José Antonio Polo Oteyza
The Armed Forces as a political threat. A requiem
Now, the chaos provoked by this inept premeditation raises the need -in fact, as never before- for a principle of armed order, and, since the government is finite, institutional dismantling is also the correlate of militaristic zeal. It is worth remembering that, in the case of Mexico and its army, a balance has prevailed until now that has integrated a respectful distance between the civilian and military spheres, an endogamous condition in its internal processes (opacity, if one prefers), a State doctrine above the partisan choices, and effective action in cases of emergency. It is not bad, except that it is a sin for a tawdry Bonapartism to have one’s own political accreditation and not that of the boss. It is even more sinful if it derives from social actions and loyalty to the Constitution. Hence, the insults when they were opposition were transmuted into poisoned appeasements from the power; to co-opt them, yes, of course, but above all, to “transform” them.
In fact, there were parallel scorns towards the police and the Armed Forces in the beginning. Still, they took different directions depending on their malleability: towards the former, the disappearance of their federal expression, budget cuts to local corporations, and appointments of military personnel in several of them. As for the latter, it seems that the conditions were already in place for what is emerging today, and perhaps the idea that “the civilians have done very badly”, combined with Lopez Obrador’s disdain for the civil service, clicked. Perhaps, the fact is that an unbridled militarization -economic, functional, and operational- was inaugurated from the lie that in the past, there was a “war of extermination” and from the manifest intention to eliminate them (“if it were up to me, I would eliminate the Army”), and that the chosen path was to drown them with functions and money… to turn them into something else. To their greater sorrow, if any, the process took off with a constitutional counter-reform on the militarization of security which, despite its apparent pitfalls, was applauded by members of the progressives who used to stage a farce as soon as a secondary law project in that sense appeared.
As in any other issue, the path was to eliminate “hindrances”, such as counterbalancing and complementing a federal police force, diluting the need for coordination with other security agencies, and not mentioning any possible external scrutiny. Not only that, but they also formed them in a mixture of automatic imprisonment, the collapse of local police, the absence of the National Human Rights Commission, and en route to crushing prosecutors and conflict with the Judiciary, as if shortcuts in politics were free, same as runaway budgets, or entering the political quagmire with the spotlight on them. Thus, the way was paved for full complicity with at least part of a “high command” that, as with other government appointments, was assembled with those who were not on the usual promotion lists.
And in exchange for this lethal menu, they saddled the new pampered ones with the responsibility for public security, with their hands tied. That is what the money is for, to load the dice, and with the money came more unconnected responsibilities, as if they were commands in a tavern. Since the beginning of the administration, there were plenty of images of how the soldiers retreated while the assassins went about with impunity and armed insolence. Well, there is no way that this does not seem to be a match between discipline and satiety.
MORENA criticized what it longed for. Today, they use the soldiers and marines, their capacities, their prestige, and their discipline, and use them when and how it is convenient, as a support, as a pretext, as a parapet, and as a campaign advertisement. It is not only that the Armed Forces replace police and all kinds of civil authorities, nor are they granted many contracts, but that they prop up López Obrador’s political pretensions. It is wrong to think that the extreme militarization imposed today will strengthen the Armed Forces. On the contrary, they will be hurt because their structure and processes are incompatible with the political function of the Armed Forces, with the role of public security: we know that our police forces are not prepared, but they could be; an Army, never. They will be hurt because they were ordered to fail to comply with the constitutional responsibility of public security that was given and to simulate a “guard”; in reality, soldiers with a different uniform and administrative platypus with a deliberately blurred identity and doctrine, because that is how it serves the political group that instructed it. They will come out soiled and diminished because the carloads of money without any oversight rots almost anyone. Their new facet as contractors, a marshmallow of public interest, corporate interest, and private interests, is not only incompatible with but opposed to the role of guarantors of the State. They will leave with less prestige because the overload of responsibilities and media exposure means getting into the political arena, and in whatever regime, and with whatever opacity, they will have to be accountable in some way. The most serious thing is that their most important capital is in its social valuation, and with the perversity of imposing a partisan identification on them, there will be neither confetti nor cotton candy to compensate for the disrepute. The Armed Forces are not strengthened; they are transformed into an appendix of a force conceived to disunite Mexicans, the opposite of what the State they are obliged to defend represents. After more than three years, we already miss the Armed Institute that used to embody institutionalism.
