Antonio Navalón
It is well known that peoples’ memory – made up of groups of human beings – is fragile and frightening. Collective memory is the habitat in which we all have to live concerning each other. We tend to forget what is wrong and what has happened and remember it only when we can or should collect it, although sometimes we don’t even remember it in those circumstances. The time has come to bring out and pay the bills. All the historical opportunity, everything we said, everything we were promised, and all the work we trusted in have expired, and it is time to see if what was promised was fulfilled and to demand everything that has to be paid for. Therefore, as it happens with the virtue of others, it is necessary to accelerate everything and establish conditions that prevent the recount and the demand to pay what is owed.
The most important and promising six years – quantitatively and qualitatively – that the country has known in the last decades have ended. The republic, sustained under the most significant democratic support obtained in its history, had the opportunity to change everything. We could have initiated a path of rectification that would have meant the beginning of a new era in our country without it meaning a de facto amnesty against the bad guys, with whom we had installed a system of kleptocracy between some and others, some by action and others by omission, and others by not wanting to see it. We had the opportunity to establish a mechanism similar to the Truth Commission presided over by Desmond Tutu, which – thanks to the enormous talent of Nelson Mandela – avoided a bloodbath at the moment of reconverting the exploiting white minority against the black majority who, in exchange for their future, had to sacrifice their instinct for revenge and their pain, at least for a while. We had an unbeatable opportunity. However, we did not take advantage of it.
Is the country better or better off than it was in 2018? What happened to education? Since José Vasconcelos decided to exchange books for bullets, there have been good, bad, regular, corrupt, and less corrupt politicians at the head of the state. Still, one constant has always been: the education chapter remains unresolved. Even though progress has been made in the fight against illiteracy, looking at the results of tests such as PISA or other educational parameters, it is clear that we have a long way to go for education to be established as the engine that will lead the country to true development. And not only material development but also moral and intellectual development. We taught people to read, and people learned to read; another thing is how far we have come and how useful was and is the material we give to the younger generations so that what they have learned will serve them both to make their way in an increasingly competitive world and so that the skills and abilities learned will serve to create a better and more prepared country.
I believe it is fundamental to recognize that, for a time and all at once, this population stood up and handed over all power to a person, a regime, and an ideology or movement still unclear regarding its objective or raison d’être. Another problem is to be able to ask for the bills and collect them when the time is right. Is the country more or less supportive today than it was six years ago? Is it possible to have a more sympathetic relationship with some situations, such as state governments? Governments that have become entirely dependent on what is decided by the National Palace and questioning whether we genuinely continue to operate under a federal regime in which the federal entities enjoy certain independence or whether we are increasingly returning to the centralism that characterized other periods of our history.
Regardless of where you are and what you think or feel, it is clear that there always comes a time when you have to pay what you owe. We pay for the good and the bad things we do in life. I do not want to say that this is the six-year term of evil; I only want to say that nothing and nobody will be able to prevent or avoid the exercise of accountability. However, the big question is who will pay and how they will do it. Perhaps that is why the whole political strategy of this campaign is that the victory is so clear, that there is such a difference in the result that it is impossible to question. In the end, all this will have significant consequences, nobody will be able to prevent us from looking in a mirror and see what happened to our lives, to our hopes for growth, and what happened to what we could have done in these last years. The easiest thing in politics is to bite the hand that fed you, but the only thing in politics that could be suicidal is not to claim, demand, and collect what is owed.
I keep thinking and questioning where the civil society came from to fill El Zócalo and El Ángel demanding that the democratic elections not be touched. If that has already happened and we already dared to take to the streets to raise our voices, there is no better electoral campaign to confront everything that the people of Mexico consider not suitable and start a recomposition and restructuring of the path. It is not about showing who is better or worse, who you like more or less, who you trust more or less; it is simply about who should pay the bill.
In any case, the political class as a whole, the one that has been there and the one that aspires to get there, the one that never finished leaving and the one that allowed – out of ignorance, convenience, or corruption – to turn the word “politics” into something vile and disposable, must know that the bill must not only be paid by those who had all the trust and all the power to change things but also by those who, in some moments, was sensitive to the manipulation generated by fear in those who did not have the white sheet of paper to be able to defend, no longer the principles, but the balance of society.
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