Homemade | Luis Rubio

Luis Rubio

The decisive moments of the becoming of a country are those during which effective leadership arises that confronts grave adversity in contusive fashion. Present-day Mexico confronts two adversities: the foreign one and the one that is homemade. Regarding the former, the President is doing the best possible. The latter derives from a long time back, but it has intentionally worsened over the last seven years. The combination bodes lethal and presses for answers to which as of today there appear to be none. There is no place to turn: The trajectory is not good, producing only one question: Will there be, first, a recognition of the moment in which Mexico finds itself and, second, the capacity, but, above all, will there be the willingness to do something in that respect?

Trump’s onslaughts and the uncertainty accompanying these no doubt explain part of the moment that the Mexican economy is experiencing but one would have to be blind, or, more exactly, deliberately closing one’s eyes to not see the causes of a premeditated destruction of the few sources of certainty and economic viability, already weak in themselves, that the country counted on. Whatever is to come of the tariffs that Trump proposes, the country’s future will depend on what the Mexican government does, or fails to do, and, however much the Mexican President deserves acknowledgment for her management of the relationship with her U.S. counterpart, the road that the country is taking is not conducive to promising times ahead.

There are two ways that Trump could be blamed for the moment that Mexico is undergoing at present: one would be for evading responsibility for the ills that the country is up against, those of the past seven years and those of long ago. The other, the desirable one, would be to fault him -that is, utilize him consciously and, even, in a negotiated way- to carry out the things that the country urgently requires, independently of what ensues concerning the tariffs.

No one should be surprised that the economy is going downhill. A quick tally of what the country is enduring is more than suggestive of what falls directly into the lap of responsibility of the two Morena-party governments: an insane expenditure to win the 2024 election; a strategy of social transfers, tenable in terms of justice but with criteria expressly conceived to impede the growth of production and productivity; price controls (gasoline, tortillas, gas) that will inexorably produce scarcity; the declining production of petroleum for lack of payment to suppliers; the absence of investment in the transmission of electricity; and the cancellation of a modest, but innovative educational reform, a system in itself oriented towards control, not toward the development of the people or to the growth of the economy.

To this I hasten to add the changes in the rules of the game in matters of regulation of the economy (competition, communications, energy, transparency and access to information); the elimination of the sole effective institutional counterweight that the country possessed, The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, due to that it acted as corresponded to it; and by consciously ignoring the problems of security and violence that harass the population for six long years.

The country drags in its wake an essential problem of governmental capacity dating from the nineties, when agreement was reached for an equitable and level-playing field competition in electoral matters that resolved the problem of access to power, but that overlooked the necessity of reforming the structure of the government, thus creating the chaos characterizing the relations among the three branches of government; the violence and insecurity that the citizenry suffers through; and the dysfunctionality of the federal system. The result has been a bifurcated country, with both sides coexisting in one and the same geographic place, where a formal and an informal economy exist, a country of rules and another of violence and a modern country (with a formidable and highly productive economic base) hand in hand with a lagging, unproductive and government-dependent economy.

None of this has to do with Trump, but the U.S. President can end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs: the part of the country that is productive, competitive and successful. This cannot be minimized: the recession that the country is apparently entering into is integrally the product of Morena. It is its actions, during these two administrations, that have caused the current situation. Instead of fostering the growth of productivity and generating wellsprings of certainty, the current President asks us to trust her. Unfortunately, that is insufficient, in that what generates trust are realities, not promises.

But there is indeed one thing that is at hand and that the President could make her own: rather than regretting the havoc emanating from abroad, the alternative would be to negotiate with our neighbors to obtain their support in undertaking the transformation that Mexico has been postponing for four decades thanks to that the free-trade agreement and migration (prior to AMLO) made it easy to not engage in reforming and whose smattering of advances were purposefully decimated by AMLO.

The choice is clear: blame Trump or get the job done. And that would imply devoting oneself body and soul to two very concrete things: Create conditions that generate certainty and dramatically accelerate the growth of productivity.