It is important to underline another misunderstanding: there is not a failed security strategy but rather a political plan that has been successful so far, which demands that the Armed Forces lower their guard in the face of other forces, also armed, that threaten the security of the State, and to advance (with their “guard” included) in the direction of their plan, to a vile trap because just as the democratic institutions were used to reach power and then attack them, they too are being pushed to the ultimate and prosaic sacrifice of immolating themselves as political fuses on the altar of instrumental support to their executioner. Perhaps the military will disregard the shipwreck, or not… and who knows which is worse, but by breaking the constitutional placenta and manifesting a personal and partisan loyalty, there could well come a succession of marriages of opportunity with the natural discomforts of such arrangements.
What a pity to go from a legitimacy with justice well valued in historical and regional terms to a shameless barter of flattery and favors, which will only make sense for certain weaknesses. To end up a praetorian guard of a politically hysterical ambition is not a privilege for almost anyone, let alone those who come from the privilege of safeguarding the nation. Perhaps the republican principle of civilian primacy is already on its last legs, and soon it will not be known who is pulling and who is pushing, and who is guarding what, to whom, and for whom. And then there will be another regime.
Requiem for the police: a community with declining institutions is a community increasingly violent and vulnerable to violence. It is not only the police, but if it were only about them, the abandonment by federal and local governments, the mistreatment by society, and organized crime attacks would make them increasingly useless and less willing to serve. Those immaculate flaming who never risk their necks for anything are not moved by the fact that one of the effects of the mantra “justice kills law” is its literal realization of the police collapse, marked by the murder of an average of one policeman a day. After all, with 35,000 murders a year, who cares about a few hundred more if they are corrupt and inept by definition. When the meaning of the extended militarization in which they have embarked us is felt, perhaps the miracle will occur that the country will miss the Armed Forces of yesteryear and the police forces, or rather, the idea of a police force.
Banality is exalted. Whirlwinds.
To insist: the government is so weak that, in contrast to all its grandiloquence, it can only aspire to a right to a set aside in that skein of extortions called Mexico. Attention, it is not only that it cannot do more, but that it cannot imagine it. This intellectual emptiness, this creeping arrogance, has the pretensions of a project when it cannot even go through essential political complexities such as plurality, technique, and silence. Many people take the bait, perhaps because they confuse the capacity to harm with the ability to govern. Still, it is worth remembering that they are different things, especially so as not to fall into absurdities that circulate as revealed truth, such as the one that we are heading towards a one-man country. It was he who warned, from the summit of formal power, that justice would be above the law, confident that he would have the monopoly of arbitrariness. Instead, his government puts the mortal blow to a State that was built as a superior dimension for arbitration and determination, leaving out in the open an unmitigated food chain, where the victims are also predators, willing to both lacerating resignations and cathartic lynchings (people can form an armed band so that the tortilla does not go up, and also queue endlessly for a non-existent job from a chieftain who never arrives).
A good part of those who move into absolute power simulates obedience because they took the measure of what was coming and negotiated franchises and impunities. In addition to the ducking in the face of crime and organized crime and the denaturalization of the Armed Forces, new margins of legalized arbitrariness are added for the administration of automatic prisons and diffuse amnesties. A tollbooth was assaulted for “the cause” (always singular because all are one and one is all) is a good metaphor for the shamelessness with which an abusive and prostituted government charges the extorted it should defend, pays the extortionists it should confront, and then fills its mouth with “social justice”. Kafka explained it well: “The sentence is not passed suddenly: the process gradually turns into a sentence.” For the processes have been incubating for at least two decades, since the grand march to the presidency began, and the sentences and permits and exemptions fall like ripe fruit. But it is not only the government; in a country where a sentence can take years, there is general rejoicing for the expeditious sentences, with each citizen a prosecutor or judge on their marks to go against “guess who”… although each one looks up and out of the corner of their eye imagines their respective sword of Damocles.
