Luis Rubio
The paramount question for the future of Mexico is how to create a foundation for its development in the long term. This concerns the eternal dilemma that is the object of distinct proposals and responses every six years, but that never pans out. The most ambitious project for attaining this coveted transformation was NAFTA, which achieved three vital things: first, it resolved the chronic balance-of-payments crisis; second, it sowed the seeds of a platform of clear rules and mechanisms for making them be complied with, which became a source of trust and certainty for entrepreneurs and investors; and third, it allowed for the construction and development of a modern industrial plant capable of competing with the best in the world. None of this is trifling, but undeniably not enough.
The enormous success inherent in NAFTA did not extend to the country as a whole. In a text that appeared recently in the periodical Nexos, Claudio Lomnitz argues that the end product was a Mexico of rules and a Mexico dominated by extortion because, in the latter, a reform of justice and security was not brought about that would permit breaking with the factors that have historically anchored the country in underdevelopment. And, worse yet, the advance of organized crime has culminated with Mexico foundering in a sea of violence, uncertainty, and decay. In its eagerness to procure votes and popularity without dedicating even a minute to matters of development or security, the present government has exacerbated things due to ignoring them and rendering them permanent.
Current scandals such as that of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic, the true objectives of so-called “preventive custody,” and the conflicts of interest with which some of the country’s large companies are led, on the outer edge of all regulation or legality, allow for catching a glimpse of the real problem confronting the country, the one which the next administration will have to attend to if it harbors the least minimal probability of starting to revert what seems to many today as the road to a failed State. A failed State, one in which vast zones of the country are inaccessible to any formal authority, subjects the population to a regime of submission to the narco-traffickers, the interminable wake of murders of journalists a case-in-point.
In 1982 Mexico found itself at a zero hour of dramatic proportions. The economy contracted extraordinarily, unemployment grew as never before, and the government discovered itself in virtual bankruptcy. It took ten long years to turn the situation around, and it was NAFTA that enabled attracting the investment that would revert the crisis definitively. The question at present, in the face of a scenario similar in concept, though markedly distinct in specific characteristics, is that this would require turning the country around again, but this time with an inclusive outcome, one that tackles the set of problems affecting the fact that the other Mexico that now lives in absolute insecurity, lack of definition and that it is perennially subject to extortion, of one ilk or another.
In contrast with the eighties, during which the Americans were more than willing to collaborate with the construction of a new solution project -NAFTA-, this time the task would have to be internal, the product of the erection of a political and social lattice that sanctions, once and for all, the shaping of this pummeled democracy with a penchant for failure. A project of this nature would imply rebuilding what could be denominated the “social compact,” which would, in turn, entail eminently precise redefinitions of responsibilities and relations between government and society, as well as the construction of mechanisms for making rules for compliance with the regulations emanating from these.
The key point is that only an integral justice and security reform would countenance the achievement of such an objective. The reforms and/or strategies carried out over the last decades have been insufficient and inadequate for accomplishing this. For example, instead of beginning with the construction of a basis of security from the municipal level, the government opted for deploying the Army to pacify the country, with the result that a police force or justice system was never developed that would attend to the quotidian problems of the average citizen, while the best that can be said about what was done is that it evaded the further growth of organized crime. And to top it off, even this, with all of its limitations, disappeared with the consistent anti-strategy of doing nothing and trusting that things would solve themselves of the present administration.
Security and justice are the two great deficits that stand in the way of the country and that are perhaps the ticket to development and the future, supposing that their focus was to comprise a vision of problem-solving, building stability and security platforms from the bottom up, the only way to lay the foundations of something permanent. Mexican society clamors for security and justice, goals that have been rebuffed by one government after the other.
The famous Chinese ideogram alleges that crises are also wellsprings of opportunity. Mexico is moving directly toward a political, economic, and social crisis. Years of lethargy and, now, polarization have engendered a collective blindness on the sole issue that is important: security and justice as the essence of integral development. High time to advance in that direction.
@lrubiof