Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
López Obrador defines his government as a long-lasting and far-reaching transformation. However, he skirts the essentially authoritarian character of his proposal.
Lord Roxton forbade his companions to shoot at the “huge beast with a great tail” that threatened to eat the whole group. He took a log with fire and threw it into the mouth of the monster, a large theropod, “one of the most dangerous species of animal life, those that receive the curses of men.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World.
The philanthropic ogre is like a giant whose head was the government and the oligarchy, and which kept the people captured and exploited in its jaws.
Octavio Paz, The Philanthropic Ogre.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador has defined the central objective of his presidency as the construction of a new power in Mexico, as dangerous as Conan Doyle’s dinosaur, more voracious and merciless than Paz’s ogre, and with renewed vigor, surpassing Monterroso’s “dinosaur that was always there”.
He defines his government as a transformation that will last an eternity, avoiding the essentially authoritarian character of his proposal. However, the only political model he knows and recognizes is the dinosaur of the PRI system, as he drew from it during his formative years.
His fascination with the Cuban model is congruent with the parallels between that regime of secret pacts, militarism, and absolute control over the citizenry and what he admired about the PRI. Both images project what Mexico will be like under the reign of the Fourth Transformation.
He has dedicated a large part of his administration to destroying all the institutions that he considers limit the power that, according to his logic, a presidency devoted to complete transformation should have. The destructive process he undertook will culminate when all the limitations imposed on presidential power disappear. He justifies his actions by alleging the demolition of the “neoliberal system”, although this is merely the pretext to exercise a presidency without limits.
While he destroys, he also builds. He is forming a new centralized, vertical, and authoritarian power structure, indispensable for the ruler determined not to give up power. He is determined to create a new strategic governing alliance with singular actors that had not been vital players in assembling the axes of governance in Mexico. A new axis of power, different from Paz’s philanthropic ogre based on agreements between politicians and businessmen. Times change, and so do the actors.
Venezuela and Nicaragua are examples to follow. They have succeeded in creating solid internal power structures that ensure stability and strength to the governing nucleus. So much so that not even all the efforts of the “Empire” to overthrow them have had any effect. What is this hard core that will not break, even with all the international pressure on top of it? It is the close alliance of interests between the dominant party, the armed forces engaged in shady and profitable businesses, and the international criminal organizations mainly linked to drug trafficking. This sum of interests is the key to their success in holding on to power. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are three regimes with differences among them but with deep coincidences in their durability and capacity to resist. And all three are waiting for Mexico to join the bloc.
López Obrador is shaping a new triangular pact between the power of the Mexican presidency, the high command of the armed forces, wealthy businessmen, and important factions of organized crime. The three players in this pact have a strategic interest in common: the continuity of Morena to ensure that political power and business flow with relative order. That is the constituent base of the new dinosaur.
This new political power base in the country does not depend on elections or popular support, although such support is helpful as a justification for certain actions before the international community. What is at stake, both for AMLO and the upper echelon of the armed forces and drug traffickers, is the fact of being an integral part of the new ruling triumvirate in Mexico. They are the head, structure, and body of the dinosaur, and they share a common need: the reproduction of their control over the State, without transparency, without accountability, and definitely without institutional counterweights. In Mexico, we are witnessing the prolegomena of the “occupation” of the State, forged on the half-destroyed ruins of the fragile democratic institutionality that obviously has not taken root in the country’s culture, society, and mind.
Drug trafficking, taking advantage of the freedom offered by López Obrador’s government in exchange for its support in electoral tasks and containment of the opposition, has turned to consolidating its social strength and territorial control. It has installed itself as an “alternate state”, governing entire swathes of the country. It uses its military force to impose its law, either through terrorist tactics or through the submission and fear of the inhabitants of the occupied zones. During this six-year term, drug trafficking has been transformed. From being a contained brute force, it became a political-military and economic force in full expansion.
The active and intentional intervention of drug trafficking in the 2024 elections is a fact that will play in favor of those who have allowed it to become this “alternate State”.
Historically, in Latin America, the military controls and administers the legal violence of the State and has played the role of guarantor of the continuity of the establishment in power. In our case, which establishment will it protect?
AMLO has done a convincing job among the military high command. He has made it easy for them to become prominent businessmen with personal properties of enormous economic value, allowing them to manage customs, airports, railroads, and an airline. Not only has he corrupted them, but he has also compromised them with the president regarding secrecy about the origin of their new wealth. All of this is in line with what has been learned in Cuba about the functionality and durability of the island’s system of government based on transferring the ownership of state assets to strategic private hands to ensure authoritarian political control.
