Antonio Navalón
Today, we live in a world that is not only convulsed and confused but also highly ideologized. In part, this is because the ideological struggle allows and endures everything. For example, if you want to kill children and civilians and destroy the cultural heritage of a nearby country that once belonged to you and then ceased to be part of your territory – as is the case with Ukraine – all you have to do is invoke the need to denazify it. All this is from the point of view that, in the Russian collective memory, it can never be forgotten that the worst moment in its history was when the Nazis applied – according to Napoleonic teachings – their scorched earth policy.
When Adolf Hitler invaded Russia, he ordered that behind every conquered village, the only thing his army could leave behind were dead – no matter if they were women or children – and scorched land. He ordered that no trace should be left of any wheat crop, animal, or any element that could be used by the Russian army to stand up to him or to regain strength. At this time when we are suffering hyperinflation of ideology, moreover – in the face of the failure of the neoliberal model on the one hand and the populist failure on the other – we find ourselves in the paradox that, for the first time, the two Americas, the Spanish-speaking and the English-speaking, are in a somewhat similar situation of lack of definition and bankruptcy.
The two Americas are highly polarized, ideologized, and – at the bottom – mired in failure. In many cases, these are convivial political failures. In other cases – as in ours – they are ideological, political, and coexistence failures and failures of effectiveness in not knowing how to make the State apparatus work.
The formula to explain why we are failing is very simple. The crimes that preceded us and the damage done to the Republic by those who came before us are so deep that we will need fifty years to be able to clean up, fix the damage and start from scratch. Even though no one knows exactly what that means. There is corruption that is just as bad as falsifying data, stealing the till, or rigging contracts to get riches. The type of corruption we have is the one that derives from an incompetent administration that wastes and does not make the correct use of the few public resources available. Resources that not only end up going into the pockets of policymakers but also end up drowned in the swamp of inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
Words will not prevent death from continuing to spread, nor will they solve the problem of drug supply shortages. Words will not stop the fact that air traffic is a problem that remains unresolved despite the goodwill and the desire to do great things. Nor will words stop what it means to stare in terror at the approach radar of the Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City every time airplanes attempt to land. In this regard, and the way things are going, it seems – God willing, it will never happen – that we will need a catastrophe to realize that all the money saved from austerity, to give it away and burn on social programs, will have an unimaginable cost. And what the President of the Republic understands to be politics is not going to solve the need to update and invest in the maintenance of the nation’s essential services.
A country is not made only with slogans or good intentions. A society is not built only on the diarchy of the good ones and the evil. A civilization is not maintained on the basis and argument that those who were there before hurt it more. We need proposals, but above all, we need to reactivate and rectify the principle that assumes that ninety percent loyalty and ten percent efficiency are necessary for a good performance. Perhaps that is enough for the President. But Mexico – which in the end is the reason he gets paid; the reason why he lives; the reason why he moves; and the reason why he goes out in the mornings and I don’t know where he goes at night – Mexico needs things to work and work well.
The world is full of examples of goodwill and failures. I am especially concerned that up to this point, our President has not made use of that very general formula that when the oven burns at home, it is better to go for a walk around the world to be honored. The President is going away. Now he will go to Central America, and then it seems that he will visit the country of evil: the United States. He will visit the neighbor to the North in the Summit of the Americas framework to be held next June in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the President – undoubtedly the most important populist leader in all of Latin America – is going to meet with a series of peers – small or big, who are already ruling their countries, and no matter the number of accumulated failures, the hunger of their peoples, or the collapse of their societies – who share his thinking and ideology. This thinking revolves around the fact that no matter how things are in their respective countries, what matters is to have enough elements to claim that everything bad is the fault of those who preceded them and that everything good is thanks to them.
In this environment and under this setting, President López Obrador will visit Central America and spend a few days in the great Cuba. Cuba is like the Icaria of the impossible dream. It is the place where the longed-for social justice of an entire continent, America, could never be found. Cuba is a failed Icaria whose example begins with itself. It is proof of how little use is the carnival of words in front of the forcefulness of facts.
President Lopez Obrador knows that this year in Colombia, his co-religionist, Gustavo Petro, may win the Presidency. Besides, there is the fact that at this point, nobody doubts that, sooner rather than later, Lula da Silva will be again the President of Brazil. What does all this mean? It means that the populist wave will cover most of the American continent.
For the first time, America has a new factor. The internal crisis in the United States is of such proportions that it impedes the country’s advancement, and with each passing day, social hatred and ideological confrontation are increasing. Currently, in the United States, the two parties have not found any interest in working together to look after the country’s true interests. And while the effects of this fragmentation are being seen, non-English speaking America finds itself colonized by the flow and the empire of words that led to building the most significant stream of social hatred and ideological claims – devoid of actual content – and, above all, of development plans that make any sense or offer a plan for the future. In this sense, it isn’t easy to think that during what remains of President López Obrador’s term in power, he will have the necessary external accompaniment to rectify the course.
President López Obrador, who is such a believer. That every day he can live comforted by his faith in a superior being called God, should learn the supreme lesson of the power of the spirit and what distinguishes the powerful from the weak. He should learn and practice more and more the capacity for forgiveness. The time has come when the President has to start forgiving to teach his co-religionists to do so, but, above all, he has to find a way out of his situation. A situation in which, in the end – even though he has not stolen what is missing – the budget he presents has been squandered and thrown away by incompetent and incapable people who were very loyal but very useless.
All this would be tragic in normal times, but in these extraordinary times we live in – with wars, the threat of a possible nuclear war, and the recomposition of the world maps – it is even more tragic. And it is so because the first socio-economic consequences, those that affect the stomachs of the neediest and those that hinder the possibility of social growth, have already begun to manifest themselves. With the current inflation worldwide, the fuel crisis, and the tangled panorama that exists in this new world reconfiguration, countries have an obligation to know how to manage what they have with the criteria of the moment they live. And this is a moment of world crisis, not a moment of ideological crisis or cheap chatter.
