Antonio Navalón
Everything is broken for almost everyone. Neither the East nor the West has a clear plan that allows us to know how to get out of the situation we are in or where to go from here. Beyond Vladimir Putin’s antics and his ability to have shown that he is – by far – the best leader today, his prowess would fill Josef Stalin and the creators of the German Gestapo with pride. Beyond the fact that Putin is the man who has best-used intelligence as an instrument of power, everything else, everything around us, is pure confusion and loss.
Everything comes from the far East. Everything comes from Asian countries, including the Eurasian giant that is Russia. The rest – starting with the United States, the European nations, and the countries that starred in the faces of success, wars, failure, and evolution from the 18th century to the present day – in the only place where they find an element common is in loss and confusion.
In addition to Russia led by Putin, it seems that only China and its search for consolidation as the middle empire of an Asia that has become a determining and dominant factor in the world, has a way, even if this is only to face its confessed enemy: the United States. But in reality, not only have the Americans turned against the Chinese but so have every one of those who have been affected by the birth not only of a new power but of a new economic order that has moved the driving force, energizer, and controller of the economy that dominated from West to East.
Joe Biden premiers and boasts humility, which for many is weakness. I prefer to believe that it is humility that will unleash the wrath of the righteous. Biden is clear about the program that he has to implement. After having already crossed the line of half a million deaths, his priority is to prevent hundreds of thousands of his compatriots from losing their lives. Dead offered on that strange altar of human inability to understand, difficult for us to accept, called Covid-19.
Europe? Now nobody knows what Europe is anymore, but, what is worse, nobody can imagine what Europe we will have in the face of a strong Putin and a disappeared Merkel. The European nations are heading towards a path in which they will have to re-adjust their accounts without England and in the midst of a new reconfiguration where their social and economic model is seriously in crisis. And it is in crisis, above all, for one reason: because it has been many years since Europe lost the ode to joy and because – despite having Beethoven’s Ninth as an anthem – it has been a long time since it had shared political or social ideals, it only has accounting realities and adjustment plans. It isn’t easy to maintain the cohesion of an area with 24 different languages and 27 countries forming part of the unit without political, moral, philosophical objectives and common dreams.
Then there are us, the poor. We are those who were in bad shape before the pandemic and who will come out much worse – those who survive – after the pandemic passes. You can walk, find out, search and try to analyze what happened to us, but there is a scene that sums up the current moment in the other Americas, naturally discounting the subcontinent that is itself Brazil. This scene shows the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, starred last week.
They are both men who have clearly reasoned completely opposite to what has been done worldwide to combat the pandemic. Both have reacted and understood the action of governing the crisis in a radically opposed way, although curiously you see where their dreams come together, in the fact that – as Fernández said – both will go down in history as the presidents of the pandemic. Both have dreams of articulating a new axis from North to South – and vice versa – that gives new content and meaning to social distribution, the fight against corruption, and the fight against impunity in both countries. Within their beings, they seek the rehabilitation of the dream of the Americas, of reviving the dream of Bolívar and Juárez, in the sense of establishing a new order in the Americas, which, although it does not share interests, respect or institutions, at least have dreams in common.
It would be interesting to ask the two peoples – the Argentine and the Mexican – what they thought when they saw their two presidents dreaming in the morning together and proclaiming a speech in which the only thing they lacked in that trip to the past that they fully represent was to say that there was never a better government than that of Perón and that the years –which seem like a representation of the 1960s– that we are currently living are the best that Mexico has ever experienced. Both leaders want to love each other, although naturally, the love poem is written on the basis of finding a way where the good ones finally triumph and the bad ones are defeated. There are problems with vaccines in their towns, with assistance, corruption, and hunger, but the important thing is not the current reality. The important thing is the dream of tomorrow. Within all this and to do justice, that new ideal of being able to reinvent the world from Spanish-speaking America, now with the Mesoamerica Plan, will continue to function on the basis that, the only thing that we can never lack –although we lack of everything – are the illusions, hopes, and dreams.
Alberto Fernández and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are not only in the antipodes –one is more southern, and the other is more northern–, but they really share axes and bases that go beyond how they manage their peoples. Fernández is the ideological son of General Juan Domingo Perón, while López Obrador is the son of former President Luis Echeverría Álvarez. Although originally the Mexican President likes to think about the light and guidance that General Lázaro Cárdenas gave him, it is evident that in the practical development of policies, he must be conscientious not to end up using the model of Luis Echeverría instead of the model of General Cárdenas. And in the midst of his ideologies, there is the absolutely inalienable desire to end with the poor in the name of the poor, but within a circuit that is repeated over and over again. You cannot live without dreams. It is a shame that to keep them alive, it is necessary to eat, have a health system, and have a system that provides basic and necessary security. The world does not know where it is going, but some countries are lucky enough to at least seek, not give up, and want – above all – that the dream lives on.
It is to applaud the normality of the rulers in the exercise of power. Still, it is also important that they remember that, at the end, when citizens cast our vote at the polls to choose who will lead us, we also have the desire and the need for them to whoever is going to preside over us knows how to attack and carry out with rectitude and efficiency the function for which he was elected. The comrades that we saw last week representing the North and South of the Americas who speak Spanish was a personal gesture that has nothing to do with the structure necessary to articulate a political alternative.
