Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
In his book Estado de Emergencia (De la Guerra de Calderón a la Guerra de Peña Nieto) State of Emergency (From Calderón’s War to Peña Nieto’s War), author Carlos Fazio ended the text with an analysis of the Ayotzinapa massacre, which led to the following conclusion: “It was the State”. The final sentence of the book reads as follows: “As Norberto Elias had thought for Nazi Germany in 1935, in Iguala the “forces of order” had joined hands with the “forces of crime”, not as a “political” or “institutional” crisis, but as a civilizational crisis. That is, where the only commensurable law is the “law of the strongest”, and all mediations that could inhibit this “law” have disappeared. Mexico had entered a civilizational crisis.”
In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered to end the nightmare represented by the disappearance of Ayotzinapa students if the popular would favor him. The popular will favored him, and he has exercised power for six long years. His six-year term is six months away from concluding. And, we can affirm, without being untruthful, that not only did he not resolve the Ayotzinapa issue, but he has deepened the crisis he represents, and, therefore, he has deepened the relationship between law enforcement and criminal forces that Fazio masterfully describes.
During the six-year term of López Obrador, the consolidation of an agreement between the “forces of order” and the “forces of crime”, popularly known as “hugs, not bullets”, was a state policy. Following Fazio’s reasoning, we would say that the liberal forces introduced Mexico into the path of the civilizational crisis. At the same time, the left installed itself in power to consolidate and institutionalize this agreement between the Mexican State and organized crime.
Today, crime is already operating as a political force determined to act within and outside the institutional frameworks of politics. Implicit permission has been given from the highest spheres of political power to do it.
This authorization for organized crime to act is not given in a vacuum: it was granted as part of the process of transforming political power in Mexico into a militarized entity, where those who govern do so with weapons in their hands. That is, in essence, the transformation that López Obrador wants to impose in Mexico. It is not a democratic transformation but an armed one.
Neither Calderón nor Peña Nieto conceived of going that far, and they were not willing to subvert the constitutional order because they conceived their actions as a tactic to defend the rule of law. Instead, what López Obrador is doing is with a strategic vision to subvert the constitutional order.
In Sinaloa, the cartel conducts laboratory tests, kidnapping families en masse, to test the State’s response in anticipation of its intervention in the elections just two months away. This mass kidnapping makes sense for the narco’s electoral intentions in Sinaloa. It is a rehearsal through which the cartel studies how the State and its security forces react to a generalized case of intervention to impose its candidates in all popularly elected positions: senators, deputies, and local authorities. Let’s remember the decisive intervention of the cartel in the 2018 and 2021 elections to place the governor in his seat, with collective kidnappings, ballot box robbery, and voter intimidation.
The same is happening in Guerrero, Michoacán, and Veracruz, among other states.
In the eighties, the State controlled and directed drug trafficking, distributing routes and collecting quotas through Bartlett. From Salinas until Peña Nieto, the relationship was one of conflict and partial containment, with intermittent negotiations, under the guidance and logic of García Luna. Since this six-year term, the model has been one of tolerance with freedom for the territorial occupation of the cartel, with agreements and division of routes, without reaction or control by the State. Today, the model is directed directly by the President and his family. Hence, the explanation for so many “working visits” to Badiraguato is
In every stage of recent history, corruption prevailed as a present value.
What is relevant in our case is that the left had to come to power in Mexico to make the decisive turn towards the model of co-government between the State and its natural adversary, the anti-state forces that propose to destroy the State for their benefit. Crime has quickly learned that it can colonize the State for its own benefit. If it achieves this goal, the next Legislature may have a parliamentary faction representative of drug trafficking. To achieve this goal, it has been necessary to distract the Mexican Army from its constitutional role as a defender of the State against subversion.
The Mexican left proposes to create a new constitutional order (which it cryptically calls “the second floor of the transformation”) built based on a governance pact between drug trafficking, the armed forces, and the remnants of some vestige of a political class organic enough to represent the interests of a new business class, headed by the López Obrador famiglia.
In that scheme, Sheinbaum is a ceremonial figure without exercising real power.
Which way does the civilizational crisis referred to by Fazio go? In reality, there is no such civilizational crisis if we start from the principle that any constitutional agreement can be discarded and replaced by a new one, even including drug trafficking as one of its pillars.
Of course, the logic of crime in power is chaos, as a force naturally contrary to order and control. Drug trafficking is the psychotic part of human behavior. But the Mexican left vindicates that part as “human and, therefore, acceptable as a companion”.
The agreement is ultimately a logical consequence of the “hugs, not bullets” policy. The exponential growth of the criminal occupation of territories is due to the freedom of movement they have been allowed, within the strategy of not having confrontations between law enforcement and criminal forces, under a “pacifist” logic. Collaboration has gone beyond specific situations that facilitate the State’s control of zones or routes, as was previously the case. Today, collaboration has been strategically unbalanced in favor of the criminal factor, allowing it to “transform” into a relevant political actor.
A central piece of the second floor of the 4T is the elimination of institutional counterweights to presidential power. Their idea is to totally occupy the Legislative Branch with its actors (from Morena and drug trafficking), demolish the Judicial Branch, and eliminate all the autonomous bodies that act as watchdogs and correctors of the Executive Branch’s deviations.
If things continue as they are going, Morena will be able to register candidates linked to organized crime in the States of Mexico, Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Campeche, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Baja California, and Sonora. It will be a parliamentary bloc with enormous economic and political power, enough to ensure that the second floor of the 4T discards the current constitutional agreement and changes it for one that suits the new dominant forces in Mexico’s political power structure.
In that new second floor of the transformation proposed by AMLO and the 4T, there will be no more investigation of Ayotzinapa or any incident that resembles it in the future. The criminal act will be the norm, not the exception. It will be a new subversive constitutional order that will dominate the future of Mexico, manned by an entity that claims to be “leftist” and linked to crime and the arms of the State. They will say it is not a failed State because a new Constitution will govern it.
Let no one be surprised.
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