Antonio Navalón
It is moving to see the clash between the dream and the reality of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Every morning, after saying good morning – always wearing a coat, as being from Tabasco, the cold affects him significantly – he begins to unravel the painful path of discovering the end of dreams. The country’s leader dreamed of transforming Mexico – in his own way and no matter what it implied – but he always had the conviction and the desire to generate a change in the country. At the cost of everything destroyed along the way, President López Obrador has accomplished his mission. However, no deadline will not arrive, nor will a dream last forever.
I am one of those who believe that dreams give life and keep the illusion alive. They are as necessary as the hope that there is always the possibility of a better tomorrow. I am one of those who believe that faith moves mountains. But I am also one of those who know that to fulfill dreams – in addition to a lot of rhetoric, a lot of illusion, and faith – you need to be effective. The President of Mexico and his team lacked and have lacked effectiveness. And now we can begin to assume the cost of the dreams. I will leave out Texcoco Airport and not because of my own preference, but because every time I land in Mexico City – something I do frequently – I see with pain that my grandchildren will have to suffer from the same suffering that I suffer. Not having done Texcoco puts us thirty years backward from where we should be. And do you know what the worst thing is? We were already thirty years behind, so in reality, we have sixty years of unfinished dreams and unmet deadlines.
I will never forget what I think about in the solitude of my nights. In them, one of the questions that most invade my thoughts is the question of who made López Obrador. Did the consecutive failure of eighteen years of frustrated illusions and dreams make him? Probably. For eighteen years, López Obrador promised the Mexican people a change. For the current President, it did not matter whether the PAN or the PRI was in power; for him, the offer was the same, and the changes never came.
It is difficult to know how much frustrating dreams are worth, but we can get an idea of their actual cost with everything we are living. We begin to see it in the lack of control of violence. We begin to see it in the absence of illusion. It is also noticeable that we are a country that has lost and exchanged any sense of self-improvement for receiving without having to give anything in return.
I keep in my memory when in 2003 I had a private conversation with the former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox. I showed him my surprise and told him that a group of macheteros from Atenco could stop the Texcoco airport. The then President replied, “Don’t exaggerate, Licenciado. After all, only six percent of the Mexican population travels by air. That explains a large part of the tragedies. That explains why we can offer our country neither poverty as a destination nor horses as a means of transportation.
After Vicente Fox came Felipe Calderón, and as if we had not had enough with the warning of the most fantastic characters and events of the “bronco” Mexico, the then President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, drew his pistol and began to shoot. And it was there that we discovered what we all assumed but did not dare to accept: behind every Mexican, there was someone with a gun ready to shoot. That ride through violence and blood did not end with the victory of the State but with the failure of society. And finally, all of us who had collaborated with the system and believed in its evolution lacked the reflexes to understand that Enrique Peña Nieto and his regime was the regime of kleptocracy.
The more than thirty million votes obtained by López Obrador cannot be understood without the accumulated failure of the transition of the 2000 regime, without the electoral trauma and the violence of the 2006 administration; but, above all, without the kleptocracy of the regime that began in 2012. Eighteen years of murdering the people’s dream brought us a President with the most significant political power in the nation’s modern history.
Let no one complain; we are all responsible. The power currently held by President López Obrador is the result of years of unfinished promises and failed administrations. Since Vicente Fox arrived at Los Pinos in 2000, Mexicans – but especially those who governed us – thought that whatever was done or not done would have no consequences. Mexico’s past leaders and Presidents believed that neither the transition that took place at the beginning of the 21st century, nor the hundreds of thousands of deaths as a consequence of the war against drug trafficking, nor the kleptocracy of the Peña Nieto administration, would have significant effects. Today, the consequence and the result of all that is called Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Today, the cost of dreaming is beginning to be noticeable, the accounts are beginning to come to light, and the deadlines are starting to expire. Today, we already know that the Suburban Train that intends to run a route that will take passengers to Santa Lucia airport has an unaffordable cost. We now know that the Mayan Train is an impossible dream that – besides taking us to “La Chingada” – has great difficulties in fulfilling its logistical and touristic objectives. The challenges presented for the Train to pass through Merida, Cancun, or Tulum make the Train a project doomed to failure. And in the end, to get the ox out of the gully, the collaboration of members of the private sector is needed—the same who are accused of being boycotters and, at times, even enemies of the regime.
But while this collaboration is taking place, the ox is still in the ravine. And it seems that it will remain there for a long time, since in the end, in this intermission of the consultation on the recall of the mandate – in case we were missing something and in case we did not have enough problems already – what is clear is that nobody cares about the future. We only care about the past, and we only care about who to blame for what, when, how, where and why we did what we did.
The end of the dream is always bitter; it is like the end of love. However, one can live neither without dreams nor without love. I will not be the one to punish or condemn the President for dreaming. I will be one more Mexican who will demand from him that, in addition to dreams, he should have understood that his function required him to have an effectiveness that he did not have. All those who surround him, applaud him, and console him in the face of failure, are as responsible as he is. Only that at the end of this era, only the sad image of the “Mañaneras” (morning press conferences) will remain – with or without a coat – and the rest will be only what could have been and what, once again, was not.
What, when, and how will it continue? Nobody knows. According to the calculation of the Mexico we know, the next President will also be from Morena. Although the question is: what is Morena, and how long will it last? Everything other than the figure and person of Andrés Manuel is fiction. And it is a fiction without content. From here on, we have to start living with reality, and this assumes that neither Texcoco nor Santa Lucia nor the Mayan Train -we will see what happens with Dos Bocas- none of these projects, yet to be concluded and those which already failed, have been enough to achieve the desired change or ensure the longed-for and prosperous tomorrow. However, what is certain is that tomorrow we will have a reason to persecute, insult, or condemn someone. Every morning that the sun rises in Mexico, we look for someone to blame for why things are not going well. While the world is struggling with a change of models and a crisis of systems as never seen before, our country is dealing with its own problems. In Mexico, democracy is not in crisis because it is a concept that no one is trying to strengthen. In Mexico, the idea of security is not in crisis because it is a concept that has simply disappeared in our lives.
After years of thinking that our actions would have no consequences, today in Mexico, what is in crisis is coexistence, and it is in an inverted sense. If corruption had to be cleaned like the stairs, from the top down, social hatred and the destruction of the country’s social cohesion are also following the same model of action, from the top down. From the first voice to the last, Mexico has been involved in an intermittent cycle in which, on a daily basis, it is about looking for those responsible and criminalizing others. It is no longer only those responsible for what happened in the past that are sought; everyone is being attacked equally. And in this relentless search to find the guilty parties, no one has ever – neither by accident nor by chance – admitted to being guilty of anything.
We are a country of many crimes but few responsible for them. Of many accused but few guilty. And in the midst of all this, there is no sense of self-criticism and no sense of forgiveness. There is only the sense that someone somewhere betrayed the 4T, even though not even the creator of the Fourth Transformation could explain exactly what it is or what the movement consists of. The only thing that is known is that it got to where it is because of the faults of those who preceded it.
Poor Mexico. With so much to dream of and so many deadlines to meet.
