Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The celebration of Mexico’s Independence Day in 2023 was the staging of the deep sectarianism that defines the government of President López Obrador. By prioritizing the exclusion of the representatives of the other branches of the Mexican State, both Legislative and Judicial and representatives of the different political forces accredited in the country, it was turned into a partisan event with a narrow view of the enormous universe of Mexicanity.
But this exclusion illustrates the small-mindedness of what Morena and López Obrador are today. They are small-minded because they can only see the space they have created for themselves in the Republic. It is not a quantitative matter. They may be numerous. Rather, the issue is the flat, tiny gaze, navel-gazing, and, from there, reinterpreting the world of Mexicanity.
The problem with historical reinterpretations that pretend to be universal is that they risk being at the service of a few. Or of one, as in this case, we are referring to.
It is well known that López Obrador has a colossal ego. A blindness of the same size accompanies those egos. How do we know that his ego is “unimaginably big”? Simple. Because he has said it countless times before he was president and now, being president. But what is it that he has said that reveals an ego out of all proportion?
Mainly the fact that he considers himself a leader and transformer on par with the achievements and historical stature of Hidalgo, Juarez, Madero, and Cardenas. He has said it publicly a thousand times, especially now in his mañaneras.
It is no coincidence that he chose the symbols that surround him. Mainly, the logo representing his government: six men, no women: Morelos, Hidalgo, Juárez, Madero, and Cárdenas. For AMLO, men make history, while women applaud them. That is also why he constantly minimizes the women’s movement. His logic is simple: why do women want to steal his show if he is making history? It seems unfair to him or, worse, an infamy on their part. He thinks it is women’s turn to subordinate themselves to his heroic purposes today. One more time.
That is also why he considers that every work his government carries out has an epic and historical character. A railroad is not simply a railroad. No, it is an act that, according to AMLO, will profoundly transform national life. When he inaugurated four stations of the Toluca-Mexico interurban train, even though all the stations in Mexico City were missing, he declared it “a monument to the transforming capacity of his government”. And this, even though he had little to do with this train designed by Peña Nieto, and he is not going to inaugurate the complete section either because the capital city society resists the last section. They deny it to AMLO just as they denied it to Peña Nieto.
In López Obrador’s mind, the AIFA, Dos Bocas, the Mayan Train, and the Transisthmian Railway are works that future generations will have to remember as events as important as the National Independence, Juarez’s Reform, the “Niños Heroes“, the 1910 Revolution, and the oil expropriation.
The error is that he suffers from immediatism. He does not want to wait to be recognized by history as one of the five giants of Mexican history. No, he demands to be recognized as such during his lifetime. That is his desperation. And that desperation makes him small because he conceives himself as the author and director of the play, the leading actor, but also the voice-over that exalts his immeasurable virtues, the costume designer, the set designer, and the one who collects the tickets at the entrance to the theater.
The other giants of the story had to wait for the judgment of history. He wants to be the editor of his own magnificence. This explains the immediatism of textbooks. His purpose is not to educate students but to have them praise the achievements of his government. He does not want to wait for that mundane thing called “the judgment of history”. That is why the textbooks are made with that crude resource of exalting living characters. If he does not do it himself, what certainty will he have that history will do it?
As we all know, he considers himself a keen historian. He gives lessons not only to all Mexicans daily in the mañaneras, supposedly making history (or telling stories?). He has also applied his long perorations to Biden, Díaz Canel, and the Pope, among others. But this is the habit of a man afraid of what history will say about him. He is guided by fear and uncertainty, not self-confidence.
In his “historical observations”, he has seen how the country applauds, with enough enthusiasm, the five giants of history. And there enters the confusion “of the times” in the calculation and López Obrador’s head. He does not understand why, if those heroes of the past are almost uniformly applauded, why he is not equally applauded.
He obviously does not understand the difference between past, present, and future. Much less does he understand the process of building social and political consensus. In their historical moments, those heroes did not have the generalized applause of the public but were often greeted with armchairs or, worse, with bullets. This is how history is made.
His way of governing is to give the impression of having an absolute social consensus, reminiscent of the cheers to Hidalgo on the day of National Independence. But since he knows that he has an opposition of at least 43% of the population (according to polls by Reforma and El Financiero), he has decided to surround himself exclusively with his own and govern only with them.
This is how the decision to invite only unconditional supporters to the National Palace for the Grito can be understood. It is consistent with his fantasy of historical unanimity on his personal heroism. And he allows himself to conveniently ignore the difference between the judgment that history will make about his administration and the judgment that the President himself makes about…himself.
The problem is that this narcissistic profile of his personality derives in concrete political consequences. His government has decided to contract a historic amount of debt since the times of FOBAPROA. By the way, AMLO denounced this debt contracting in a book he signed but written by others. The current purpose is to increase public debt to unsustainable levels to finance social programs to secure a “historic” vote, although bought and empty of legitimacy, to win the 2024 presidential election. Morena’s sectarianism is accompanied by the assault on the federal public budget for 2024.
But it also aims to confirm to López Obrador, in real-time, that he is as applauded as Hidalgo on Independence Day. It is as crucial for the president to demonstrate his heroism as it is to win the election because the stability of his expansive and fragile ego is at stake. And with it, the Republic is in danger because, to defend itself, AMLO is capable of any atrocity.
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