Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
This week the Mexican President reiterated what he has said: he will violate the law when, in his judgment, he must defend the poor. This approach makes the President violate constitutional precepts daily, starting with his morning press conference (Mañanera). By attacking people’s honor, offending them when they disagree with him, and not respecting their right to reply in the same media, these acts violate constitutional principles on human rights.
Thus, the presidential “idea” of what is or is not justice is biased by his subjective notion of what he requires to exercise the office of President of the Republic. He considers that being elected President gives him the privilege of forcing all citizens to submit to his ideas, notions, and subjectivity. As simple as the decision that all Mexican children must pay homage to Marx, Lenin, and Bakunin in the educational system because he so decides. By the way, such education is not given even in Cuba, where children are educated according to the supposed teachings of José Martí, not Marx or Lenin.
The conviction that there is a world of ideas alien to what they arbitrarily call neoliberalism reigns among Morenistas educators. At this stage of the six-year term, the agitation of the neoliberal flag is to float the phantasmagoric presence of a monster that must be defeated under the penalty of living in eternal misery. It is a flag as false as the flag of austerity and the chant that there is no corruption in his government.
The messianic discourse of the mañaneras suggests a parallelism between this untidy and tireless President and the fight of St. George against the mythical dragon. This religious image underlies Morena’s call to the fanatic war to which he summons his followers. Morena evokes “its” conception of religious justice to become the armed vanguard of a new Cristero movement in Mexico, now motivated by St. Charles (Marx) in his righteous combat against the capitalist dragon. Except that the Morenistas are not anti-capitalists but rather power seekers without purpose and without the program. Greed and corruption are their new morality, justified in the name of the poor.
They say all their political actions are carried out in the name of the poor. Violating the constitutional and legal order when it is “unjust” is done in the name of the poor. Militarizing the public administration benefits the country because it is done in the name of the poor. Building a new pact between drug trafficking and the Mexican State will bring social peace, always in the name of the poor. Ignoring the law when voting for notoriously anti-constitutional laws with their ephemeral majority in Congress is also done in the name of the poor. Morena and AMLO seek to eternalize themselves in power because they are the only ones, they say, who have the right to do so in the name of the poor.
The conceptual framework that justifies their government actions, even if they tend towards the establishment of an authoritarian regime, is because, they say with a flaming finger, they have a higher goal, which is the destruction of the nefarious neoliberal dragon. Their battle reaches biblical proportions. That is the imaginary that the President feeds daily from the morning. That is why it can be said, without fear of being mistaken, that the President is a minister of worship speaking from a pulpit, haranguing his faithful to believe in a new and unusual religion: the exodus of the poor to the land of honey and manna, guided by a messiah who abnegating leads the way. The new Cristero war in Mexico has begun.
Ignoring the Constitution, invoking an ideological, subjective, and arbitrary idea of justice, and the arbitrary trampling of the rule of law in the name of the poor is the modern way of mixing ancestral atavisms with political grist to create new systems of political domination. It is the groundwork for a new edifice of Mexican authoritarianism.
In the name of the poor, they want to justify the capture of the State by identifiable political forces of the Morenista environment, together with dark forces of organized crime, in complicity with federal law enforcement and some magnates of the national economy. What could go wrong? The constitutional order is violated, and the transformation of the State into a political-criminal apparatus is planned, all designed to benefit the poor, says the messiah who lives in an ornate and luxurious viceregal palace.
But in reality we know that this political framework, together with his “pobrista” narrative (in the name of the poor), is only the façade of a personalist political project that seeks to eternalize himself in power. AMLO’s idea is to turn his legacy into that of the one who came to stay in power, immovable for all times. And, even so, he compares himself to the greats of Hidalgo, Juarez, Madero, and Cardenas when, in reality, he is merely an aspiring dictator.
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