Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The Royal Spanish Academy says that the word “engullir” (gobble up) means “to swallow food in a hurry and without chewing it”. I wondered why I invoke AMLO’s presence and political work when I think of that image. I have no idea of the President’s gastronomic habits. But I do perceive his political behaviors. And those behaviors project a personality that intends to gobble up and dominate everything around him. And he obviously wants to gobble up as much as he can in the last three months he has left as President.
However, the most relevant aspect of his intentional scramble to gobble up society, power, and money is the imposition he entrusted to the Morena legislators in September. In that month, counting on an illegally qualified majority in Congress, the new virtual President-elect and her legislators will approve AMLO’s last act of political revenge: he will dismember the Judiciary and ensure that judges, magistrates, and justices are elected by popular vote.
This revenge is in retaliation because many judges, magistrates, and, most significantly, the Supreme Court Justices of the Nation (SCJN) resisted the pressures and intentions of the President of the Republic to approve his illegal acts and/or acts contrary to the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States.
AMLO intends to lay the “foundations of the Fourth Transformation.” These bases intend to strengthen the Executive Power (i.e., the President) and weaken everything that stands in its way by building presidential absolutism. Therefore, the Legislative Branch accepts weakening the Judicial Branch without realizing that it paves the way for its own approach to irrelevance within the decision-making process.
Although the country is going through a transition that is not a transition from one ruler to another, the transsexennial method of governance is emerging. The intention of the new political regime in the making is to spread its tentacles in all the chinks of society, without exception. The new President has said that she will remove the proportional representation legislators as a decisive step to eliminate minority voices or voices different from the sole and indivisible voice of the ruler in office. Also, the reelection and, why not, the autonomy of the electoral body.
The first expression of this is the colonization of the media by the cronies of the new regime. They have spread like mushrooms in the morning dew. The dissident voices are being extinguished while the officialist voices multiply. There is the case of Latinus, one of the most flagrant and worrying cases.
Of course, it is argued: “We are an overwhelming majority”. Yes, it is true. It is an unexpected truth but a truth at the end of the day. But does that justify crushing dissenting, minority voices in society? In the monolithic thinking that emerges from the bowels of Mexican society, it is perfectly possible to consider that different or dissident voices work against the crushing machinery of the unarmed majority.
The new ruler also promises to eliminate the autonomous bodies, whose essential function in a democratic society is to demand clear accountability from the authority for its actions, expenditures, and decisions in the areas of its competence. The rulers allow the existence of autonomous bodies as long as they cease to be autonomous and respond to the ruler’s interests.
In the novel 1984, George Orwell described the functioning of the State machine in its phase as an instrument that operates with overwhelming dynamics: when it is a machine that gobbles up everything in its path. It is an implacable machinery that imposes itself, by its logic of absolute control, on everything human and all humans. That is the masterful description Orwell offers us in his novel. Not even the Leader was above the logic of the system. His role was to intimidate, but he also ended up intimidated by the logic of the state machine that gobbled up everything it touched or encountered in its path.
The 4T’s need to destroy and then colonize to control the Judiciary is precisely the best example of that eagerness, after having succeeded in having the electoral bodies impose their illegal and cheating majorities. According to the logic of the new regime, everything is to be gobbled up: power, then the opponents, then money, and finally, themselves.
Orwell predicted humanity’s self-destruction. What we can predict is the road to destruction, first and then self-destruction, of liberties, democracy, and the life of an independent Republic at the end of the road of what this new political regime, installed as of June 2, with the majority popular vote, offers us.
The masses can be mistaken, and in Mexico, they were mistaken when they accepted the offer of the astute myth-makers of those who govern, now, yes, the Republic. So much so that they opened the way to a great cultural and intellectual tragedy. The Rector of UNAM, denying himself and the institution he heads, denounced and criticized the work of intellectuals critical of the judicial reform. Instead of doing what he should have done-defending freedom of expression and academic freedom-he aligned himself with the wishes of a government that, day by day, will tolerate less and less critical and profound analysis of society. The Rector of the UNAM aligned himself with closed-mindedness and censorship. He betrayed his mandate and his sacred commitment to the search for truth and intelligence.
The next step will be eliminating academic freedom and freedom of expression in the country’s universities. Do you think this is not possible? The Rector has already given the go-ahead to the validation of that path. What will come next will make generations of Mexicans weep.
AMLO created the bestial state machine that will rob society of its soul and brain. Sheinbaum is already a hostage to it, and to survive, she will have to deepen the dynamics of imprisonment in an entire country. To succeed, they will have to liquidate the entire opposition without exception, for failing to do so, she herself will be shattered by the machine created to gobble up the entire Republic.
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