Otto Granados Roldán
When Mexico’s new President takes office on October 1, she will find herself with a poisoned inheritance that will inevitably mark her government. Although her comfortable victory avoids post-electoral conflicts, the country’s problems are very serious in almost any of the vital nerves with which, in theory, a government functions. Let’s see.
An advisor to Tony Blair once lamented, “There are no ‘dignified’ exits or ‘orderly’ transitions, only exits and transitions, all of them more or less abrupt and unsatisfactory. Such is life, I suppose.” In highly civilized countries, the leader changes in hours, and everything continues to work. Not in the Bronco Mexico.
According to official government information, the next President will receive a country plunged in a disaster: 188,522 intentional homicides; 800,000 people killed in pandemics; 47 million Mexicans living in poverty; 51 million without access to health services; 25 million lacking education; cities and regions where the State no longer exists; economic growth of 0. 8% annual average; public finances in intensive care; unsustainable social programs where the cost of pensions for people 65 years of age and older stands out, which this year are equivalent to more than 24.4 billion dollars; fiscal deficit of 5. 9%; failed pharaonic works that must continue to be paid for; a country at the bottom of international corruption, rule of law, and organized crime indexes; a state-owned oil company, Pemex, technically bankrupt, with 107,500 million dollars of debt and whose survival hangs on the meager lifeline of money from the Ministry of Finance, among other things.
Add to this the structural challenges -from water and the energy transition to climate change and artificial intelligence- as well as circumstantial challenges: the complex relationship with the United States in an election year and the distrust of the financial markets and current and potential investors.
The second page of the will says that she will have to face a technical body and a bureaucracy torn apart in different areas and a remarkably reduced space to manage and correct these stubborn balances in the short term. What she can do initially will depend centrally on the competence of the team she assembles and how she designs, formulates, communicates, and implements difficult decisions. From the political point of view, this beginning will not be easy because the comfortable composition of “her” legislative bench will be subject to certain partisan fragmentation, that is, to the origins and loyalties of deputies and senators who owe their positions to López Obrador, to the national leaderships of their acronyms or eventually to their territorial interests and connections of all kinds, among them the hot spots of organized crime. Moreover, the discipline of some legislators towards the next President could fluctuate depending on the issues at hand, and in any case, they will auction their political loyalty.
Along the same line, she will have to deal with governors. However, her margin of maneuver is slightly more significant because several of them are politically weakened, because she can influence the unpalatable carrot of fiscal contributions, because a good part of the sub-national finances is in the bones, and the federal government can close or hinder them the mechanisms for contracting debt, today subject to the Financial Discipline Law or because the transfers, agreements, contributions and subsidies from the center to the states and municipalities -for water, education, health, security, roads, public services, etc.-, will enter the drought season, simply because there is no extra money.
The third page outlines a confusing map of problems, weaknesses, and crises. First, it has no party. Unlike the old regime, Morena is a forced copy of the “movimientismo” (Movements) used by the Latin American lefts in the 1960s; it is not an organic party with structure, class representation, cadres, or masses in the classic sense. It is a mob rather than an organization. Therefore, it lacks the indispensable pillars of a functional party foundation -discipline, loyalty, real coincidences-; it is, instead, a varied combination of opportunism, militancy, and defections, where each one manages his own philias, phobias, and interests, which may make it difficult for the President both to integrate a team of her own and to manage the legislative process, because strictly speaking they are not her allies but of López Obrador, who will be very tempted to rock the cradle.
As it is not a classic party, it does not have, consequently, a program as such. The so-called fourth transformation had no historical or social density nor a real doctrinal and conceptual design. It has more electoral clients than organic followers, as evidenced in the election. It has been so far a collection of clichés and catchy occurrences but not a program of structural or systemic change. And there can be no second floor without the scaffolding of the first. The transformation has been, instead, an authoritarian drift. The President will then have to decide whether to carry that as a straitjacket or try to make viable, if she has one, an agenda of her own.
