Luis Rubio
“Democracy, writes the scholar Larry Diamond, is a system of government of the majority, limited by counterweights and institutional balances.” This classic definition is clearly not among the new government’s priorities.
A speech, however encouraging, does not a summer make, but it can constitute the first step in the process of reconstruction that the country urgently needs. Beyond personal loyalties and common histories, the past six-year term was not a paragon of virtues, except for those who depend on the government: those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder and those (almost) on the bottom. To prosper, as proposed in the speech by Madam President, it is indispensable to open competition and generate productive enterprises, not governmental contracts and a population dependent on the government. The political profit of both is evident, as reflected in the election, but this does not comprise a solid or sustainable (or financially viable) platform of development, of economic growth or of the reduction of poverty and inequality.
Eliminating the mechanisms that permit, that should indeed guarantee, freedoms and citizen rights, as has been happening on repeated occasions over the last months, implies eradicating legal predictability in a country that requires a much more dynamic economy than the existing one and that, perforce, must attract foreign investment.
The latter is key because Mexico is experiencing an unwonted moment during which all anchors of stability assembled throughout the 20th century disappeared, while those anchors that were attempted to be developed to replace the previous ones, all this in the past three or four decades, did not succeed in their objective.
The country today boasts free elections (this difficult to deny by the new government); very weak, not to say nearly inexistent, protections of citizen rights; and a very differentiated citizenry between those who followed the outgoing president faithfully, and the citizenry that clamored for a schema of counterweights. The departing government eroded the little that did exist and, in its final onslaughts, ended up sowing the seeds of a potential re-creation of the authoritarianism of a century ago, or worse.
The institutional approach is more Bolshevik than liberal or, as the British would say, far from Edmund Burke, the philosopher who critically analyzed the French Revolution, concluding that the key was in the preservation of the laws and freedoms, by means of a competent government. From that perspective, the best that can be expected from the recently installed government is, if everything turns out right, a competent government.
The philosophy that seems to embody the new President diverges from that which the country was trying (sort of) to build in terms of a functional government while being delimited by the structures of the Rule of Law, by considering it necessary to hold monopoly of power -rather than of the law- to advance the country’s development. Both the recent reforms, as well as the frequently employed tools such as preventive imprisonment, could very easily be converted into a mechanism of control and of the submission of a society that, independently of its vote, has demonstrated a historical inclination toward freedom.
It is not unduly excessive here to repeat the famous phrase of Porfirio Díaz, without question no liberal, who stated that “governing Mexicans is more difficult than rounding up turkeys on horseback.” The Mexican, independently of their socioeconomic situation, does not submit easily, as the old colonial saying of “I will obey but will not comply” suggests. Although she calls it freedom, the implicit pretention to subordinate a populace that lives on a day-by-day basis and depends on exports is extraordinarily ambitious, if not rash.
In fact, the new orthodoxy deviates from the previous one. For example, in the previous administration appointments to key entities such as the National Human Rights Commission, the National Electoral Institute, the Supreme Court and, even, the Bank of Mexico were driven by loyalty. Today’s criteria is ideological: whomever fits is welcome; the rest are left out. With this I do not mean to suggest that the nominations of her predecessors were pristine or always ideal, but there was, at the very least, the goal, even the propensity, to name persons “technically” qualified for the critical posts, something surely not a criterion in recent years.
In his writings on Napoleon, Simon Schama describes this personage as “was the prototype of a modern despot, cynically assuming that the majority of the people cared little or nothing for liberty or constitutions or the vaunted ‘sovereignty of the people’ and so he could easily dispossess them of it, substituting for freedom the pyrrhic dazzle of military triumph.” If one were to remove from this sentence the last two words, military triumph, and were to substitute electoral victory for them, the scheme does not seem all that alien.
Whether one likes it or not, the future of Mexico is bound to the rest of the world. Ratifying or adopting measures, laws and regulations that reduce or eliminate counterweights and attempting against the most basic principles of the Rule of Law, this understood as the protection of citizen rights with respect to governmental action, is counterproductive for the President herself, and implies to play with fire and call into question everything the she says she wants to achieve.
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a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx