FORBES – Febrero 2015
Luis Rubio
An entrepreneur arrives at the inspectors’ office of the Ministry of Labor to inquire about a fine that he’d been issued. The person in charge explains to him that the inspector visited his company and found that the strips on the floor were 9 cm in width while the code establishes that these be 10 cm. That violation of the code entails a fine of 16,000 pesos to be paid within the next 30 days, but the person in charge informs him that there is nonconformity procedure and that it’s easy to win because the code has distinct measurements for floor strips depending on the part of the code applied. Act 2. A person seated next to the receptionist’s desk approaches the businessman and offers to represent him in the nonconformity procedure. They move over to a corner and the alleged attorney informs the entrepreneur that it’s easy to win the dispute and that his fees would be 5,000 pesos for the entire process. The entrepreneur reluctantly accepts the offer and in 24 hours the case is resolved for the modest sum of 5,000 pesos. The expeditiousness of the procedure leads one think that it‘s an artful ambush, a modus operandi devised for extortion pure and simple.
Simulation is the Mexican’s daily bread. Some are extorted from their money by organized crime, other by government inspectors, but the act of extortion is exactly the same. In both cases, the asymmetry of power is such that the citizen in the street has no alternative other than dealing with the consequences. Bureaucratic extortion dons a halo of legitimacy but it’s not distinct from the other: both are designed to increase the overhead of commercial operations just enough as to not wipe them out. What’s interesting about the governmental case is the simulation that characterizes it: the guise of legality that an act of flagrant abuse takes on.
Examples of simulation abound. A Physician friend of mine who was engaged in his social service stint in a population in State of Mexico came down with measles. However, the State of Mexico government had informed the public some months previously that measles had been eradicated in the entity. Thus, the case of measles could not exist. Act 2. An ambulance drove my friend home with a certificate of termination of his social service, although months were left until its conclusion.
The recently approved legislation on telecommunications matters, supposedly oriented toward generating greater competition in the sector, has not impeded the industry’s ongoing “consolidation”, that is, the dominant players buy out their lesser fellows.
For years, the Mexican National Electricity Company (CFE) anointed itself a “world-class enterprise”. The only problem is that it was alone in its league because it was not competitive under any of the relevant rubrics by which the industry is gauged. Luckily PEMEX to date has not had the audacity to adopt a similar point of comparison, perhaps realizing that a simulation of that magnitude would not be tolerated even by its own exalted personages.
Now that Mexicans are in the full throes of the electoral season (June 7), we find that it’s also the stage of the grasshoppers: politicians who abandon posts for which they were duly elected for the sake of coming by a new one. The responsibility assumed in the prior election to govern a municipality or entity or to represent a district in Congress is the least of their worries: what’s important, as the old saying of Mexican politics goes, is not whether the glass is half full or half empty but being inside the glass. Some civil servants entertain the urgent need to occupy a new post because they would thus be protected by legal immunity from misdeeds committed during their prior terms-of-office. The point is that there never was a commitment with the citizenry whom they’d sworn to govern (this latter, in a manner of speaking) or represent. The important thing was to have a post. Everything else is simulation.
Simulation is the true essence of Mexican politics. The discourse touts democracy but the reality is one of despotism; representation is advanced in the rhetoric but the objective is personal enrichment. The citizenry, economic progress and the nation’s well-being is the least of it: what’s relevant is staying alive in the power and corruption loop. What is truly astonishing is the ease with which the PAN and the PRD mimicked the PRI, the old and the new.
The simulation-corruption-impunity triad bestows respectability on the pillage, on the so-called vested rights, on the abuse, thus, on the country’s lagging behind. A country that lives in and from simulation is not one that can bestir itself or achieve development. There are contradictions that simply do not stand up under the light of any scrutiny.
@lrubiof