To Destroy

Luis Rubio

Things were assuredly not perfect, and it had been some time since the promise of being part of the first world had dissipated. But the reality was not black and white: Mexico had taken great strides forward, as illustrated by its aeronautical, automotive, and agro-industrial exports. States such as Querétaro and Aguascalientes have not only maintained internal peace, but also have been growing at Asian rates. Nonetheless, there are regions that have not only stagnated and lagged, but also that in past decades have become factories of migrants. Anyone with a minimum of common sense and the capacity of observing without ideological and partisan distortions knows well that there were great advances and enormous insufficiencies. The greyscale of the current panorama in Mexico is tangible wherever one looks. The question is whether achieving decisive and generalized progress would require destroying all that exists or whether, contrariwise, the ideal recipe would be to correct the course, build on what’s right and set aright the errors committed.

López Obrador came to the government exactly two years ago convinced of the first approach: everything is inadequate and must be destroyed in order to return to what worked in former times. Next step, the country has seen a whirlwind of the elimination of programs, the cancellations of projects and all types of actions, some justified and the majority arbitrary. Some share the need to overhaul all relevant matters, but what is certain, two years hence, is that the sole plan guiding the president is to throw over the entire lot, on many occasions due to the most visceral of motivations: hate, the spirit of revenge and the lust for power.

There are two key factors on which the narrative of the present government is centered: first, that the reforms of the past decades pursued an ideological logic; and, second, that things were better before the reforms commenced.

If one analyzes the way the reforms project came to be conformed throughout the eighties, the first thing that jumps out is that there was no plan. The presidency of Miguel de la Madrid found itself inheriting a bankrupt government and a crazed economy. All his actions during the first two years of his term were directed toward attempting to reconstruct the economic stability of the sixties: controlling public expenditure, lowering foreign debt, and restoring financial equilibrium. The great shift in which the administration engaged consisted of beginning to liberalize imports, with the objective of attracting investment and upgrading the economy’s productivity.

That swerve, enormous in concept, very modest in its first implementation phase, did not respond to any ideological consideration, but instead to a crucial recognition: that the world had changed. More than anything else, the high growth rates of the economy of the seventies had been due to an exceptional moment: the discovery of extensive oil fields and the expectation of the huge revenues that would derive from them. When these did not materialize, at the start of the eighties, the economy collapsed. The essential point is that it is not true that the economy was in very good shape prior to the reforms: those who believe that are focusing on the oil mirage, not on the solidity of the economy’s structure.

The true problem of the reforms, which acquired a much more structured form at the start of the nineties and was consolidated with NAFTA, lies in that the project was conceived to avoid carrying out an alteration in the political status quo. In contrast with other nations that underwent reform during these decades –such as Spain, Chile, Korea- in Mexico there was no new government, the product of an election following the end of a dictatorship, which carried out the reforms, but one in place of a government emanating from the party that had been in power for decades. The only similarity was the USSR, which did not survive it. In consequence, the reforms were born truncated, because they procured two contradictory ends: liberalizing the economy and rendering it more efficient; and at the same time protecting the interests of key groups within the political class in enterprises, sectors and functions. The result is, for example, the educative system that Mexico now has and that impedes the progress of vast regions of the country (and that makes it almost impossible for Mexico to replace much of what China produces for the U.S.), the immense monopolies that persist and all sorts of interests that keep the south of the country in poverty.

There are many reasons for change and AMLO was singularly positioned to effect those that Mexico required. Only someone like him, a connoisseur of history, adept at political mobilization and not linked with the promoters of the reforms, could have made the changes that the country needed. Unfortunately, he chose another path: that of denying the circumstances that led the country to where it is and allowing himself to be swayed by primary motivations incompatible with the function for which he was elected. The result is a destruction, systematic and at any cost, of much of which does work in the country, without creating anything susceptible of transforming Mexico for the good, with better economic conditions, less corruption or greater legality. In a word, two years of destruction. And those to come.