Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO is overwhelmed by what it means to lose the presidency: he will have to render accounts that are impossible to explain. The time comes for every state leader when he must explain how he spent the money that society entrusted him with, why he made certain decisions that favored some and harmed others, and how many corpses resulted from his mistakes.
The terror of some leaders facing the inevitability of having to justify their actions is particularly strong in the case of those who offered themselves as extraordinary entities or as unique rulers invested with quasi-messianic and imperial powers. Four rulers currently come to mind in this case: Bolsonaro (perhaps the least petulant of all), Trump (already facing his fate in the US courts), Putin (terrified of losing his war and power, he prefers to threaten humanity rather than face his final judgment) and AMLO (the Mexican who, seeing a march of citizens against him, decides to spend public money hand over fist to say: “they love me more and they can neither take me away nor prosecute me…”).
The agony of power drives rulers to desperate or even frankly insane actions. Putin threatens the world with nuclear weapons if Ukraine does not subordinate itself to him. Trump contemplated a nuclear attack on Iran and China to declare a state of emergency in the United States, thus not handing over power to the Democrats. Bolsonaro threatened a coup d’état if his electoral victory was not recognized.
And AMLO, with what instruments does he threaten society to overcome his agony in power and keep his project alive?
His attacks on what he considers to be the opposition to his mandate have increased to hysterical levels. He insults, attacks, devalues, and offends, convinced that the polarisation of society is what suits him to justify maintaining himself as the power behind the throne and to impose his figurehead in the executive. For the time being, he has given up any effort to create any space for reasonable dialogue with other segments of society.
None of this is new. However, it is important to recognize it as a symptom of the method employed by an amateur dictator. Thus, in the entire six-year term, he will not have met with the opposition even once. It will be the six-year period of confrontation.
To accelerate the confrontation, he is militarizing his administration in an accelerated and profound way. The military elements are already administrators, engineers, customs officers, construction workers, aviators, refiners, railway workers, security chiefs, investigators, spies, bankers, and more. In other words, AMLO’s administration has introduced the military institution into every pore of the federal public administration.
Moreover, the military may decide that they can and should administer the country more orderly than politicians and their chaotic parties. That was the thinking that preceded the wave of coups in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Political parties were incapable of building stable political societies, and the military stepped in to impose “order”.
Beyond his public works, the hallmark of AMLO’s six-year term will be the militarization of society and public administration. He orders militarization not to fight organized crime, drug trafficking, and corruption. It is a militarization to control society, to spy on the opposition, and to regulate the conduct of drug traffickers so that they can go about their business and help the ruling party stay in power.
Thus, the three pillars of a new power in Mexico emerge that aims to eternalize itself in power and therefore avoid accountability after the end of AMLO’s six-year term. These three pillars of power are: the Presidency of the Republic, the national army (excluding the navy), and drug trafficking (preferably Sinaloa because the CJNG does not appear to accept subordination as such).
In the six-year term of Miguel de la Madrid, a similar scheme operated as the pillars of a new power, which was operated and controlled by Manuel Bartlett, as Secretary of the Interior and superior authority of the Federal Security Directorate. The executive branch, the army, and the Guadalajara Cartel even operated Mexico’s foreign policy, partnering with the CIA to channel arms to the Nicaraguan Contras in exchange for allowing cocaine to be trafficked northwards for distribution in the United States and Europe.
The current governance scheme promoted by AMLO is the brainchild of his teacher and director of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), including defending the drug economy as an attribute of economic nationalism because it is “our great industry that generates jobs and economic activity in the most depressed areas of the country”. AMLO wants to replicate what Bartlett did in those years, but national and international conditions are very different. Back then, there was no trilaterally approved USMCA/CUSMA/T-MEC with the United States and Canada, nor was there the pressure of social networks as a space for dissemination, analysis, and denunciation of the conduct, in real-time, of those in power. In other words, there was no politically active civil society as there is today.
Today, these three pillars of “new governance” in Mexico also share the agony of the possible loss of power. The existence and effectiveness of this perverse power arrangement are based on the condition and assumption that it will continue for decades to come, with acceptable adjustments to its operation, depending on the replacement of its main actors.
AMLO’s offer to his partners is that he will operate like the real estate cartel in Mexico City: AMLO inaugurated it, Ebrard continued it, then Mancera, and now Sheinbaum. Twenty-four years of running a cartel have brought so many benefits to the leaders of PRD-Morena in the CDMX.
These pillars of a new power structure in Mexico will have to be sustained by acts of electoral imposition on a notoriously restless society. Hence the an imperative need to control, from within power, the electoral arbiter. Otherwise, the 2024 presidential election will be an open competition with unpredictable results, as the ruling party could lose power in the face of an organized and emboldened opposition. That is what AMLO wants to ensure now that the end of his six-year term is approaching: the inevitable continuity of the Federal Executive-Army-Narco cartel.
Without the certainty of continuity that AMLO wants to offer his new allies, any promise could disintegrate. And not only that: their break-up could mean that the cartel’s partners, all of them, could pay dearly for their audacity in a scenario of a new arrangement of power that excludes them. To begin with, there will be a policy of thoroughly curbing the narco, returning the military to its constitutional functions with feasible budgets, and, finally, audits of AMLO’s chaotic and corrupt administration. This scenario will make them pay for the consequences of a six-year term that brings the country closer to a precipice with the danger of falling to the bottom of self-destruction.
All these conditions underlie AMLO’s call for a march. Pure and simple fear of the future without power. It is the agony of the end of power.
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