Antonio Navalón
One of the fascinating things about human beings is how quickly we get used to the unreasonable. It is enough for someone to be in charge. It is enough for someone to have power. It is enough that fear and obedience are generated in us so that the craziest, most unsuspected things, as long as they are carried out by the one in charge, acquire a sense of normality around us. For those in power, nothing is worse than forgetting that everything passes and everything remains and that they are not just a flower of a day, but that, by the system – with or without democracy – power has a fixed term and a duration. However, that is not enough to prevent them from doing the most incredible barbarities and living in the purest of irrationalities. The problem is not them; the problem is the rest of us who, time and again, wait for either common sense to flourish or for something to happen – a bolt of lightning or something unprecedented – to wake us up from the nightmare that certain powers become.
On July 1, four years ago, the people of Mexico decided they wanted a President, an administration, and a particular way of governing. And they did so as never seen before and with an overwhelming majority. Those who follow me know that I have refused to be a part of the procession of permanent criticism and the fact of living exclaiming: oh, how dare he! However, that does not mean that everything the President does is right. It only means that it is useless to divide ourselves into two large groups in which, on the one hand, some follow him beyond all reason while others oppose him beyond all reason. Nevertheless, in life, there comes a time – as happens to us in our homes – when it is essential to be accountable when it is important to know what happened to the investments we made and when we have to know if what we sold as the ideal was really the best for our loved ones and us.
I do not doubt the good feelings harbored by the presidential initiatives. I have every doubt that those feelings will ultimately be crowned with success. Among other things, because we have entered a game in which it is more important to be right on behalf of thirty million voters than to listen to what reason dictates what can and cannot be done. We have reached a situation in which it is not only the fact – and I will not dwell on this for long – of proposing to dismantle the Statue of Liberty because of the Julian Assange case, but that we really do not want anyone to hold us accountable or to realize that everything we are doing and the resources we are using on behalf of everyone to carry out the most important projects of the six-year term have a dubious practical application.
I recognize that inaction in the construction and collective development of significant works – especially during the last thirty years – are some factors that have prevented the country from moving forward. But we must recognize that doing a major work often does not mean having made a significant contribution to the country’s development. I hope to see the Felipe Angeles International Airport full of airplanes. I hope to see the Dos Bocas Refinery’s capacities need to be expanded, and I hope to see the Tren Maya trains overflowing. But, in the meantime, all I see is a confrontation and attrition that goes beyond all reason. And, what is worse, any reasonable doubt, any expression of fear or bewilderment about what is being done, is answered with the purest disqualification, and the reasons of those who express it are attacked with full force. This happens simply because in Mexico, the powers-that-be, by definition, do not make mistakes and cannot make mistakes.
Enemies are everywhere, and friends continually celebrate the confrontation and this kind of dialectic civil war we live in. Meanwhile, we are murdered on every corner; more women are killed every day, we have more internal problems, and our children are increasingly abandoned to their fate. In this regard, I don’t even want to consider what we have done with the country’s educational package and offerings. Have you noticed that – because of the pandemic on the one hand and the respective policies on the other – the education and public health chapters have disappeared from our lives?
As far as the health chapter is concerned, I am not only referring to the continuous supply of vaccines or to the data on the evolution of Covid-19 that are repeatedly presented to us. I am referring to the fact that the time in our country when one could count on a pension when one got old has been left in the trunk of memories. At this moment, for the regime, the pensions it gives away without asking for anything in return – such as those that revolve around providing funds to young people who do not study or work – are the maximum axis of its political legitimacy. We need to promote a public health policy that employs those Mexicans who are prepared for it and helps us have a better life.
In education, I would like to know how many children stopped going to school due to the pandemic and the measures adopted by the current administration. I would also like to know how much it will cost us to have stopped giving English and technology classes to those who hold the future of the country in their hands. If we don’t do something about it, our children will be disconnected from the universal language and the language that governs the business world. But they will also be isolated from all the technological progress, a world that is evolving daily. In the corrupt and impunity-ridden Mexico, most children did have breakfast and lunch. They received what they were not given at home through the State or the schools. Now they only receive ideology if they go to school at all, but they have neither protein nor food.
With the death of health and education, we are killing the welfare state, and that is fine because when it was the time of the Fabian Society of London, of the Bertrand Russells, Clement Attlee’s, and all those who imagined a happier world, it was supposed that, at most, human beings would live sixty-five years. Now, however, with the extension of life expectancy, no state or budget can support pensions or public health care for the elderly. But from that, to completely eliminate our public health care and education care, from our perspective, there is a considerable stretch.
Society breaks down and ceases to have a future when it cannot integrate most of its components. Today, the majority still seems to follow the wishes of the President and the 4T. But the problem is that majorities are not only conformed by numbers but also by moral expression. And in that sense, Mexico is a broken country. Mexico cannot be built on the exclusionary basis of a single ideology or a single approach. The country is built by all of us. And today, many of us can no longer fit in.
We are coming to the end of this stage. We are going on summer vacation amid a situation in which the cost of the great dreams and the fact of being part of the history of President López Obrador can be realized. If one adds his Airport – by the way, still a virgin – if one adds his refinery – by the way, also still a virgin – and if one counts his Mayan Train, the cost of those illusions and dreams rises to an investment of more than five hundred and ninety billion pesos. Naturally, it is worth dreaming. Life would be nothing without dreams. But the problem is that sometimes dreams end up in nightmares, and, in any case, every dream must lead to a possible awakening. And the awakening of all that investment made – I will not fall into the vulgarity of comparing it with examples such as what it would have meant to complete the Texcoco Airport and advance the country’s development by twenty years – has to yield results.
Clearly, in this six-year term, no one can dare to ask for the accounts to come out and be balanced. I will not ask if there is a scale of values or under what ideals the nation is governed, since everything is dictated by the designs and desires of the President. The account that matters is that of illusion. The detail that counts is the country’s purification, no matter what is destroyed to achieve it.
Then there is the fact that the President will visit the White House on Tuesday. A hostile White House. It is not a White House with the warmth of his friend Donald Trump, who treated us as equals and whom we even thanked, in a press conference, for treating us as human beings. It is a White House that embodies interventionism and all the defects present in the United States, and there are still many pending issues to be resolved.
That’s the game at the moment. No limits. Neither the people nor the President has been able to set limits; these will be formed by history. But history usually charges the bill with two elements: blood and accounts. The blood is in the streets. And up to here, the accounts do not work out and are very complicated.
