Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
What Andrés Manuel López Obrador built was a fortress. A rapid and impressive seizure of power unprecedented in our time. He eliminated all checks and balances on the all-encompassing power of the presidency. He wiped out any possibility that citizens might even get a glimpse of how the president manages the budget. He changed the laws so that all information regarding the government’s actions would remain locked away… by the presidency itself.
He changed the public’s priorities without any consultation. He decided to give away money on cards to nearly the entire eligible population for any reason (working women, single mothers, mothers with partners, newborns, toddlers, students at any level, young people working without a degree, men aged 56–59, women aged 60 and older, men aged 60 and older, people with disabilities, indigenous people). It raised the minimum wage, a move that did not cost the public treasury, but rather the business community.
Since the budget isn’t enough for everything, spending on the healthcare system and education was cut. Health and education in exchange for a card. This established a new Mexican paradox: money in the pocket, but no health or education. The disappearance of vaccination campaigns is the symbol of that healthcare system slowly sinking into oblivion. That existed, but no longer. And public education simply ceased to be the instrument of social mobility it once was, becoming instead a ritual to be fulfilled…or not. The massive dropout rate in the public school system signals the social catastrophe unfolding in real time. The guaranteed economic, political, and social regression is the result of the new paradigm imposed on Mexico by López Obrador and Sheinbaum.
Finally, they inaugurated new systems of corruption to co-opt the elites. Soldiers, Marines, public officials, politicians, businesspeople, and drug cartel executives were included in the new system for appropriating the nation’s public wealth through phantom businesses, starting with the state-sanctioned fuel theft, a system that guarantees riches for all. This is how they buy their complicity with extraordinary simplicity. López Obrador and Sheinbaum rely on the greed of those they govern. Benefits for some; contracts for others. And power for themselves. Simple.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches this process in Mexico with a mixture of fascination and horror. Fascinating because it offers a true real-time laboratory for the study of human behavior in its most basic needs and vulnerabilities. It is truly shocking to see how an entire society can be distorted in its values, ethics, and moral standards by a charismatic leader and, even more so, by the system he imposes on a society that is already quiet and submissive. The comparisons keep coming: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and closer to home, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Trump in the United States. Anything is possible when one knows how to strike the most sensitive chords of creaking societies, which feel fear in the face of the futuristic spectacle.
But observing Mexico from the outside also causes horror. The experiment reflects the fragility of democratic systems of government and reveals their vulnerability to powerful, destructive forces that lie at the heart of any society. The charismatic leader can convince society to relax its resistance to losing individuality and critical thinking and to go along with the mainstream current of submission to the will and pleasure of the Big Other. That moment of surrendering individuality to become part of the totalitarian society is when individuals decide their future: either they accept becoming part of the uncritical, resigned masses, or they choose to defend the idea of the individual rather than be part of the masses. Mexico stages the eternal struggle between freedom and slavery.
That is where Mexico stands today. A Supreme Court Justice promotes rulings favorable to her family, and they see this as normal behavior. The government spends the budget on its political and personal objectives and feels no obligation whatsoever to be held accountable. The political elites hand out positions and contracts while society, passive and defenseless, views the internal machinations of power without passion, but also as inevitable. Organized crime and the military decide the division of the national territory.
As in any totalitarian system, decay and destruction come from within. Money is running out, tribal power struggles destroy any semblance of unity, and crime begins its upward trajectory. Citizens’ standard of living declines irreparably. Morals and ethics give way to a brutal struggle for survival among the system’s remnants.
All of this is happening in Mexico because a single force managed to impose itself on every last vestige of power, destroying all checks and balances. It imposed total, totalitarian power. That is the portrait of Mexico today: corrupt, defenseless, with no escape route. Subject to the curse of absolutist power seized by force by the charismatic leader and his shadow. And then, the inevitable decline.
@rpascoep
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