Yearly Archives: 2023

 Luis Rubio Electoral competitions are (almost) like a soccer game: they give free rein to emotions, wagers and illusions. The citizenry turns itself over to the process and (at least one part of it) participating with overwhelming zeal. However, it is after Election Day is over when the true challenge begins: that of governing. And […]

Luis Rubio The Good Tsar is a myth. In history there are good presidents and bad presidents, an inevitable circumstance of human nature and of the complex reality. What is unacceptable is submitting the population to the possibility that its president might be good. The essence of democracy does not lie in the free election […]

Luis Rubio One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking from a restless sleep, he discovered that while he was in bed he had been transformed into a monstrous insect. Without doubt a transcendental occurrence for Samsa, the character of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but perhaps too strange and farfetched for its nature to be understood and, […]

 Luis Rubio In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, as set forth by Carlos Lozada, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. No one understands this logic better than President López Obrador, who is not only a master of narrative (and mythology), but of another trait that few have noticed: […]

Luis Rubio Polarization alters everything: from the way things are worded to the inclination to listen to them. Polarization destroys language, with widely accepted terms morphing into polemical conspiracies prone to the extermination of adversaries. Bent by the obsession for confronting the good with the bad, it is in the end nearly impossible to recognize […]

Luis Rubio A myth is circulating around Mexico: that of presidentialism without counterweights. This is nothing new. Between the exacerbated presidentialism of yesteryear including the legislative paralysis in recent decades, and now the new model of unipersonal government, Mexicans display a propensity for conceiving of the governance problem in a pendular manner, the latter yielding […]

Luis Rubio In memory of Luis Alberto Vargas Governments come and governments go, but one thing always stays: corruption. The actors change, but the phenomenon is perennial. And Mexico is not the exception to this: in his 1976 book on Russia, Hedrick Smith* writes “I think”, Ivan says to Volodya, “that we have the richest […]

Luis Rubio While the candidacies advance the political risks increase. There are three factors that drive the possibility of the country having to confront critical situations during next year. The first is the most obvious of these: the presidential cycle, everywhere in the world, follows a natural logic that initiates its ascendent phase during which […]

Luis Rubio India advances uncontainable, but in an exceedingly peculiar manner, deftly skirting the obstacles imposed upon it inexorably by its extraordinary linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity.  An extremely complex and stratified society coming up against enormous barriers to progress, it has found innovative ways to break through fiefdoms, dogmas and ancestral practices. There is […]

Luis Rubio Between the seventies and the nineties, Mexico underwent an era of financial crises, the product in good measure of the laxity with which the public finances were managed: enormous deficits, huge levels of debt (mostly in foreign currency) and little attention to the profitability of the public investment. Between 1976 and 1995, Mexicans […]