Luis Rubio
All societies develop their myths and beliefs as ways to explain life, but in Mexico, these often fall short of reality. Someone once stated that if Kafka were Mexican, he would have been a narrator of everyday life. In that spirit, here are some observations that say a lot about this land of fantasy without telling a coherent story.
· Mexico lives today in the paradox of a weak government with a hyper-powerful president. The government is incapable of managing a health crisis or distributing medicines, but the president can impose his law in the election of a local government. The country’s infrastructure is falling apart; the streets look like a war zone, and extortion and violence proliferate in more and more regions, but a train that does not connect productive centers or adds value destroys jungles and cenotes by presidential whim without there having been any feasibility assessment.
· The flip side of that same paradox is the international environment in which Mexico exists and from which the government has pretended that it can be abstracted without cost or consequence. While the population’s well-being depends largely on exports, the government does everything possible to complicate ties with the exterior, as if one thing were not related to the other. Instead of promoting and facilitating these ties -both in terms of trade negotiations and investment promotion as well as in the creation of infrastructure and facilitation of daily transactions- violations of the trade treaties keep piling up on which the fluidity of trade depends as well as the very viability of our economy. The claim that an electricity generation plant can be expropriated or prevented from operating without having international repercussions is merely wishful thinking.
· Mexico does not have a food or self-sufficiency problem. For the first time in centuries, the agricultural sector is in surplus and has achieved extraordinary productivity. What Mexico does suffer from, but is seldom addressed directly, is a massive problem of rural poverty. Imposing measures restricting agricultural product exports or imports will not solve rural poverty, which is at the heart of the country’s development dilemma. The next government could begin to meditate on the way in which rural poverty can be attacked since the solution to three of the main challenges facing the country depends on this: social inequality, the quality and focus of education, and social mobility, three aspects of the same problem.
· The recent state elections, in addition to the demonstrations sponsored by the citizenry as well as by the government, respectively, of the past few months, show one of the great contradictions that characterize Mexicans today. Not all Mexicans see themselves as citizens: in a recent survey, only 58% see themselves as such, compared to 42% who see themselves as “people”. In its desire to preserve and nurture the loyalty of the population above any other value or objective, the government has chosen to impede the growth of the economy because, as the previous president of Morena once said, poor people will always be loyal, but that sentiment withers as people prosper. Consequently, it is better to bet on permanent poverty.
· But the above does not solve one of the key enigmas: the frequent distance that exists between organized civil society and ordinary Mexicans. No one who has observed the contrasts between the demonstrations organized by the government and those of civil organizations can doubt that there lies not only a contradiction but also an enormous challenge. The meager turnout in the State of Mexico election speaks for itself.
· Nor is it possible to close one’s eyes to the smallness of the Mexican political class, its lack of vision, or the inability of the opposition to perform its crucial functions. Now that their arrogance and incompetence have been exposed in the State of Mexico, the opposition leaders cannot deny the obvious: they have failed to act as the opposition to the institutional destruction led by the president. The citizenry has been losing one counterweight after another, remaining only protected by a harassed Supreme Court. The sum of arrogance, corruption, and insignificance has left Mexicans observing how the only objective of the opposition is an embassy…
· When one listens to leaders of countries that really aspire to progress, the contrasts with Mexico become all the more visible -and painful. It is not worth talking about places like Singapore, where the clarity of vision is impressive, but India, a nation infinitely poorer and more complex than Mexico, illustrates what is possible. The vocabulary used by officials, businessmen, and political and social leaders speaks for itself: investment, productivity, social mobility, trust, and predictability. Mexico has everything to adopt a similar catalog but worries about the little things that always win out.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -deliberate, contrived, and dishonest- but the myth.” This is how Kennedy characterized the indisposition to advance and prosper. It would seem that he was referring to the Mexico of today…
@lrubiof
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