Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The anticipated winner is he who calculates everything; the anticipated loser is he who calculates little. He who calculates much wins; he who calculates little perishes. Sun Tzu
The frontal, thermonuclear attack of the Mexican State against Xóchitl Gálvez’s candidacy was not only inevitable; it was foreseeable. To combat this assault effectively, it is necessary to see its component parts and past histories.
The attack begins with transforming the State into a powerful annihilating assault tank for it to succeed. Therefore, it is necessary to remove from our minds the idea that we are facing a regular competition between political parties with the same criteria of democratic competition. This is not the case. Maintaining that illusion will be fatal for any intention to defeat the authoritarian wave accompanying the campaign AMLO-Morena has in mind for the 2024 election.
All the instruments of the State will be at the service of the Morena presidential candidacy to confuse, tackle, co-opt, destroy, imprison, assassinate, or buy what is necessary to consolidate the narrative of the inevitability of the Morena victory.
The current moment is critical because it is when they want to get that narrative implanted in the head, consciously or unconsciously, of each of the country’s citizens, whether or not they agree with AMLO and his way of governing.
Demoralizing the opposition’s mood is a strategic objective in this initial period of the electoral process. The campaigns have not even begun, and there are rumblings of anguish in the opposition ranks. There are good reasons to be worried, but that is precisely why it is essential to understand and weigh the different times of a campaign. We are just at the preliminaries of the election, so it requires a cool head to understand what this moment represents for the opposition and what it means for the government and its party.
Today, the ruling party intends to win the electoral war in advance, demoralizing the opposition. Sun Tzu said: “The superior strategist achieves surrender without fighting any battle”. Demoralizing the opponent before the beginning of the electoral campaign is AMLO’s objective at this moment. How does he want to achieve it?
Through various paths that intersect in time and space. The government uses multiple means to promote the “analysis” of Xóchitl’s supposed isolation from her leading promoters, the Frente parties, and civil society organizations. It puts Movimiento Ciudadano to discuss an alternate candidacy, which insinuates fragmentation and division in the opposition. In addition, there is a discussion about the alleged “deflation” of Xochitl’s candidacy, who meets with families in their modest homes. At the same time, very expensive “spontaneous and popular events” are organized in favor of Sheinbaum to establish an irrefutable contrast. The purchase of “serious” polls published in respectable media showing an unreachable lead of the official candidate is an essential component in the effort to demoralize and disarticulate the opposition. It is “seriously” discussed in the red circle whether the difference between the candidates is thirty points or ten. Most importantly for AMLO, it underlies the narrative of Sheinbaum’s unquestionable victory.
That is why Sun Tzu said, “He who knows the art of war first becomes invincible and then prepares to vanquish.”
The opposition in Mexico must understand the logic emanating from the official strategy to elaborate its own. In this strategy elaboration, it must think it faces an enemy determined to do whatever it takes to win. This does not mean that it will succeed. It means it will try everything to win, which is very different.
The opposition must think of unusual, new, audacious, and disconcerting strategies to have the enemy (the State) permanently modify its strategy to adapt to new battle conditions. To achieve this, it must be agile, adaptable to new situations, and capable of generating alternative narratives. That happened when Xóchitl suddenly appeared as a winning candidacy.
Now, just as Morena is employing vast state resources to attract relevant opposition figures to its ranks, the opposition should be attracting discontent fringes of Morena to its ranks. This can be achieved with narratives constructed to attract Morenistas upset by militarization, complicity with drug trafficking, attacks on the environment, and the health and education crisis. On each of these issues, there are unhappy Morenistas. To assume this is impossible is a sign of having surrendered in the war against Morena’s supremacist narrative. There is the Ebrard-Monreal case and the probable breakup of Morena in the CDMX.
Part of the opposition’s audacity involves not repeating yesteryear’s models of action, not only in terms of thought models but also in the repetition of coordinators, leaders, and advisors who have led the opposition down the alleys of denial of their mistakes and of continuing to think the same as before despite the proof of their failures. I believe Sun Tzu would say it requires new generals and colonels who know the enemy and their way of thinking and acting. The previous generals did not understand this. Had they understood it, we would not be where we are today.
A seminal idea that runs through Sun Tzu’s thoughts is the ability to deceive in order to win. But deception is based on the principle of reality: knowing one’s own forces with such certainty that one knows perfectly well what force is holding one back to know how one should or can deceive the other.
With deception, there is no room for naivety, or it will not be deception. Morena is determined to deceive its own and strangers with the narrative that it is invincible. And many, even in the opposition, believe it. But they think it is partly because the opposition does not present counterfactual evidence. And it does not offer it, I suppose because it is not yet convinced that the war can be won. Xóchitl may be surrounded by generals and colonels (in the style of Sun Tzu) who were already defeated in previous battles. However, they never learned the lessons from their defeats and objectively still think they cannot win the war against Morena. That is called being defeated beforehand.
Sun Tzu insists: “In every military strategy, from the moment the general…marches into battle, nothing is more difficult than the struggle, which consists in straightening what is crooked and taking advantage of what is rotten: turning adversity into advantage”. Herein lies the key to Xochitl’s campaign. How do we turn adversity into an advantage? This is the most challenging part of the campaign facing the opposition.
It must be a strategic objective, following another central idea of Sun Tzu: know your enemy thoroughly. It should not be a piece of knowledge through the lens of one’s own prejudices or the rumors of sycophants or haters. No, it must be cold, accurate, and dispassionate knowledge. This is the only way to deceive and defeat. The deep study of the enemy is the only way to admit the possibility of its defeat. Knowing its strengths and weaknesses is the first act of the wise general convinced of being able to win. This equation is necessary to “turn adversity into advantage”.
The latter is the crucial part of any war: to be convinced that, with the strategic management of strengths and weaknesses, one can, in the end, prevail over the enemy. Ultimately, it all comes down to “becoming invincible in order to win…”.
战无不胜
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