Luis Rubio
In The Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco employs an anecdote to evoke an obvious fact. He says: “In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a Second World War movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.” The presidential strategy to win the recent election was equally evident: pay and subsidize almost half the population.
The strategy was public, open, and systematically explained and repeated: no one can claim surprise. The president utilized resources that had been budgeted and earmarked for health and education, infrastructure, and the maintenance of governmental installations but were instead allocated to subsidize his clientele permanently, creating a support base that was decidedly and brutally reflected on election day.
As the 19th-century philosopher Frederic Bastiat explained, there are two sides to each coin: what is seen and what is not seen. What is not seen is what is truly transcendent.
The visible part was the cash transfers. Millions of families were the beneficiaries of the clientelist strategy. The concept was not new: election after election throughout the 20th century was characterized by a transactional strategy of the exchange of benefits for votes. The innovation that López Obrador incorporated was that of eliminating the transactional nature of the exchange by making the transfers permanent. Now, an enormous portion of the public budget is dedicated to a subsidy that reaches, according to official figures, 45% of families.
There are two sides to every transaction: at the end of the day, this comprises an exchange. In the PRI era, the exchange was circumstantial, related to the upcoming election; the voters played the game by voting for whoever gave or promised them benefits, but they continued being free agents, to employ a professional sports term. What changed in this election, resulting in brutal effectiveness, was the systematicity of the “support”, as the president denominates it, as it converted the “free agents” into permanent clientele. Without a doubt, it is brilliant as a political strategy, but the relevant question is, what does this tell us about the reality of Mexico?
In a country in which everything is difficult, in which there are obstacles for anything and everything, the Obradorist subsidy is a decisive factor for the loyalties of these families. In fact, no one can doubt that the central objective of the government throughout the outgoing administration was to build those clientelist relationships to achieve the result that came about last June 2. What can be (and should be) criticized is the contempt with which the government operated on not promoting -or eliminating obstacles to economic development, as well as the flagrant violations of the Electoral Law, but the heart of the strategy consisted of facilitating the lives of millions of Mexicans. This is the true factor of success, and against this milestone is what the incoming government, as well as its future opponents, will have to contend.
Life in Mexico is, in truth, hard: whoever wants to open a business knows that they will have to deal with the Treasury Department (Hacienda), the municipal government, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), and a morass of local and federal regulations. Complying with the regulations is complex and costly; even paying taxes is difficult for those without basic knowledge, and the educational system does not help. In fact, education in Mexico is conceived to preserve poverty and dependence, two historical factors that the outgoing government emphasized with its school textbooks dedicated to no one being able to prosper. This point is a crucial one: education does not contribute to the formation of persons apt to developing themselves to their best, but instead to their continuing to be shackled by poverty, while the government, which avowedly put the poor first, did nothing other than shore up the permanence of the poor in that category. Why progress if it is better to depend on the government: a purposeful vicious circle.
For those who succeed in making it on their own, they will encounter the crude reality of a government devoted to its clientele or one that is flatly absent: rather than protection and security, extortionists appear who exact protection money, inspectors who demand their “fair share” and police officers not far behind. Insecurity, the element that demonstrates that the government is not committed to what matters to the citizens, is the reality with which the overwhelming majority of the population has to contend. Opening a bank account has become an almost impossible ordeal, and access to an education that is conducive to a better standard of living is only available at a significant cost because it is solely offered by private schools and universities. It is not necessary to talk about the health sector, which has been virtually nonexistent throughout the long six-year presidential term that is finally coming to an end.
The wrongs that Mexicans experience result from a system of government that capitulates to the president’s priorities and not to the development of the population. Instead of resolving the problems that truly afflict Mexicans, the president opted for subsidizing families. Who would not accept their lives being facilitated when life is already so complex, costly, and unattractive?
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) wrote, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
@lrubiof
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