Antonio Navalón
No one will ever be able to accuse President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of lying or not being clear about what he wanted to do in at least two areas. The first – as he has already stated before – is his intention to send to hell, disappear or render the institutions practically useless. With respect to this presidential objective, he is doing well. He has mortally wounded the National Electoral Institute (INE) and now, according to his own logic and thinking, he seeks to leave us without the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN). It may be said that this instrument has been of little use for the national ills. Here I would like to recall when in 1994 Ernesto Zedillo made one of the most significant changes to this institution by making a constitutional reform that reduced the number of justices from twenty-six to eleven. This change was made seeking, as the former President always did and regardless of the talents that surrounded him, the reinstatement and institutional strengthening.
At the time of writing this column, it is not clear if what was announced by President López Obrador will finally be consummated, as well as what was done by Minister Yasmín Esquivel, which is to fight to the end. A fight that forgets that institutions and laws are not born when they are published in the codes or in the official gazettes of the Republic, but rather when they gain collective respect and when their compliance is for the benefit of society or institutions. For López Obrador’s candidate, Justice Esquivel, maintaining her position or winning the Presidency of the Supreme Court under the current conditions would mean the greatest defeat for the institution.
When one becomes a Supreme Court Justice, inevitably and in spite of the existing separation of powers, one becomes a political character. However, it is necessary to mention that in politics there are always innocent victims. It goes without saying that I would like to say that in this case the year of the jasmine was in vain and that in the end it was the result of an atrocious political game imposed by the President. But until we get to that point, what must be recognized is that her permanence in the race and the approach developed has only one victim, which is not Yasmín Esquivel, but the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation.
President López Obrador will not shed a tear for the law since he does not believe in it. But the rest of us must prepare ourselves and know that at this point any solution is bad, but the worst is that in the face of the sacrifice – however unjust – of a person, there is the immolation of an institution from which many millions of Mexicans can, should and have no choice but to expect. Do not waste any more time looking back. Do not cry anymore. And the fact is that – in spite of generating tears and enough bodily fluids to leave the testimony of our pains and, occasionally, our joys in the form of water flowing from the tears – the truth is that we need all the strength to be able to build tomorrow. At some point in the future we will be able to read, without losing much time, that in the year 2023 either the counter-transformation began or the search to give content to what had been the greatest revolution in Mexico’s history since 1917 began.
This is another time, although we are still Mexicans. That means that whoever wears the sash on his chest will achieve two things: first, that for a certain period of time – between four and five years – the tradition of adoration towards the Tlatoani that we have had for centuries will turn him into a kind of God. The Romans changed history the day they humanized the gods and deified men. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and was the nephew and apprentice of Julius Caesar, whom – if they had not killed – the figure of “Caesar” would never have been born in the Italian peninsula. However, it was the assassination of the great Roman leader that ushered in the age of the Caesars, Augustus being the first of them. After him, there followed a list of Roman leaders who made real the theory that power corrupts, but absolute power completely decomposes.
Some argue that the decline of the Roman Empire lasted eight centuries, and some place it in the Ides of March, which changed the history of the world after the assassination of Julius Caesar. William Shakespeare wrote a famous speech called “Julius Caesar’s funeral”. A speech that described the pattern of behavior of men in power and that would remain in the collective memory and in the subconscious of the people. In this speech, the English playwright – among other lines – exposed a phrase that was supposedly pronounced by Julius Caesar before his death, which was: “Et tu, Brute?” (“You too, Brutus?”, in English) referring to the moment of betrayal that culminated with the assassination of the Roman leader.
From the time of the Romans to the present day, there is a lesson to be learned: to have all power is impossible, and power is an element that only God, the true and authentic one, can hold and maintain. For all other gods, emperors and leaders, power is something that has a certain validity and that generates – almost simultaneously – as many reactions of rejection as a sheepish following among the societies that are governed.
Leaving aside the historical teachings and lessons, now in Mexico we are entering the beginning of a new end. Today marked the beginning of a new year and with it, we can see the calendars of the great pending works of the current administration. However, there is a great unfinished work of which it is necessary to talk about and set a date for its delivery or conclusion, called reconciliation. The time has come when we will not be able to create a space where we can live and where the elimination of each other is not a national objective or the main objective in the daily life of the country. Frankly, we are at the end point of our journey and – despite the fact that Mexico endures and overcomes everything, no matter what conditions or obstacles are presented to us – what is certain is that we were in the burning wasteland and we have to find a way out as soon as possible.
There are moments in which the evolution we are facing in our future is really brutal. At this moment, the weapons are being veiled and the vote that will designate the new President of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation will take place. Do you know what is happening? That the new leader of the SCJN, no matter how much he or she may have origins in the Fourth Confusion or in the origins of this power – which according to the official doctrine of this regime – that destroyed Mexico, will have neither the rights, loyalties nor obligations of before. Whoever is elected will have to legalize – if it is still possible – the trauma of what it means to come from a time in which power was exercised with so much direction and so much brutality.
We begin the year in this way and we do so because it is clear that politics is never enough. To continue talking about the mañaneras and the inhabitant of the National Palace is a mistake. First, because that is part of the past. And, secondly, because, although he has the power to destroy us all in the present, what feeds, matters and excites him most, which is history, no longer belongs to the President. The very opinion about him, his person and his administration, is something that is out of his hands and out of his dialectic skills.
It does not matter how many people disappear, are eliminated, nor does it matter how many scoundrels we can incorporate into the national ideology to explain the cause of our misfortunes. The only thing that matters is who is next and what is to be done from here on. That is why, no matter how much we may want and no matter how much we may think that by defending one candidacy or another we are -from the deadly game of corcholatas to what the Fourth Confusion wants and what it enshrines- defending the essence of democracy, we must not be mistaken… it is a lie.
What is going to matter to the new President of the Supreme Court is what is next, what actions she or he has to implement or what legal order is the one to be protected, the one of a show of hands and that the wise people, the blessed people, speak, even if they have no legal guarantee. Or else, it is decided to go on restoring, through disenchantment, the lack of illusions of all those who were left without identity, without personality and without ideas in order to be at the service of the Fourth Confusion and its leader.
In this new one, we must also know that Mexico is returning to the world, therefore, it is returning to history. We will not be alone with the losers and we will be trying to make our nonsense acquire logic and justify it in the face of the nonsense of others. Or, to put it another way, that having on our balance sheet the errors and failures we have at such a high price does not explain why we have to incorporate the Pedro Castillo’s of this world to our ideology of action.
What is the model for Mexico? What do we have to propose or what country do we want to leave to our children? We, who are a sample of the State – in the sense that for a period of time we have a similar authority over our children as the State should have over us – we made the decision to spoil them by giving them too much in too little time. That is why the all-important social plans, of which I am a supporter and advocate, do not serve and are the basis on which the future development of a people like ours can be sustained. And the fact is that, in the end, the only thing we teach them is to extend their hand and collect the card or the check, but we do not inform them or teach them how to create the wealth to make the country bigger, more equitable and prosperous.
We are facing a change of cycle. It is true and it is dangerous, but there is a fact, power always has resources until two days after it ceases to be in power. But make no mistake, what really matters in power, which is the moral and historical crushing of reasons, is done with.
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