In addition to the military threat, the summary and public processes, with or without jail, have served well to spread fear in broad social groups, build enemies and kill opposition from the cradle. That is why the extension of crimes that merit automatic imprisonment; the capture of prosecutors; the “Institute to return to the people what was stolen” (the “Indepuro”); a law of eminent domain that violates the presumption of innocence and due process and imposes “precautionary” seizures. It does not take long for the brigades of “citizen denouncers” to appear, an ideal figure to channel the viciousness of the anonymous, those who have their self-esteem on the floor and their hatred in the stratosphere and who long to melt into a viscous and violent mass. When offices and basements are the same, it is not uncommon for diverse resentments to end up in the same herd. It is politics as hunting and hunting as spectacle. The joke is to move comfortably between clemency and punishment, both exemplary, and blur the lines between pedagogical admonition, political cramp, and the investigation file.
Arbitrariness (above all, the fabrication of “traitors”), militarism, and permanent distraction (which includes the deliberate production of emergencies; how can we forget the queues to buy gasoline for a false crusade against huachicol or the classist provocations to provoke the classists), nothing tones down in the least the defunding of the State. What remains then is a condition of permanent exaltation that justifies itself and is intended to be exported to society.
Gustave le Bon, who studied the behavior of crowds, said that mass leaders “are recruited especially from among the ranks of morbidly nervous, excitable, half-disturbed people, who are on the verge of madness”. At times, it seems that le Bon wrote a manual: “The speaker who wishes to move a crowd must use violent statements, expressed in abusive terms. He must exaggerate, repeat, avoid any temptation to present reasonable evidence”. In our case, the production of lies in torrents dilutes their impact, which calls for more abuse and more significant exaggeration, as the wise Frenchman explains it to us.
Despite wrapping results as objectives, the conditions to stay in power are, indeed, objectives of political action that, now, are a terrible match for an ineptitude that probably has no parallel in the history of Mexico. The essential contradictions of López Obrador are that he is someone with popularity but anti-popular, cornered by the expectations he created, and whose fulfillment conditions he destroyed. In this sense, political permissiveness with strong actors, formal or informal, or criminals, is inevitable, which must be sold as an original political option, courageous, and usually with the adjective “social”.
As already explained, power, in this case, reproduces and deepens the conditions of its impotence, and if a certain intelligence accompanied authoritarianism, it would accumulate diverse resources and manage the discourse. López Obrador, on the other hand, disguises his impotence with a double and complementary message: the zealots’ siege to the weak hindrances and the conciliatory messages to the real powers, in reality, a pitiful surrender in advance, analogous to the one he demands in the political arena. But the stridency does not make up for capacities, and if the expectations were inflated to win, it is convenient to deflate them to govern, especially if the weakness came from before; it is enough to recognize that no governor really governs his state, most of them having become administrators of contracts.
Whirlwinds: And what to expect from the Mexico of looting and criminal spheres intertwined with the different remaining forms of the State? There are many answers and an infinite number of scenes, some of them admonishing, such as those of the overturned trailer, with the driver agonizing in the cab, while some vultures -not the conservatives to which López Obrador alludes; others, without quotation marks and without a mother-, ignoring him, rush to loot the truck. In the scenes of the looting, we do not see poverty or suffering victims but a herd of empowered wretches. One more scene among countless others, like those of the soldiers as hostages -and there will also be many noble and heroic ones-, scenes of lives that pass through agreements, confrontations, and overlaps and that, in an unrestrained and often violent way, have communities and expressions of government and businesses with criminal groups, without being able to distinguish the location of each and everyone in the diffuse map of our laws, rules, links, and transgressions. The forces and interests are liquid. Each one defends something one day, and then not. Incomprehensible reactions, imaginary accommodations, one-day bosses, unforgivable subtleties, and inconsequential catastrophes. It is evident that the absence of the rule of law and violence are the slide of our ungovernability. To think that, in this mess, someone is calling the shots is, to put it mildly, naïve.
To be continued…
The author is the Director of Causa en Común, an NGO specializing in security and police in Mexico.