Federico Reyes Heroles
Fiat, from the Latin let it be done.
The damage will be immeasurable. We are already experiencing it. Record foreign direct investment? Almost all of it is reinvestment. Fresh, around 3%. In gross fixed investment, the fall was 4.9% in the first quarter. The Norwegian Fund abandoned Pemex because its Ethics Council found “multiple allegations and suspicions of corruption” in the company. Investment fund advisors have been advising against investing in Mexico for months, suggesting that if they must do so, they should protect themselves with arbitration or foreign partnerships to facilitate litigation abroad. Growth forecast for 2025: 0.1%. A country without a judiciary is a mutilated republic. It is impossible for Plan Mexico to compensate for this. Something very profound broke on Sunday, June 1. Despite all the official fanfare about the benefits of this election, around nine out of ten citizens did not buy it. The number of invalid votes was a record high. Insults rained down on the ballots. The anger is there.
But how did we reach this point of institutional and collective suicide? That may be what broke. It was not a mistake, an uncontrollable impulse. It is a form of government that has been in place for seven years. The new Mexico City International Airport: technical arguments rained down, it is senseless. “Bury it!” was the response. The Maya Train: thousands of lines of text, discussions, and scientific testimony. “Build it!” like Chávez’s “expropriate it.” Drug shortages, we’re on the ninth or tenth experiment, and no improvement is noticeable. “Keep fighting!” The dead and sick can only fall on the conscience of the Fourth Transformation. The National Guard in civilian hands, nothing worked. “That’s how I want it!” Dos Bocas: unanimity among experts, better to upgrade existing refineries to process our crude oil, don’t build there, etc. “Build it!” The cost to public health, especially for children and the elderly, due to the poisonous fumes from Tula, is around 1.5 billion pesos. COVID: amulets instead of face masks, 800,000 “excess deaths,” champions in infected medical personnel. That doesn’t exist! Airplane: Sell it! Result: the Air Force at the service of secret flights. Simple and demagogic. Selling the plane cost us money.
But “Build!” was met with “Destroy!” Autonomous bodies that sought to guarantee competition, which ultimately benefits the consumer, or transparency or professionalism in the allocation of energy resources. The order was clear: “Destroy them all!” And continuity prevailed. Justices do not accept the divine designs of the Fourth Transformation: “Destroy all judicial power!” But the justice problems of the vast majority of Mexicans—95%—do not lie with the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, but with local and state police forces, with the fragility of the files presented to judges by investigators, and with the resources available to prosecutors. Changing that would indeed bring benefits. Destroy everything!
But the judiciary is not a public policy that can be amended. It is part of the bone structure of a state. That is why the Organization of American States not only has the power to issue its opinion, it also has the obligation to do so, to warn the other signatories. The report is devastating because the “election of the accordions” was an insult to the slightest sense of democracy; it was disgraceful. It was not a mistake; it was another act of foolishness that shows their belief in their moral superiority. Miguel de la Madrid had to reverse the mess of bank nationalization. He did so slowly, but he succeeded. The same party, in effect, corrected itself. Now we will have the least professional judiciary in the world, in this case, yes, in the world.
How do we get out of the authoritarian trap? There are ways, but they all involve constitutional counter-reform. In this case, delay means more poverty and more injustice. It is not enough for the opposition to advance to the point of displacing Morena, even assuming a reversal in 2027. The Senate and the state legislatures are still needed.
Will Sheinbaum, the stateswoman, make a U-turn and avoid shipwreck?
Or will suicidal stubbornness prevail? It was a success.
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