plane can crash for lack of fuel and disappear in the ashes since it needs a runway and conditions to land. Still, if a helicopter has an advantage, it can land anywhere. If it had done so, the catastrophe we experienced last July 5th would have been avoided. When will this be reviewed and analyzed? When will we start calling things by their name? When will we recover our self-esteem and self-respect? We will do it when all the things that do not make sense and are happening to us recover, even if it is gradually, the course of logic and accuracy.
Until when will hatred cease to be the only engine of social dynamization in North America? For the time being, I would like to see a subsequent analysis of the economic and social situation. Socially, one cannot go against the Gospel. It is written in the Gospel, and it is the word of God that we must not give away fish but teach people how to fish. The social policy that we are developing completely ignores the teaching of fishing and is committed to giving away fish; the more, the better. It does so without receiving or expecting anything in return until we have grateful stomachs and a country that is becoming smaller every day from the point of view of training, education, and personal improvement.
If the national objective is to fill the stomach, as a country, we will gradually disappear like ruminants. Even to fill the stomach, the challenge of intelligence becomes the key to individual and collective growth. But make no mistake, countries do not have the governments they deserve, although they do have governments that resemble them. It is even worse when countries have the oppositions they deserve.
In this catastrophe, in this party we are living, in this verbena of the transformation of the change of the not so peaceful revolution we are going through, it is not only necessary to do an exercise to understand the reasons of power. What is needed is a higher exercise to understand the lack of patriotism, seriousness, and loyalty of the opposition. With rare and orange exceptions, the rest of the forces are in a situation that every day becomes less defensible.
Every day, we are more and more prisoners of investigation files and arrest warrants. Every day that passes, we lose more and more the opportunity to improve the proposals of power in exchange for sinking the opposition. As it happens in the extraordinary, fierce, and incomprehensible war in Ukraine, where nobody wants peace, where nobody works for it, and where it seems that what makes common sense is to accumulate weapons and thousands of dead, so many senseless scenarios show that, indeed, everything can get worse.
As it happened in the Spanish Civil War to test the new weapons, in our country, no integration exercise aims to build a national objective. In Mexico, politics is destruction; it is elimination. Moreover, precisely because there is nothing to oppose, because every barbarity is possible and because Rome can burn again, in our country, politics is a sense of austerity that, for example, can kill fourteen marines.
It will take a long time to really find out what we expect from our leaders. We live in a level of collective denial that allows those we elect to govern us to do the most brutal things without it seeming to us what they are, a barbarity.
Rome is burning again. Every time our President wants to talk about a glorious economic achievement, he talks about remittances. Remittances that are not produced in our country. Remittances earned by our fellow citizens in the United States – one of our CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC partners along with Canada – and that they sent so that their families, their friends, and their people can continue to eat.
A government and a country have the right to accept or deny an agreement. What they do not have the right to do is to deny it once it has been accepted. Above all, when that denial has an implicit intention of non-compliance with the stipulated and agreed clauses. For the remainder of this six-year term, it won’t be easy to explain what we want to do concerning our relationship with the United States and Canada and with the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC.
Meanwhile, the flames of Rome continue to spread. Not only are we putting at risk the more than fifty billion dollars projected to be received this year in remittances, but we are also threatening a significant decrease in the trade balance of the bilateral relationship. A relationship that generates approximately six hundred and sixty billion dollars and that last year reached the highest figures on record. Not only are we risking all that, but we are also risking our credibility, our trustworthiness, but, above all, the fact that everyone is asking themselves the question: do you want the agreement or not?
It is part of the miracles of power and that the people raise their hands – starting with Moses when he led the people of Israel on the exodus – on one occasion when they have not made the mistake of accepting as usual, what was utterly abnormal. But amid all this, it stands out with a special force, where are they taking us from here. If one adds up the massacre of dollars and the carnage of credibility coupled with the misfortune that has occurred – simply because of a misunderstanding of austerity or an irresponsible sense of what it means to make economies that cost lives – the big question we are entitled to ask is: how much is this experience going to cost us?
