José Antonio Polo Oteyza
“Believing suspicions and denying truths,
is what in the world is called absence,
fire in the soul, and hell in life.”
Lope de Vega
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
W. B. Yeats
Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed,” was said in Rome to clarify that no trace was to be left of their African enemy. Mexico is undergoing a massive and comprehensive process of destruction. The difference with Carthage is that here the destroyer came from within. The revocation/ratification ends the first stage of a presidency that was assumed as the overdue payment of a national debt, that of not having voted for López Obrador earlier. It is essential to see it and to see it well: impatience accumulated over a long time, which lousy fortune crossed with the persistence of a radical and radically inept political group, which is weakened by citizenship and strengthened by clienteles; a group that, between the cracks of intellectual narrowness, understands and assumes that it will only be able to perpetuate itself by trampling on freedoms, mutilating the private and social sectors, hijacking the misery of millions, razing the institutions of the Republic (one less institution is one less slope), taking arbitrariness to new depths, and selling itself as an impossible political Siamese, all-powerful and victim of all.
What follows in this essay is there for all to see, which does not mean that everyone sees it, believes it, understands it or cares about it. It is only an attempt to contribute to the balance sheets of what López Obrador and MORENA have meant for Mexico.
Intellectual emptiness and profitable ineptitude. A peculiar catechism. The language of impotence.
Unlike other political projects, today’s force is destroying the country from the formal power (with its evident communicating vessels with other worlds and underworlds) has no identity, contours, or ideas. Symptom and cause of partisan mediocrity, MORENA has not produced a discourse, a page,
a paragraph that is not a jumble of absurdities and cheesiness. Ideology? To begin with, what we call ideology tends to be a jumble of judgments and prejudices, adulterated by vices and tempered by values. In more than a few cases, it is an alibi for projecting an ambition, a personality, and a pretext for revenge and settling scores. The case of the government and its party is extreme, not because they do not have an ideology but because they have not generated a single viable proposal for development, coexistence, and security. Since there are plenty of words but no ideas, everyone hears the cryptic sentence or silence what they want to hear. And since there are no plans, except for three or four secondary objectives orbiting around the main one, which is that the one in charge continues to be in control, the government is a palimpsest that is rewritten every day to the rhythm of reflexes and prejudices that must be interpreted and then sifted through fanaticisms, expediency, fear and, of course, business anxiety. These attributes used to cross and link to experience, talent, good faith, and a sense of governance. Not anymore.
The case of the government and its party is extreme, not because they do not have an ideology but because they have not generated a single viable proposal for development, coexistence, and security.
In this vaudeville called MORENA, where abjectness is a new patriotic value, the bench is a pack, and the governorships are satrapies. There, the illuminated inept assumes that the disasters are tasks accomplished. More clearly: in politics, from certain levels of ineptitude and moral decrepitude, in this case widely accredited, disasters are not accidents but requirements. Therein lies the primary contradiction, the strength and weakness of MORENA… and the tragedy for the country.
Furthermore: they despise the State because they do not even sense it, and they destroy the government because, since it is complicated, it gets in their way, but they do know that only in shattered countries can remain in power confraternities like theirs of astonishing ignorance, which they also sense, hence the resentment. Premeditated dependence is a rounded political perversity, but it is nonetheless rational if that is what is wanted. In a happy marriage between incapacity and the “objective”, in this case, to tighten the yoke: it is enough to induce poverty, famine, scarcity, and to garnish with lies and fear. The specific categories of achievements and effects, strategy, and tactics become meaningless, so the meaning of words must be adjusted. The regime of the Cuban criminal colony that López Obrador admires so much is an excellent example of how the Orwellian abuse of antiphrases that were already imported along with enslaved doctors, there and here, collapse is by design; poverty is purity and waste is austerity; where the right is left, and the bottom is the top; where power is opposition, militarism is the people, the abusive is the victim and crime is difficult coexistence; where claudication is peace, justice is adjusted, and rights are the hindrances of a period to be buried (a verb which in these lands is not usually a metaphor). Everything in the sun and crooked, but where everything fits.
Here is a specific example of demagogic exploitation of one’s ineptitude: it is not likely that the government wanted to sink the economy, but there were more important things, and now that they have indeed sunk it, they found advantages: they tie stagnation with “austerity”, they add fuel to the confrontation with the “conservatives”, they sell the relative value of the money they give away, and open the door to a forward flight with a greater radicalization. If a few decades ago the government began to sell companies -the “grease”, it was said-, in this lower stage of neoliberalism, what is called for is to break the skeleton, the economic structure, as a side, but welcome effect of the stupid decisions that must be justified.
It is necessary to underline that there is no indication that in any decision process, any intelligent design is inserted (they do not play chess, obviously); on the contrary, indifference to the damage is evident from the outset, and the brutalization of the language is even more ridiculous, and even more critical the instinct to profit politically from each misstep. Indifferent to their irresponsibility (or rather, “anti-responsibility”), the energy left over after the destruction is used to win the blame game and find the pretendedly triumphant angle. Thus, with a government that sees no shame in kowtowing to Trump or criminal groups and diminishing institutional resources, the impositions of strong actors will multiply, wrapped as agreements and presented as strategies.
MORENA’s government could have a special mention in The School of the Upside Down World, by
Eduardo Galeano, a truly leftist man, with some pearls, for example, on the new catechism and its benevolence towards gangs of murderers: “The Zetas…are victims of a sick society that did not know how to provide support… They are the first victims of a corrupt, capitalist, neoliberal, neo-liberal, sick and failed government” (July 2011). “With which cartel should AMLO’s government start? Well, the PRI is already leaving. I think the others will be less difficult” (July 2018). “With the migration issue… President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is between a sword and a wall” (June 2019).
