Antonio Navalón
Before, in the other era, before we made history together, when the bad guys ruled – which explained all the ills that afflicted us – life was contained and depended on what happened in each election. Like centuries in the history of the social sciences, six-year terms marked our lives. The appointment of successors by the famous “dedazo” (finger pointing) – and in a way still is – a demonstration that with Hernán Cortés or without him, with three hundred years of rule or without, the soul of this nation had not changed. At the time to which I refer, being close to and accepting the designs of the one in charge was in itself a life project and certainly the most important and politically honorable thing to do.
Of course, it is terrible to have a State where the government is your enemy. But it is worse not to have a State without a government. Now, at a time when it is impossible to stop the forces of nature. There was a day when a meteorite broke all the balances on planet Earth and shaped it as it is. Today, to give just one example, the imbalance is becoming more noticeable and significant. Look at the soil of the Yucatan peninsula and see the wear and tear of an area once the home of the God Tlaloc and where water was plentiful and vegetation was abundant. Today, we are witnessing the economic disaster and ecocide that is taking place in this region, and all because someone felt that the Mayan Train was necessary simply because he had the idea of it.
The Mayan Train, which looks as if it was designed by Jules Verne – in the sense that it will pass the entire ecosystem surrounding the Yucatecan ecosystem as if it were a representation of the monsters dreamed up by the French author – is on its way to being a significant failure and a human tragedy in every sense of the word. But no matter, people who do not recognize the capacity for madness in their leaders are not generous people, nor do they deserve the opportunity to have a worse leader than the one they have now. It is not that people have the leaders they deserve but that they are governed by the leaders who most closely resemble or match their reality.
I will not talk about the Dos Bocas refinery, nor will I talk about the results of the AIFA, an airport of which – by the way – I am a confessed follower. I believe that the country would do much better if there were logic in public action and if financial and strategic movements were used for strategies or works that would truly last and not as a supreme exercise of the wisdom that comes with power. In Mexico, we are not looking for results to be justified in terms of public utility; here, we are looking for works to be done as an affirmation of our personality. In our country, it is enough for the leader in office to give the go-ahead for what is going to be built or carried out for it to be carried out. And it is done even though what is done is a repetition of the military scheme of the Battle of Celaya, an event so brilliantly described by the author Pérez-Reverte, to understand so well the keys to the behavior of the Mexican revolutionary heroes.
Just as Pancho Villa was determined not to keep anyone in reserve and condemned the entire Northern Division to fall into the open zone and the trap that was the crossing of the Laja River, President López Obrador is determined that his flagship works be completed at any cost. It doesn’t matter how much they cost, how many people die, how much is destroyed – as in the case of the Mayan Train – or whether we run out of soldiers willing to maintain national security. For the President of Mexico, the only thing that matters is that all his wishes are fulfilled, regardless of whether or not they carry the necessary logic.
We are entering the beginning of the end. 2023 will be the last year of López Obrador’s administration, although I am not sure it will be the final year of his movement. A movement that is not yet clear what it stands for or what its goals or intentions are. And here I ask again, what is the 4T (Fourth Transformation)? No one and nothing, except the unshakable will of its leader, will be able to explain well what this experiment was and has been. But what is true is that to make it clear that we will die on our feet, in the letter in which the two Presidents – López Obrador and Biden – congratulate each other on two hundred years of bilateral relations, the Mexican leader took the opportunity to pass the bill again. While he did not ask the American people for an apology in the document – as he did with the Spanish people on the issue of the abuses of the Conquest – he did take the opportunity to recall that our relationship was sometimes characterized by confrontation and war – which is true – and that we are still the people who suffered an invasion-robbery perpetrated by them in 1848. An intervention that Abraham Lincoln not only described as immoral but also made public his stance in defense of Mexico.
It is said. Our national honesty is once again written on paper in gold letters from the National Palace. What is important, however, is that no one knows how the following chapters of the most important relationship for our country will be written. To begin with, it should be pointed out that we are the United States’ number one trading partner, with trade worth more than 449,824 million dollars so far this year. This puts us at a point where we should consider that being right and having the courage to face the powerful and tell them the truth should not be contradictory to the sad exercise of eating three meals a day. Moreover, we come to this moment in history with pending panels and the memory and the open wound of what it means to be so far from God but so close to the United States.
It bores me to write and talk about the current national leader who has brought the country to where it is. First, because it is unfair to give him all the credit, either for having voted for him or for not having had the responsibility that the occasion required, we are all participants in the national reality and this moment.
What we are currently experiencing as a nation and as a world is unprecedented. The planet has to reorganize itself and establish the structure and models that will govern the future. Inevitably, when thinking about it, one looks at the panorama and wonders why we have the curse of having rulers with so much popular pull but, at the same time, with such a fatalistic program of wanting to make history based on defeats and not victories.
The CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC will explode in 2023. Make no mistake; the United States understood some time ago that the Mexican government was either trying to give them a blow or was trying to take an unfair advantage. Or, what amounts to the same thing, that every opportunity given was an opportunity thrown to the wind of history since they never really wanted to change here. For two hundred years, we have not answered whether we can live without the Americans because we have lived against them for many years. The point is that now, we both seek to do the same in that shared space we call North America.
Let us celebrate with joy this holiday season because no one, absolutely no one, knows when there will ever be another Christmas or what the miracle of the Fourth whatever was all about.
Happy holidays. Happy living. We’ll be back with this “Year Zero” next January 2nd.
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