Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Last Friday afternoon, all of Mexico City’s agencies, decentralized bodies, public administration entities, and mayor’s offices received, by official letter, an order from the City’s Internal Comptroller, Juan José Serrano Mendoza, to refrain from using their material resources, vehicles, means of intercommunication and personnel on the following two Saturdays, July 30 and August 6. The reason?
“Due to the process for the election of members of the State Congress, District Congress, and State Council in Mexico City of the Ordinary National Congress of the Morena Party…” reads the official notice. In other words, so that a national political party could hold its internal election in Mexico City, the government of Mexico City ordered the entire local public administration, a large part of which does not belong to Morena, to disrupt its regular plans and stop its activities so that a party, which is not necessarily its own, could settle its internal conflicts.
Even in the case of most of the municipalities that do not sail under the Morenista flag, the Internal Control Organs (OICs) went beyond what was instructed by the Internal Comptroller of the City. By official letter, they ordered the opposing City Councils to suspend their activities on ALL weekends of the Morenista election, and not only on Saturdays. Thus, the instruction was, in an appendix with a partisan militant tone, just to fuck with them, that the suspension was “from 6 p.m. on July 30, 2022, until 7 a.m. on August 1, 2022, and from 6 p.m. on August 5, 2022, until 7 a.m. on August 8, 2022.”
Then came the spectacle presented by this political party to all the citizens of Mexico City, the country, and the world. It is difficult to imagine the amount of public resources used for the transportation of thousands of people threatened with losing their jobs or their social benefits so that they would support with their “free and sovereign vote” any of the candidates previously approved by the presidential pre-candidates. It is impossible to calculate the amounts of public funds used illegally (which, it must be pointed out, come from the taxes that citizens contribute to the public treasury) for the purchase and distribution of hundreds of thousands of provision boxes or the payment in cash to those conscious free and sovereign voters. And what can we say about the vehicles used for this mobilization, including the public transportation buses portrayed in social networks by the same Morenistas, critical of the hypocrisy and conduct of their party comrades?
What happened in Mexico City was a vivid portrait of a State operation to favor a State party. Does it sound redundant? It is, first of all, the repetition, in absurdity, of what every democrat fought to banish from our culture during the ’80s and ’90s when we sought to save Mexico from the “perfect dictatorship”. At least that perfect dictatorship took care of the forms of political operation without ceasing to be a dictatorship. That is why it lasted so many years.
Now we are facing another attempt to create a new State party, but now as a pitiful comedy, full of fantasies, mistakes, incompetence, and all its corruptness exposed in social networks for the knowledge of the general public. They have produced a ridiculous and disheartening spectacle.
And the official letters issued by the Internal Comptrollers only unmask the crude attempt to legalize and cover up the actions of a poorly planned, illegal, and shady State operation in its intention to violate the laws of the country and the internal regulations of that political institute. The question remains in the air: and democracy and transparency, when?
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