It is not a minor thing to affirm that the Zetas were victims pushed to betray the State, become the bodyguards of a psychopath, and then become independent and throw a tsunami of blood over the country. Furthermore, to affirm it, in 2011, a time when the hundreds were already massacring migrants; in two of those events alone, they murdered at least 265 migrants. And to hear it from Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who assumes to be a defender of migrants, even though his priority is to defend López Obrador, who gave the order to deploy the army to help Trump and Biden to detain those who shortly before he had welcomed with open arms. The fact is that there will be many victims. Still, some are more equal than others and, according to his pastoral understanding, for father Solalinde, the essential victim is only one, regardless of him being in power today.
When a government is particularly inept, it is challenging to elucidate premeditations, but in this case, the effects of the ecumenical embrace with the sewer were well thought out and have already crystallized in the foul play that criminal groups deployed in favor of MORENA during the past local elections.
The condescendence from the top of the State is well understood, even by the paramilitary group, as well as by the military, the police, as well as by the always latent mob. There, arrogance and resentments of reserved prognosis are incubated.
It has been said in a thousand ways and all tones, and it will be necessary to insist: it is as far from the intelligence as from the imagination; the government can only manage to sell a present based on unconnected remnants of pasts that never existed. When there is power, and still, there is impotence, pretexts and distractions tend to be constructed, in this case, stapled to a psychological propensity: the country must be divided into enemies to pursue and allies to be bought. The vocal support (the “social communication”, as it was called before) is a systematic lie. A shameful paradox arises when a country is told, with meridian clarity, “we lie because we want to, we lie because we can, spread the lies,
explain them, prove them; it is better this way because then the measure of our impunity is also clear”.
To not avoid comparisons: neither a defeatist PAN, nor an uninspired PRD, nor a PRI compressing itself to its cheapest expression, would achieve becoming the worst of national politics, precisely that for which many of those who nowadays complain about voted, always deserving, a heroic opposition.
To parasitize the State, to jibarize the government.
The different expressions of the State constitute a fragile but essential piece of the puzzle, by some political influence, for some operative capacity, for information and budgets, for their symbolic power – it is not for nothing that they kill Mayors. The state deployment is, without exception, arthritic; the institutions, out of breath due to the penultimate cutback; stunned by endless demands, the police, the clinic, the school. What remains is what had to be broken (by design or by effect, it doesn’t matter anymore), and that’s why Mexico has suffered an assault on the State from its top. What happened happened, and several were lucky and found, in the new wave, an opportunity for promotion and revenge. There are two main incentives: understood as carrion, the State, in its expression of government, is a cash register to bring money wherever it is ordered; it is also a space where the squares are bleachers for the enthusiastic followers. Only a triumphant resentment could win over most of the upstarts transformed today into public officials, and MORENA political operators, in charge of their mediocrity, are more than a suspicion. It is about the staff as conveniently dysfunctional and grateful, especially after the previous system failed to do them justice since it maintained some meritocratic values in government or academia or science and filtered out or hindered the promotion of people with more or less obvious technical or intellectual deficiencies. Perhaps the bitterness will never go away, but for the time being, they look happy and proud while they execute edicts to shrink or disappear policies and programs, autonomies, supports, and budgets, many of them aimed at destroying the middle class from which they come. It had to be the worst of such type that would come to betray it, celebrating every order they receive with pack tones and mañanitas in Congress.
When the institutions are prostituted so that they only squeak for political directives, the analysis and supervision sections collapse. The transmission belt between the command and the operators is as short as a message. Or not even, since there are already too many over-understandings and the dwarfs, aware that their statures are now public virtues, have painstakingly undertaken the demolition. In fact, the movement knows no inhibitions and displays ignorance as a proud banner. Not to mention the integrity and honor that Max Weber referred to concerning politics as a vocation; in the antipodes, the Mexican government turned into a feast of rancorous clowns, disguised as civil servants, legislators, governors, or managers, who choke with the vicarious power of the courtier. At the same time, they enlighten us about the most profound meanings of homeland and loyalty, understood as credits in favor of their boss, the chief paymaster, and collector.
One can discourse on the psychological motivations of a politician sawing the floor of everyone. Still, the fact is that there is no way that from these ruins emerges the possibility of a minimally effective government, and even less so with increasing levels of violence, poverty and inequality. Mexico has a president and a government only in the most formal sense of the word. However, this does not imply immobility either, as can be seen in the useless comings and goings of the military and various operators, leaving a trail as noisy as it is empty.
Those who compare the above with the PRI have no idea. Today’s caricature has nothing to do with a system programmed to co-opt and assimilate, dilute and channel, reconcile and balance, and its most extreme resources remained there, in the extreme. When it began to use force was because the system was weakening, and, by using it, it weakened itself more. MORENA does not even have a collegiate of pragmatists or intelligent fanatics capable of organizing something. If the Mexican State got away from the possibility of governability by omissions when there was a government, what came after December 2018 defies any capacity for synthesis. This is an on-the-fly account of the gaps that are still defended or criticized as if they were really public policies: changing the uniform of soldiers is not a security policy; destroying programs and throwing checks is not social policy; dumping resources into absurd projects is not investing in development; sinking public hospitals and the distribution of medicines is not health policy; eliminating evaluations is not educating; the lumpenization of the ministry of Education (SEP) and the Sovietization of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) is not to support education or science; destroying the environment is not an environmental policy; twinning with religious groups is not respecting laicism; crouching down in front of a fascist and facing a democrat, defending dictators, insulting friendly nations and hiding from the world does not constitute a foreign policy, at least not one worthy of this country.
To be continued…
The author is the Director of Causa en Común, an NGO specializing in security and police in Mexico.