Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The country is experiencing an explosion of criminal violence against communities throughout the country and unrestrained official corruption. The two phenomena (criminal violence and official corruption) live concatenated with each other, like soul mates. One protects and feeds the other, and vice versa. And both are growing at an accelerated pace.
The country’s security authorities meet every morning to learn the situation of the earlier 24 hours, as well as incidents and threats. The President has said that this type of meeting occurs in no other country outside of Mexico. But, despite these meetings, violence and corruption grow steadily.
The instructions to the country’s security forces are unambiguous. Contain, but do not interrupt the drug trafficking business in the country. Dedicate yourselves to construction, running businesses and airlines, guarding ports and customs, and creating hotel networks. Under the cloak of secrecy granted to them by the national security law, they will be able to have the necessary public funds to do juicy business. What is more, they will be rich. If Mr. Secretary became rich in a few years, the same brilliant future awaits the rest of the commanders.
From the political officialdom, it is coldly calculated that these military commanders will be accomplices of corruption when someone thinks of asking for accountability. But if the accounts turn out well for the President, there will no longer be institutions with legal powers to enforce accountability. Those who ask for accountability must be satisfied with the answers, even if they are brief and without further verification.
Likewise, the military will not be able to protest the proliferation of corruption among individuals or public entities because they will all share the same sin. The President’s children oblige restaurants in Mexico City to buy their chocolates. With the same force, they make state governors give juicy contracts to their friends to charge, at least, the “finders fee.” Friends, associates, relatives: they all live the Year of Hidalgo (Que chingue a su madre el que deje algo– Screw anyone who leaves anything behind.) with singular joy, encouraged by the idea that the next six-year term will be theirs, too. Raul Salinas’ “Mr. Ten Percent” is now seen as a tender naivety.
To ensure the continuity of the system, drug trafficking has become a necessary “evil”. In deciding to agree to the terms of the “narcotic peace” that rules this six-year term, one consequence was to give narco candidates entry into politics. They were granted the status of present and valid actors in the political and economic decisions relevant to the development of the six-year term. It is a give-and-take. The government has to deliver some rewards to the DEA in exchange for preventing the DEA from operating freely in the country. With the DEA out of open operation, the field is free for agreements between ” discerning” actors.
The narco is respected in its areas of operation and transit, allowing the election of governors, deputies, and mayors who are friendly to the business, yes, if not in the whole country, at least in key states. Thus, Guerrero, Michoacán, Jalisco, Sinaloa, Quintana Roo, Veracruz, and Sonora, to mention a few, are within the pact. There is an understanding. There is no DEA, and there is permission to have winning candidates under the purifying mantle of AMLO and Morena. Business goes back and forth. Known Morena operators, including relatives of the President, operate one day with authorities and the next day with organized crime, all on the same terms and with the same familiarity.
This is the new model of governance that AMLO is imprinting on the country. It is a civil-military model borrowed from the Cubans, who operate this way but with a material poverty that keeps them at lower levels of operation and efficiency. This Cuban governance model has never been applied in a country with an economy on the scale of Mexico.
AMLO is building a very elaborate civil-military and narco alliance, where all will be held accountable if the pact falls apart or the presidency is lost. Hence, the top priority of the members of the new ruling confraternity is never to lose power.
Something similar, although much more conventional, was done by Carlos Salinas during his administration. By privatizing state enterprises, he created a new faction of the Mexican bourgeoisie linked to him. From there, for example, emerges the economic strength of Carlos Slim.
However, the Salinas case was an agreement between pre-existing economic and political powers—no military or drug lords, at least not at the top. With AMLO, there are the usual people in business and politicians, but now allied on a parity basis with the equally corrupt military and also with the always uncomfortable but necessary drug traffickers.
From these needs comes the urgency to disappear all autonomous and independent bodies and everything that could represent a limitation to the imperial exercise of the presidency. And everything that could represent a legal demand for accountability. Because his accounts do not add up.
It is not an accident that AMLO has chosen the National Palace as his home. That is how he conceives himself: as imperial, imposing, and unquestionable. According to him, he has every right, because of the votes he received in 2018, to impose himself directly or indirectly on the country’s presidency for the rest of his life.
The basis of his assumption is that everyone at the top of the economic and political power committed the same sin of greed and betrayal. They had their hands in the public budget and now cannot be held accountable for diverting public resources to their personal coffers. The only ones who don’t care about that are the narcos: it is their money, obtained by blood and fire. They have no reason to be accountable to anyone except their bosses.
If Xochitl wins the presidency, she will have to dismantle that governance model, and it will have to be accomplished by blood and fire. If Claudia wins, she will be a hostage and participant in a government that neither directs nor controls.
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