Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
There has been so much discussion about who would be the best candidates for Morena that the issue of their proposals has been forgotten. Nobody knows for sure how the method evolved. It is known that the first conclusion about the “Morenista vision” of the elections is that what is important is the candidate’s name and then comes the programmatic proposal.
In politics, it was always said that the important thing was the program, and then the candidacy would be defined. In Morena, it is the other way around. First the candidate and then the program. If at all, a minimum program.
The campaigns of the corcholatas, and now the corcholatitas in the rest of the country, revolved around people and not their proposals. In fact, the general idea in Morena is that the pre-candidates do not present proposals or debate among themselves.
This method turns the so-called “campaigns” of Morena into a popularity contest, but not a campaign of proposals or confrontation of ideas. That is why we first saw campaigns like #Es Claudia, #Es Marcelo, #Es Adán, etc. And now we must prepare ourselves for #It’s Clara, #It’s Omar (who?), #It’s Gatell. None of these campaigns, with millionaire expenses in publicity and propaganda, resulted in notable proposals or new benchmarks. Instead, the campaigns served for each of them to have personal media exposure, but none left a mark in the national reflection.
The security crisis was not even touched with the petal of a rose. Ebrard made a “technological” proposal without getting to the bottom of the phenomenon. Much less did he dare to make a modest, lukewarm, or exploratory criticism of the current government’s security policy. Much less did they comment on the health system crisis (if it qualifies as such), which has severely deteriorated during this six-year term. Education and the setbacks suffered by Mexican students were simply conspicuous by its absence. Even though serious studies have shown that the Covid pandemic caused a severe delay in the formation of competent academic, scientific, and technological cadres in Mexico, the Morena presidential pre-candidates preferred not to debate these issues, to the extent of not mentioning them.
Security, health, and education: three key issues that were not touched by Morena’s pre-candidates. And now that the Morena candidacy has been settled, these issues of national interest are still absent. The Morena candidate only devotes herself to criticizing Xóchitl Gálvez and the opposition, with the usual epithets repeated daily in the presidential morning show (mañanera): conservatives, neoliberals, corrupt, traitors, etc. Then, and only then, did we realize what was going on.
In reality, the agenda of the presidential candidacy for 2024 is already elaborated and presented to the public. It is an agenda made daily in the heat of the mañaneras. It is made, day by day, by López Obrador as he speaks, with witticisms, “feelings”, information he reads in the daily press, and what the generals and admirals around him tell him. And his budget for 2024 defines the culmination of his 5-year apprenticeship in government. It increases money to unsustainable levels for social programs, as an electoral investment, in the Armed Forces to manage one-fifth of the national economy and his pharaonic works (Dos Bocas and Tren Maya, mainly). In other words, Morena’s agenda is defined by social programs, the Armed Forces, and major works (refinery and trains). That is the agenda “towards the future” for Mexico.
This agenda, carried out for six more years, would mean the country’s ruin. It is not a budget that can sustain itself with the national economy in its current conditions. Public finances have been looted to finance the construction of the AIFA airport, the Dos Bocas refinery, and the Mayan Train. And, once built, come the eternal subsidies to maintain those white elephants, along with the others in the Armed Forces sector: its airline and regional airports. As all these businesses will be managed by the Armed Forces, who will not be held accountable for National Security reasons (which have little or nothing to do with national security), the country faces the specter of historical subsidies to maintain the fiction of national sovereignty in the hands of the heroic Armed Forces. Under this economic scheme, what Mexico will face is more than a foreign debt; it will be the eternal debt of future generations.
The mañanera is where, in reality, the agenda that Morena will propose for the next six-year term is elaborated. It will be wrapped in a shiny cellophane with a populist discourse. Still, it will not cease to be what it is: a proposal to develop Mexico with foreign debt because it will not achieve its objectives with its own resources. And even less so when the absence of transparency and accountability is the norm for the operation of the Armed Forces.
Since the Armed Forces have their own War Code, through their Code of Military Justice, to judge themselves (and we are seeing it in real-time with the soldiers detained for accusations about the death of Ayotzinapa students), we can be confident that we will never again see money delivered to military hands. Military justice proceeds within the military hierarchical structure. It exists outside of the civilian justice applicable to the rest of Mexicans. López Obrador wanted to strengthen this military “exceptionality”, seeing it as a protection for himself. The method has been elementary and astute: to incentivize the greed of the generals with amounts of tax-free money never before imagined by them. And it seems that they fell into the delicious trap the President of the Republic set.
Morena’s agenda is elaborated in the presidential morning show. And its seminal idea is to deliver the real power of Mexico to the Armed Forces. This is how this six-year term ends.
[email protected]
@rpascoep
Further Reading: