Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Mexico is undergoing a process of accelerated decay. Violence and the extension of the tentacles of organized crime are progressively destroying the bases and foundations of the rule of law without the national State reacting with a strategy that recognizes the danger it faces.
Apparently, the President considers it normal and acceptable for young people to be kidnapped and brutally murdered. His ” I can’t hear you” echoes throughout the corridors of established political power, including in the Army, Navy, and National Guard barracks. They sleep peacefully as long as their privileges and projects are not affected. But around them, the country burns.
This “I cannot hear you” is the cry of the nation-state strategy chosen by President López Obrador. He prefers to make up data than to go out to the streets to assume the costs of solving the problem. But the issue of “not hearing” goes far beyond the problem of violence that has bloodied and mourned Mexico.
The ” not hearing” has been the leitmotiv of Lopez Obrador. It is the same character the candidate López Obrador who promised everything people wanted to hear about security and progress, as the character President López Obrador in government who does the opposite of what he promised in his campaign.
In government, he has never met with opposition leaders. He has never met with opposition legislators. When he meets with governors, he does so with those of his party, excluding opposition governors. He does not go to Congress for protocol events for fear of being questioned by the opposition. When he travels to Washington, he does so in such a way that he never meets with legislators or political leaders of any party that could question him, much less with the free press of that country.
Entrenched in his mañaneras, he devotes himself to vituperating and offending anyone who dares to question the government and its policies. He has insulted and humiliated the country’s doctors and the mothers searching for their missing loved ones across the country. He has mocked children with cancer, accusing them of being objects of manipulation by “conservatives”. He hates and disregards the academicians, laboratory researchers, and the entire intellectual and scientific community of the country. He expresses particular rage against newscasters, reporters, and the media in general. His lack of empathy goes so far as to be interpreted by his followers, including members of organized crime, that killing journalists can be taken as an act of ” patriotism”. This attitude of lack of presidential empathy has made Mexico the most dangerous country for journalism in Latin America.
Particular attention has been drawn to the President’s systematic attack on women. So bullying and abusive is López Obrador that judicial instances of the country have ordered him to cease his attacks against women and towards some in particular, such as the case of Xóchitl Gálvez. We must single out the issue of his attacks, scorn, and invective against the President of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Norma Piña. So offensive has been his public behavior against Justice Piña that the President’s followers have placed a sit-in at the gates of that Court, preventing the entrance to its facilities. The sit-in remains because the President understands and validates this form of war against the Court and Justice Piña in particular.
The list is endless of people, institutions, or initiatives that have been the object of attacks, insults, and abuses by President López Obrador. Remember that he never offered this governance model when he was a candidate. He offered the opposite: he spoke of love and peace. But he governs with hatred and violence—the opposite of what he said in his campaigns.
Given the failure of the rest of his public policies, the most tragic outcome of this “method” of government based on violence is the natural association between the Presidency and the most violent actors in society, which emerges as an implacable logic. Hence, the strengthening of the State’s law enforcement forces in general. Less understandable, but moving in the same direction, is the apparent complacency of the Executive Branch with the presence and actions of organized crime. Violence attracts violence and the violent. Violence begets more violence.
To avoid assuming the implications and consequences of the lie of his administration and his way of being, López Obrador opts for the method of governing by refusing to listen to the demands of society. “I do not hear” is the phrase that defines this failed government. And with it, he condemns Mexican society to a prolonged spiral of violence.
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