Fourthly, for the reasons mentioned at the beginning, this hypothetical agenda will be compromised and, to a great extent, under tremendous pressure by the arrival of the rotten season: the accounts that economic and political actors, pressure groups, and adversaries want to settle with her predecessor to collect for what, in their opinion, affected their interests during these years. Ruptures are not unprecedented in Mexico, nor alien to betrayal, that “foundational act of politics”, according to some. Revenge may not be immediate because, as Shakespeare wanted, it is a dish that is eaten cold. Still, it will place the President before a cruel dilemma if she wants governability: to give in to the Freudian instincts of killing the father out of a mere sense of conservation or, otherwise, to nullify her mandate and assume the wear and tear. What is certain is that the internal and external media and political pressure, even from her supporters, will be very intense, and she may find it necessary to give up some heads.
The next front, much more delicate, will be the new players on the muddy field received. On the one hand, she will have to decide the type of entente she wants or can build (if she wants to and can) with an increasingly strong and sophisticated organized crime that is not willing to give up or lose an inch of the physical, financial, institutional, political and geographic domains it controls today, calculated in a third of the national territory according to the Congressional Research Service of the United States (https://www.ft.com/content/fe04c6ed-73f8-4e17-852b-ce16fd6c3515).
Another infinitely more entangled issue is how to respond to a crucial riddle for its own stability and national security: what to do with the armed forces.
Since the 1940s, the Mexican military has never had as much power, authority, and money as it does today. The governments after the 1910 revolution let them do as they pleased, looking the other way in the accumulation of capital, keeping them at bay with the provision of support and resources in case “they wanted to take up arms” according to the anecdote attributed to Jesús Reyes Heroles, a revered Mexican politician, and incorporating them into party politics -remember that the PRI had a “military sector”-, all of which helped to prevent coups d’état in the country. The military thus established a comfortable and profitable modus vivendi with the civilian governments.
With the militarization of the last five years, Mexico seems, as it was said of Spain during Franco’s regime, “a country occupied by its own army”. The armed forces control police, highways, customs, banks, an airline, ports, airports, communications, infrastructure, public enterprises, and a long etcetera, which they will not tamely return to civilian command for at least four reasons. One is that their current duties give them unprecedented power, as evidenced by the Cienfuegos affair, where the former Secretary of Defense was detained and released in the US in 2020. Another is that this status allows them massive management of public resources and, therefore, access to legal and illegal businesses and extraction of rents without exhaustive civilian accountability. A third is that should they maintain certain unprofitable operations -airports, trains, ports-they will need a gigantic injection of additional resources from the federal budget, which the latter does not have. And finally, the most important: for their own legal protection against files, accusations, and facts of alleged abuses, corruption, and impunity, which until now have been kept shielded and reserved both in the unfathomable system of military “justice” and the mechanisms of access to information.
To suppose, therefore, that from the power they now have, they will return to the more modest, albeit very appreciable, tasks of helping distribute school books, applying vaccines, or operating plans in the face of natural disasters is naive.
Finally, what is the President going to do with López Obrador? There is no preconceived script because a lot will depend on psychological and political levers. Still, some former Mexican presidents -Zedillo, Calderón, and Peña- did much better with successors from the opposition. Conflicts within the family are usually more bloody than between adversaries, and nobody knows what will happen next. However, in the political arena, the bicephaly never works. For the time being, coexistence during the four months of transition may not be smooth. The future ex-president has organized his entire mental structure around power, and it is difficult to escape this trap. It is not that he does not want to accept the finitude but that he seems psychologically unable to do so. People with power always repeat themselves, and a complex combination of feelings clouds their judgment. Therein lies the seed of Greek tragedy: the terra incognita, life after power. In this respect, Mexican politics, with few exceptions, has been heartbreaking.
Finally, there is something that by mere pragmatism should be understood, which is the urgent need to provide a certain dose of concord and serenity in public life, to reduce the current dangerous levels of bitterness and to cement common minimums among the different actors and sectors on crucial issues for the country. In any case, there is no other way to straighten out a poisoned country. To paraphrase Hadrian, the Roman emperor, in his memoirs, keeping the bonfire of polarization burning is a “battle without glory”.
And history is prodigal in examples.
This piece was published in Spanish by Líder Empresarial on June 4, 2024.
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