Antonio Navalón
Before, they used to buy or assassinate candidates. Today we have reached a narco-democracy in which what they do is that their candidates win and do it convincingly in the electoral processes.
Unfortunately, nowadays, the word “war” is in fashion. The war in Ukraine; the war in the most radical civilian approaches of some countries – until now leaders of the world, such as the United States – the fight to stay alive within the pandemic unleashed two years ago with a virus of still suspicious and unknown provenance but which has managed to bring the whole of humanity to its feet. There are many reasons to know that we are going through times in which, it can be concluded, humanity is exhausted. But of all wars, as always, the most important is our own. They are the individual and the collective. As history has proven, the worst wars, the bloodiest, and the most vicious are always civil wars.
I understand that we are tired of the spectacle of social insensitivity we are going through in the country. In Mexico, nothing surprises because everything is normal. We were accustomed to always following the current marked from that unassailable pedestal which means the Presidency and the figure of the Tlatoani. And we were so in the sense that – regardless of the truth and often against common sense – the only thing that mattered was where the Tlatoani wanted to direct the winds of history. We live in times in which, every day and every week, the intensity of the civil war is raised two notches. And it is not a war – as it is pretended to be – ideological, of models, of conformation, or visions of development of the country in confrontation. It is not because some seek the welfare and improvement of the majority and others try to maintain all the privileges that – for example, and to speak of the last few years – the dominant kleptocracy has installed to gross and absolutely unbearable positions.
We are talking about the natural right to be able to speak with whole reason about what is better or how one understands that the way to govern the country should be for the good of all, at least under the legitimate scope of the vision of each individual, even if that inevitably leads to confrontations of all kinds. You can read hundreds of columns every day and hear many opinions that insist on the same thing repeatedly. Criticisms of the political and economic situation are clearly aligned and directed as a kind of covert civil war, which rather than being carried out with physical shootings – which we also have this kind of wars and which are breaking all sorts of records day by day – are given as a flurry of words. We have reached such a point that we have managed to sink entirely into the swamp of recrimination, suspicion, and condemnation of any possibility of an agreed understanding.
In Mexico today, the word “pact” is cursed. It is not wanted. It is not sought. And even though there are stagings that apparently seek dialogue, they are nothing more than simulations to pretend that we are still a democracy where everyone is listened to. We made yesterday the great killer of the present. Yesterday is to blame for all the dead of today. And while we are all children of our yesterday – as happens in human life – there comes a time when we come of age and with it the responsibilities that go with it. Both in the lives of individuals and countries, there comes a time when everyone must answer for the consequences of their actions, for their mistakes, or their successes.
This debate, this coming of age, has no place in Mexico. Here we continue to have yesterday as the great culprit for everything we do wrong today. With that assumption, it is impossible to build relationships since, deep down, that is the excellent alibi for not modifying anything but also for – as yesterday killed everything and brought the consequences of its perversion a hundred years forward – no one can ask for accountability or demand results or responsibilities in the short term.
We live in a period of wars taking place in different parts of the world and in parallel. But, the war that worries me the most and in which I do not believe we can continue to subsist in the war that – accompanied by that drunkenness of words that takes place every morning – is developing in Mexico.
What does Mexico’s war consist of? Simply in hijacking any moral reason to put a different vision of the country first. From seven to nine o’clock in the morning – or until whatever hours are necessary – this hijacking is fed by whoever holds the country’s Executive Power office. Moreover, when laws are passed in Congress, the only thing that is done is to elevate to legal and legislative technique the wills expressed a few days before in those morning press conferences in which not only the country’s agenda is really configured, but also collective or individual actions are judged and, above all, the line is drawn that only the unique vision of history and the almost divine mandate – rather than the democratic one received – gives the natural right to be correct and not even to allow debate. And everything happens in the face of what is a steamroller of truth and before which none of us can resist or challenge.
Where is the country going, to which area of interests and influences does it belong? Besides yesterday and the governments of the past, who is responsible for all the present failures? The dead that fall under the bullets of the greatest crisis of violence known in the Republic since the revolution and the following years, to which moment of history do we point them, to the decade of the eighties, nineties, or the beginning of the XXI century? What is certain is that those deaths are not from 2022, but instead, they are deaths inherited from all the consequences and errors committed before this administration.
We are no longer facing rectification – via ideological confrontation or substitution of the way of doing politics – which is the country’s reality. We are facing the permanent and detailed recounting of the structural and historical damage done in the past by those who were there before and which explains, time and again, everything that is happening in all fields and areas. They explain education, health, energy, economics, and finance failures.
Mexico is a great country. And as we have always known, Mexico is far superior to its problems or the mistakes – and look how gigantic they can sometimes be – of its rulers. The problem is that today Mexico is on the way to a world that is not only exhausted by the accumulation of crises but that -whether it knows it or not- is defining its immediate future with the blow, in some cases, of bombs and missiles as is happening in Europe and some other matters with the clash of definitions of energy models, reinforcement or weakening of the areas of citizen coexistence and democratic expression.
Mexico does well by taking care of its own problems first before getting involved in others’. However, we must be aware that our problems are already part of a unity, especially in matters concerning the structural deficiencies of security and economic conformation with one of the blocs that has formed the world and that, for the moment, is the bloc that co-leads the world. This bloc is North America. The successes obtained by the non-neoliberal ideology – which in some cases can be cataloged as populist and in others does not fit the application of this model, as is the case of our country – have caused the continent’s dynamics to change. Mexico cannot be considered a populist country since one of the keys to populism is expanding and increasing the State and the government’s size to exert more control over societies. However, what the 4T has done is to slim down the government – except in terms of social militancy and programs that directly address social subsidies and gifts. Social programs are not embedded within the State or even as part of the Welfare Ministry but are part of a missionary doctrine of resources that the State uses to make a work of social awareness and dependence in the name of a trend and not of a country.
Now Chile begins. Venezuela is on its way to finding a solution given the global crisis to its crisis with the United States. And the United States of America is looking for its own solution in a situation of division as deep as the one it is going through throughout the country. And us? We have enough to feed the silent civil war that is being forged every day in the country. It is a place where words kill legitimacy more than bullets, while bullets have managed to reach unimagined records.
There are some who are neither as good nor as hopeful in the peaceful conduct of the country. They are the ones who grow and increase their influence permanently over our lives under cover of the political and democratic crisis and the situation in which we live. Before, they used to buy or assassinate candidates. Today we have reached a narco-democracy in which what they do is that their candidates win and do it convincingly in the electoral processes. What is in the middle and what accompanies this situation is of no importance because no one is looking there.
