Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO’s support for Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship is a fact. The question is why and whether this support is a correct policy for the Mexican State.
To support Nicolás Maduro under the current conditions is to help a dictatorship. It is a dictatorship because it is a regime that beats, kidnaps, imprisons, and kills its opponents. And when it does not win a presidential election, it steals it and installs itself in power. And also because it has politically colonized the powers of the State to entrench itself in the government: the electoral bodies, the Judiciary in its entirety, and the Armed Forces are instruments that Maduro directly controls and acts as spokesmen for that country’s Constitution.
Both the current owners of the country called Nicaragua, as well as the heirs of Chavez in Venezuela, commanded by Maduro, learned well the lesson of the Cuban revolution. Once you take power, you must create a new State with all its institutions: New Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches. But they are recreated according to the needs of the revolution. If necessary, it uses the rhetoric of democracy and the people to consolidate power and justify the actions undertaken.
The essence is to create an efficient and total apparatus of state control that leaves no room for doubt about who rules the country and who will continue to rule for decades. Popular democracy means that by governing on behalf of the poor, the majority in all countries, it is a government that will never leave power.
Is it not a full democracy to rule for the country’s impoverished majority? Logic indicates that it is the right thing to do for any country. Stalin and Mao ruled indefinitely on behalf of the poor people. Fidel and the family in Cuba did the same: always in the name of the people and against imperialism. There are the generations of the Kim Il Sung family in North Korea, whose grandson, Kim Jong-un, is the current leader and ruler. Putin is still in power after 12 years and has just changed the Russian Constitution to allow him to occupy the throne until 2036.
What do they have in common? That they seized power and transformed the state apparatus, colonizing every chink in its structure, as a basic rule to never again leave power in hands other than their own. This method of creating a new State has kept the Chinese Communist Party in control of the country since 1949, despite internal transformations in its economic model. Likewise, as a lesson for Latin America and future heroes, the Cuban revolution took power in 1959 and had no intention of leaving it, despite the pressures exerted against its government for 65 years.
Having the same conditions as those nations, Maduro’s government has the objective conditions to continue in power until his death. Perhaps the subjective conditions work against it at this juncture (an unexpected and spectacular electoral defeat, for example), but the Cuban revolution resisted that and more.
Another heroic example: Nicaragua and the Ortega-Murillo duo, remain in power, with significant international pressure against them. However, internally, their control over the legislative and judicial power is ironclad. The Armed Forces are theirs and are loyal to them in corruption. The terror apparatus, via the secret police, is highly functional to intimidate the population in general and to expel from the country all those who dissent from the regime or to use the prisons as a home for the toughest opponents.
So, why Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s endorsement of Maduro?
Of the three countries that are Maduro’s “friends” (Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico), Mexico is the only one that has not asked him to present his minutes. Mexico refuses to attend OAS meetings despite being a member of that organization. Colombia and Brazil attended and voted in favor of the resolution demanding that Maduro present his electoral records. Mexico, once again, did not attend that meeting.
Mexico’s absence from OAS meetings to discuss Venezuela says more about Mexico than it says about Venezuela or the OAS.
Mexico does not want to publicly express its opinion about Venezuela’s situation. So far, AMLO and Sheinbaum have repeated the same thing: we will accept whatever the Supreme Court of that country says. As if they did not know that it is an organ of the Venezuelan State 100% taken over by Madurism, it is obvious that it will ratify Maduro’s victory.
But Mexico’s ambassador to Venezuela, Polo De Gyves, is a Bolivarian militant committed to Maduro and, therefore, is the living expression of the closest opinion of what AMLO considers to be Mexico’s correct position: to support Maduro’s electoral victory against all odds.
Mexico’s support for Maduro is justified in many ways. The most common is that the vote was the result of pressure from fascism and imperialism, which, in alliance, managed to confuse a significant portion of the Venezuelan people into voting against Maduro and in favor of the opposition. In other words, there was “a manipulated vote” against Maduro.
But as a State policy, it is unforgivable that Mexico maintains its silence in the face of the imposition of a dictatorship in a Latin American country. There will be more reasons behind this position. External advisors of AMLO’s electoral campaigns state as a fact that he received money from Maduro for his 2018 campaign. That is a strong commitment, and it explains Maduro’s presence at AMLO’s inauguration in December 2018.
But it still would not seem enough for the President to commit the Mexican State to silence in the face of the most egregious electoral fraud in recent Latin American history and the brutal assault on Venezuelan democracy. The underlying motive may be that AMLO has, in his hands, the same political project as Maduro. That is to say, the total colonization of the Mexican State in its organs and institutions to prevent the 4T from losing power in the following ten six-year terms. Does it sound ambitious? It is, but the Cubans achieved it, and Cuba is the political model most admired by the young student López Obrador. Seen this way, more than 60 years after the Cuban revolution, nothing is ambitious but eminently possible. It is also possible that, even with the whole world against him, Maduro can resist the pressures and, entrenched in power and supported by friends like López Obrador, sustain himself in his struggle and achieve a bloody imposition to power.
Finally, AMLO and the 4T intend to entrench themselves in the government apparatus as the best method of eternalizing themselves in power, just like Maduro, Fidel, and Ortega.
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