Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
We are just at the beginning of the 2024 electoral process, and data and events indicate that it has been decided to take the country to the edge of a precipice. And maybe even throw us over it.
It is impossible to envision a competitive electoral process within reasonable legal parameters. Everything indicates that we will live through a completely unlawful contest. Furthermore, we lack a competent and neutral electoral arbiter with the necessary moral authority to lead the process to a successful conclusion, in which the winners will have won in good standing, and the losers will accept the verdict of the ballot boxes.
Marcelo Ebrard’s complaints about the illegal use of public funds in Morena’s internal campaign have gone unheard and unheeded. The national tour undertaken by Claudia Sheinbaum shows that Morena intends to increase the use of all public resources to massively mobilize and force entire populations to vote for the ruling party. There can be no room for doubt. The government intends to blackmail voters into captivity due to their poverty and need, forcing them to vote for Claudia and Morena’s candidates.
Ebrard’s denunciation will remain as an anecdote of a madman in Morena who thought that honesty was a reality, not an illusion. The truth is that Congress will approve a budgetary deficit with a propensity to a historic indebtedness for the sole purpose of financing the massive purchase of votes and the deployment of the power of propaganda, together with explicit blackmail to the Mexican society. The blackmail is simple: if you don’t vote for Morena, you will lose any semblance of welfare. Either you cooperate, or I’ll cut your throat!
So the first premise of Morena’s campaign for the presidency is the willingness to use all the gold in the world to win, to fill all the stadiums, plazas, and massive events with masses and more masses of people.
Another premise is to create an environment of coercion and intimidation towards the opposition. The use of prosecutors and investigators is to terrorize the opposition. The case of the Morelos prosecutor is a good propaganda point to intimidate anyone. The question that arises is obvious: if they do that to a man with immunity, what would they do to me? They did it to Ricardo Anaya in 2018. They are already preparing the bunk for Xóchitl and Taboada in 2024. Thus, the opposition may have its two main candidates as indictees or even in official pre-trial detention. Furthermore, Anaya had to flee the country, and there is the case of Christian Von Roehrich, coordinator of the PAN, imprisoned and with a long future in jail.
AMLO uses the Office of the Public Prosecutor to harass those he considers his enemies. Rosario Robles is another example. The Attorney General of the Republic and the Attorney General of Mexico City are the armed civilian repressive arms of the party in power. Do not doubt it for an instant. Remember, those of you with a short memory: AMLO imprisoned Carlos Ahumada, an incautious and ill-advised Argentinean businessman, when he disclosed the videos in which he paid bribes to high-level officials of the capital city government, which he headed. He imprisoned him at that time. And recently, he wanted to extradite him to Mexico while President of the Republic. AMLO’s hatred, jealousy, and resentment last a lifetime.
But the national scenario worsens, seeing the idea that germinates in his political work for the future. The nomination of Omar García Harfush as the candidate to occupy the second most important national position is not because he is well placed in the polls. No. It is because of who he is, who he has been, and what he represents. This data makes AMLO a little uncomfortable, but it also allows him to close the circle of his strategic allies toward constructing a future regime in Mexico.
Harfush is the Gordian knot that closes the circle of alliances between the intelligence and espionage community in the past and present, represents the community of military control over public security, and offers continuity of a fluid dialogue with convenient and useful sectors of organized crime in Mexico, despite the extradition of Ovidio. Or precisely because that “sacrifice” was made at the altar of the demands of the U.S. priesthood. In other words, he is the representative par excellence of the armed forces before the official political power and confirms that the close alliance with organized crime factions will continue in a hypothetical six-year term of Sheinbaum.
Do not doubt it: a six-year term with Sheinbaum at the head will be, rather, that of the military, not of civilian power. Mexico City will once again be the headquarters of the Presidency, as it always was before, during, and after the cuartelazo (Coup d’Etat) that killed Madero.
The military will have discretionary control of vast swaths of the public budget, as the Mayan Train, its airline, airports, and customs, in addition to the routine expenses of a relevant army, will be for long years the spenders of considerable budgets to maintain businesses that will not report profits, nor will they render public accounts, for reasons of “national security”.
But it is not just any military force. It is one that maintains a dialogue and communication with organized crime, mainly drug trafficking. Recent data on the workforce employed by organized crime places it as one of the most powerful enterprises in Mexico. According to a recently published study, around 175,000 people work for the cartels, and it is unclear whether that figure includes all the peasant groups that produce the inputs for drug production, for example, and whether it includes the employees of the legal businesses that are employed to launder their funds.
Hypothetically, that labor force is included in the calculation of the alliance that would make up this new governing model in Mexico. And if this is added, the Servidores de la Nación, a force estimated by some to number 500,000 people paid by the government, represents a bloc capable of intimidating anyone who receives a “dinerito” (petty cash) from the government.
The State is partially at the service of the project of a new civil-military regime in Mexico. The entire Executive Branch, a part of the Legislative Branch, and parts of the Judicial Branch support it. However, within the State, there is strong resistance to Morena’s total colonization of its structures and its political project. Because of this conflict, the State is on an internal war path: some support it is at the service of Morena and its partners in arms, and others are for it to stay out of this project, considering it unconstitutional and entirely outside the law.
In the process, what can be destroyed is the State itself. Some want to annul it, while others want to reinforce the path of the Constitution and the rule of law. The election of 2024 is destined to define which of these two projects will advance and which will end right there and then. No more, no less.
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