Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
What does the left have to offer Mexico and the rest of Latin America? In Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the question is quickly answered: it offers dictatorship and corruption. In Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, the governing lefts persecute each other, commit stupidities, are ineffective and without options for the majorities. It has not had an answer to the crisis derived from the Covid pandemic and does not dare to question the dictatorships that say they are of the left.
Lula represents today a tired and reactive left, with glimpses of international audacity but internally trapped by conservatism. Fortunately, he is trying to save the Amazon.
Mexico remains. Morena and the President say they are leftists, basically because they still enthusiastically sing “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido” (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) cheered by Cuban animators. They also affirm that they govern “for their love for the people.” But, from the analysis of their governance, what is leftist?
The Rule of Law Index evaluates 139 countries in terms of their respect for the rule of law and the fight against corruption. Mexico ranked 135th out of those 139 countries, only better in terms of corruption than Uganda, Cameroon, Cambodia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In other words, the Mexican left has turned the country into an even more corrupt nation than it already was.
At the end of AMLO’s six-year term, we will confirm that many “leftists” have become millionaires at the expense of the public treasury, starting, of course, with the presidential family. Hence, for the President, it is of the utmost importance to destroy the autonomous bodies, being, as their name indicates, instruments to limit and monitor the exercise of the Executive’s power.
The President wants to disappear the disappeared as if they were ghosts questioning him at the most inopportune moments of his political history. He swore to be different from the previous ones, and he has more disappeared than Calderon, officially named his nemesis. And his administration has resulted in many more deaths, both due to the violence of organized crime and the terrible management of the Covid pandemic.
The Mexican left does not protest, nor even dares to question, either the rampant corruption of his administration or the policy of re-victimization of the disappeared. Nor does it question the tragic management of the Covid pandemic, which killed close to a million Mexicans.
Nor does it question the obvious militarization of public administration and the conversion of the military establishment into a fundamental political actor. Latin America knows this mistake that has caused blood, fire, and tears everywhere. Salvador Allende was as naïve about the military as López Obrador is today. The exorbitant increase in the military budget, to the detriment of the budgets for health, science, and autonomous bodies, speaks of military empowerment on a par with civilian naivety.
The ecocide committed with the Mayan Train and the Dos Bocas refinery, if it had been done before, would have provoked mobilizations of the left throughout the country. Today, that same left, including its “organic intellectuals”, consider the work to be majestic and turn a deaf ear to the alarmed criticism of environmentalists in Mexico and around the world about the destruction of this unique habitat in the world. And they are dying of joy with their Porfirian trains.
While Lula tries to save the Amazon, AMLO destroys the largest forest in North America. And the Mexican left is silent like a mummy.
The left in power finds AMLO’s alliance with drug trafficking reasonable. A sort of pragmatism is imposed from the power: better to get along than to get along badly. The problem is that “getting along” means more violence and territorial occupation of vast swaths of the country by organized crime. The leftist government in Mexico has become an “asset” of drug trafficking, not the other way around.
Finally, the Mexican left has given, with the approval of its silence, the endorsement of López Obrador’s project to impose a civil-military regime in Mexico. That is to say, he accepts the outcome he offers to the future of the country, a violent and corrupt dictatorship without health and education.
In short, the Mexican left offers the country a return to a recharged Porfiriato. And it accepts, without being dazzled, its historical, moral, and ethical defeat in exchange for a handful of dollars.
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