He has also worked ideologically on the commanders. First, he has pitted the Army against the Navy over a historical grudge. The Army, more “nationalist”, believes, like the president, that the economy generated by drug trafficking should not be understood as an enemy of Mexico but as a respectable national industry, while the Navy shares the international opinion that it should be fought. The President has traveled with his Secretaries of Defense and the Navy to Cuba to convince them of the viability of creating and consolidating a new historical triumvirate similar to the Cuban one.
They consider that this triumvirate will be the basis of the new governing pact that will give a long life to the transformation AMLO advocates. It seems that the military high command is more or less convinced that they must defend the path AMLO offers. Even at the risk of implying a constitutional breach.
How could such a constitutional breach come about? AMLO is seducing the armed forces to guarantee their support in the 2024 elections, whether Morena wins or loses the race. If it wins, there will be severe national and international discontent because it will be considered an illegal and illegitimate victory. If it loses, the process will have to be declared null and void, and a state of exception will have to be established to govern by presidential decree indefinitely.
This is what Pedro Castillo wanted to do in Peru. The failed Peruvian attempt taught AMLO what he could do and what he should not do if what he intends to do is to disappear the State institutions and rule autocratically completely. In any case, a solid triumvirate is necessary: military and drug trafficking as preferred allies, no political parties, no elections, no National Electoral Institute (INE), no Federal Institute for Transparency and Access to Information (IFAI), no Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Everything by decree. That was Pedro Castillo’s dream, also delighted with the examples of Venezuela and Nicaragua.
For such a triumvirate to successfully govern Mexico, López Obrador’s Fourth Transformation will have to accelerate the demolition of the state institutions created during the last 120 years in Mexico since the promulgation of the 1917 Constitution. The president is moving forward in liquidating the three independent powers of the Republic. He intends to make the legislative and judicial powers subordinate appendages of the executive power. He also considers an independent press a pernicious and factious animal that only exists to subvert the existing order and information. Any dissent in society should be barely tolerated and, where possible, annihilated. These will not be times of dissidence, but of uniformity and acceptance of the dictates of the Supreme Power embodied in the ruling triumvirate.
The president applauds and supports the effort to crush independent thought, academic freedom, and research. Science and research, activities that require minds free of prejudices and constraints to advance, are contrary to the uniformity of thought and action to which the new model aspires. Pre-primary, primary, secondary, and high school education is seen as a possible source of disruption of “social peace”, which is why budget cuts are a priority to reduce the intellectual level of the country to the lowest common denominator possible. This uniformity in ignorance will be a sign of a new type of social equality, according to the egalitarian theories of the Fourth Transformation.
The declared plan is to destroy “everything that came before” and leave no relic of the past they call neoliberal. But this intention exposes the essential contradiction of the presidential pretension. The “new society” is being built on the material and economic premises of the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC, which, as an instrument of the liberal market par excellence, confirms the market economy model and its close link with globalization, especially with the U.S. economy.
The president is delirious about importing the Cuban political model to Mexico, based on the economic strength of the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC and the free market economy. It is impossible not to conclude that the president is living a disconnect between reality and his fantasy. The essential contradictions of his public policies and rhetorical outbursts should be of grave concern. The subject is choleric and determined to build an authoritarian and violent dinosaur to hide the fact that his plan is rooted in a profound contradiction that he cannot resolve.
Being incapable of accepting mistakes and failures and unable to build real solutions to his predicament, he prefers destruction to construction. Unable to solve the contradictions inherent to his proposal (the political model of the authoritarian triumvirate mounted on a globalized free market economy), he prefers to attack rather than recognize the structural impossibility of his idea.
Moreover, corruption has become rampant in his entourage. The nouveau riche abound in his administration. This makes the need not to lose control of the political system even more desperate. He does not want to end up in the Maximum Security Prison in Almoloya. He does not admit the possibility of losing power in the next presidential elections. Consequently, he accelerates the institutional destruction to stop any balanced competition between the opposing forces. He will do whatever it takes to curtail any possibility of the opposition winning the election.
The dinosaur AMLO is building has a long tail capable of violently whipping those who do not abide by his plan. The tail will hit with force given by the firepower and destruction of drug trafficking, and the armed forces determined not to lose the fabulous privileges acquired throughout the six-year term of López Obrador. Privileges that themselves turn them into actors with their own will and the capacity for independent action.
The dinosaur’s violent tail will be able to destroy all that remains of democratic resistance in Mexico, but also its own progenitor. What will the military and criminals do once they, not the president, control the dinosaur’s tail?
This was published in Spanish by Letras Libres on August 14, 2023
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