Once upon a time, there was a beautiful country in the middle of two oceans where nature was gorgeous and generous; its people were diverse in appearance, culture, and dialects; they built pyramids, calculated calendars, worshiped, and registered the movement of celestial bodies. Millennia later, its culture and achievements are still admired.
One afternoon a few centuries ago, an expeditionary group from another continent disembarked, settled, and extended their culture, beliefs, and language over many years. One day, all men spoke the same language, shared beliefs, and social organization, becoming a colony of a kingdom from far away.
Once their cultures, blood, and traditions were mixed, the call for independence from the foreign reign succeeded, and a new nation was born. There were ups and downs in the organization of life as a society, swinging from federal republic to imperial monarchy and back. Those movements were not always peaceful or without costs; actually, after a period of revolts, Mexicans realized that while they were fighting with each other, half its vast territory had been lost to its powerful neighbor to the north.
Once the smoke and dust were over, a period of peace with civility began with a regime that, while developing infrastructure and setting the forms and rules of governing, fell into the temptation of staying in power endlessly.
That, together with the gross inequality, ignited a bloody revolution demanding, among other things, the redistribution of the land, a credible electoral system without reelection, and a new constitution that embodied its ideology, guaranteed basic education for all, labor rights, federalism, municipal liberty, division of powers with an independent judiciary and a bi-cameral legislature, separation of church and State, and a presidential form of government circumscribed by it.
So, a few years after the upheaval, the revolutionaries formalized an organizational model which permitted and guided changes in the social, political, and economic spheres through ad-hoc viable and effective institutions while enjoying political stability. The strongest among them declared that the institutions’ regimes should replace the caudillos’ governments. And so it began the era of the institutionalized revolution.
A few years later, the regime mobilized labor and peasants into tailor-made organizations under the wing of the government to gain a popular support base, bringing the masses into national politics and making them feel that their interests were represented, the same as the military and popular sectors in the party decision making council.
This way, a modernizing process began, legitimized by a constitutional doctrine translated into programs, norms, priorities, policies, instruments, and institutions based on a strategy devised by the governing leadership, following the constitutional principles of checks and balances, federalism, limited government, popular sovereignty, republicanism, and separation of powers.
Factually, it was a one-party system maintained mainly through peaceful means, facilitated by the broad representation of interest groups and the attention given to its needs and open to negotiations with the private sector. Also, by the effectiveness of the institutions created to transform objectives into plans and specific programs.
Over the rest of the past century, it is safe to state that the country enjoyed security, order, political stability, popular representation through organized groups of interest, norms, legitimacy, a guiding ideology (nationalism and socioeconomic progress), and a translation of ideology into a programmatic course. Institutions and norms fostered economic growth and social mobility, although the benefits of it were unevenly distributed socially and regionally.
With the new century, alternation arrived. People were fed up with the one-party system (PRI), which had been in power for over 70 years. One party (PAN) was in power for two six-year terms, and surprisingly the good old PRI was back. But the system was no longer functional. It went from a self-dealing ruling class to a corrupt technocracy to a mediocre kleptocracy (a government whose corrupt leaders use political power to create and expand their fortunes).
Political parties became franchises controlled by gangs that divided the spoils of public office among themselves for their benefit. This was increasingly public and notorious, degrading the image of public officials, politicians, and their parties in the eyes of the electorate. According to Transparency International, 91% of Mexicans perceived political parties as corrupt institutions.
Hence, it was not difficult to propel the candidacy of a man who had tried twice to win the presidency, a man who bragged about his honesty and demonized the very system that was no longer functional and promised to end with corruption, insecurity, inequality, high costs, government incapacity and excessive bureaucracy, impunity, and privileges, abuse in the self-promotion of officials and candidates at public expense, and political and economic uncertainty.
His message was effective and was able to capture the attention, support, and goodwill of many that no longer believed in parties or their leaders, that repudiated the current system but did not propose any other, that questioned the coherence of organizations and procedures, sometimes rightly so, and could not find where to channel its ideas and concerns.
López Obrador managed to unite all the dissatisfied, who, with good reason, were the majority. Today, victorious, he breaks the law and applies it selectively; he uses power to benefit businessmen, regions, and projects of his liking, and as a result of the dismantling of the political parties, he has no counterweight in Congress.
We are witnessing a process of destruction of institutions with the objective of making those in power remain forever; it is not, as he claims, the beginning of a cycle but the end of a system that worked, with ups and downs, for a century. It was López Obrador’s turn to detonate the final explosion of the system, not the beginning of another, because, to this day, he has not defined what the fourth transformation is, what it consists of, or how it would operate.
There is no surprise. His education in political science is limited to the mechanisms and tricks for winning elections, which is why he has continued campaigning since he won the election. He never studied or understood or was interested in the art of public administration, much less economics. He is against specialization and excellence.
He used to say that governing was very easy; he thought it was the same as campaigning, and that is why he continues making promises instead of fulfilling them. What he can conceive as public policy is nothing more than pursuing very primitive notions of small-town public projects. His education is on par with his intellect; both are extremely limited, unsuitable for the role of a leader of a modern nation in the third decade of the XXI century.
To make things worse, he has annihilated the professional talent that the country invested in for decades, appointing loyalists with similar qualifications as his to the highest levels of government. He makes all decisions from his pulpit, micro-managing and celebrating his ideas as if they were already accomplished projects. Every morning he sows tares, bitterness, divisions, suspicions, and fears, rewarding the incompetent and concentrating power in a single vindictive man with a severe inferiority complex.
López Obrador has maintained a support basis through a system similar to the fiefdoms of the feudal state. Before a lord could grant someone land (a fief), he had to make that person a vassal. This was done at a formal and symbolic ceremony called a commendation, composed of the act of homage and oath of fealty. During homage, the lord and vassal entered into a contract in which the vassal promised to fight for the lord at his command, while the lord agreed to protect the vassal from external forces. The land that would generate income was a fief, and the property that caused the revenue, usually by peasants’ labor, was called a fiefdom.
Through his political party (Morena), he has ensured the loyalty of most states’ governors, legislators, and public officials at the federal, state, and local levels; trade union leaders, two other political parties, and an unacknowledged but evident alliance with organized crime. Also, other groups of vassals are taken care of through an army of activists pompously called “servants of the Nation” paid by the taxpayers who hand out alms to senior citizens, young people who neither study nor work, single mothers, and other interest groups.
Sadly, most of these vassals have one substantial similarity with their beloved leader: its vulgarity. Their attitudes, ideas, slogans, expressions, remarks, standards, and behavior denote ignorance, obnoxious tendencies, archaic concepts, obsolete knowledge, rudimentary principles, lack of taste and civility, objectionable values, offensive language, and a very primitive vision of the world.
People’s poverty should not be seen as a virtue, much less as an advantage for electoral purposes; if at all, it should be a challenge to overcome for a responsible government. Then as now, since the old political system could not satisfy all the interests that had to be considered, it was ruptured. Wistfully, it decayed into a fiefdom now controlled by the chief vulgarian and his vassals.
SEPGRA Political Analysis Group.
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