Luis Rubio

The neighborhood is not only complicated but also extraordinarily contrasting. Although the border region between Mexico and the United States constitutes an exceptional space, distant from Mexico City as well as from Washington, the reality is that it is the most critical flash point in view of the year 2024, a moment at which the presidential elections of Mexico and the United States will coincide. It is there that the fears of the Americans will converge with the failures of Obradorism and the result is anything but certain.

Octavio Paz wrote that the border marks a greater cultural than geographical difference, an encounter of contrasting civilizations. Nothing illustrates this better than the way the Mexican government has responded to the growing U.S. clamor for Mexico to face its security, border control and migration problems. There is no doubt that the outcries of the U.S. legislators and governors entertain an evident political and electoral connotation trained on attracting their own voters, but that does not alter the fact that what impacts Mexicans are not the diatribes of prominent U.S. figures, but instead the extortion and violence that affect practically the whole population.   Wrapping oneself in the flag is very emotive, but that does not in any way change the reign of impunity and fear under which nearly all Mexicans live.

Similarly evident is the bias that the current Mexican government has imprinted on the strategy toward the U.S. Recognizing, however implicitly, that geography is unalterable, the government has maintained a somewhat schizophrenic policy  toward the Northern neighbor: fear concerning Trump, disdain for Biden; disinterest in the rules of the game inherent in the Mexico, United States and Canada Treaty (USMCA) vs. individual actions for specific companies to allay the risk that the U.S. might undertake punitive actions; control of Central-American migration, but paralysis on being confronted with the migratory crisis percolating along the entire border. Were it possible, the government would have distanced Mexico from the United States; since that is not an option, the government does whatever possible to provoke it. The risk lies in that, when the goings get complicated, it opts for setting off the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. This is not a small nor a minor risk.

The solution to the problems of Mexico does not reside in the presence of U.S. troops (or advisors) in its territory, but it is likewise obvious that many of the central problems characterizing Mexico cannot be attended to without the participation of the American government, nor can they be divorced from the reality of that country.  The easy way out would be to envelop oneself in the flag and hurl oneself (metaphorically) over the wall of Chapultepec Castle, but that would not change the circumstances of a region in which the one depends on the other.

The situation recalls Marx’s often quoted phrase in the sense that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce and we are now in the farce phase. Much the same disquisitions took place in the eighties and the final decision then was that it was impossible to resolve Mexico’s key problems without the concurrence of the U.S. government.

The notion that is possible to divorce the two countries is not only nostalgic, but also fallacious, merely ideological. Mexico’s real problem, exacerbated by the fact of the neighborhood, is found in the existence of a government that does not have the capacity (nor the disposition) to address such basic problems as security, justice and economic growth, all critical for getting ahead.

The visceral response is always to attack when confronted by the actions (almost consistently discursive) of the U.S. side, but that does not solve the problem facing Mexico, which is not drug addiction or fentanyl, but rather that the most rudimentary security has been denied to the population. I have not the least doubt that the arms turning up from the United States contribute, even decisively, to consolidating the power of the Narcos, but the Mexican problem is not that. As in so many other things that characterize the bilateral   relationship, whether that be directly or indirectly, the arms are pure and simply an incidental factor.

The President is beguiled by pipedreams of restoring the old political system and has dedicated his government, in its totality, to that purpose.  However, in terms of the matter of the bilateral relationship and security, the old system is unreproducible. In the middle of the past century the federal government was hyper-powerful, which conferred upon it the possibility of imposing conditions and limits on the Narcos of that epoch, all those Colombian. Today the Narcos are Mexican, they have entire regions under their control and the federal government is weak. Worse yet when that weakness is emphasized on limiting the capacity of action of the Army and the Navy. And much worse, because that is the underlying issue, when there is no investment in the building of a security system from the bottom up, the only one susceptible to modifying the reality of impunity and violence in the long term.

The neighborhood is an inalterable reality. The question is whether Mexico will see this as an opportunity or as a curse. As with Marx, Mexico has returned to the era where it is seen as a curse. The only one of the two that will function is opportunity.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

 Americas Quarterly
by Luis Rubio
March 22.2023

The president’s vision for the country is erasing years of institution-building efforts—and endangering its economic and political stability, says the chairman of Mexico Evalúa.

MEXICO CITY — Mexicans seem to enjoy economic and political crossroads; the country is often faced with one because it seldom addresses its underlying challenges. Now, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has chosen to avoid economic crossroads altogether by simply killing the goose that lays the golden eggs—and even the USMCA is at risk.

For the last four decades, Mexico has lived through a contradiction that lies at the heart of its inability to cope with the ever more complex management of a modern economy. Other nations were willing to undertake broad reforms since the 1980s—including to their political systems—to stabilize and create conditions for long-term economic development. In contrast, Mexico undertook economic reforms largely in order to avoid reforming its politics. Therein lies the huge difference in results between Mexico and Chile, or between Mexico and its Asian peers.

Domestically, the persistent incoherence between the economic requirements of an ever more complex economy and the political capacity to deliver conditions for prosperity is what largely explains the vast differences between states. On one hand, Aguascalientes or Querétaro grow at Asian rates. On the other are the poverty-stricken southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, which continue to be dominated by local fiefdoms and special interests.

Moreover, these incompatibilities explain much of the other ills that affect Mexico: violence, organized crime, dysfunctional relationships between the federal government and state governors and, especially, the democratic deficit that continues to widen.

Through all these years, one administration after another subscribed to the paradigm that institutional build-up would strengthen the economy and lower the impact of the political incapacities that resulted from an old, stagnant and special interest-ridden political system. That explains the creation of regulatory agencies like the Competition Commission, the Telecommunications Commission, the Energy Regulatory Commission and so on. Same with the reform of the Supreme Court in 1994 and the creation of the independent electoral authority in 1996. Institutions were created to make up for the lack of a political system capable of addressing urgent needs like a functioning security system.

In retrospect, much of this has proven to be mere quick fixes that failed to address underlying issues, which, at their core, lead to the excessive powers of the Mexican presidency. Previous presidents opted not to challenge these institutions but, in retrospect, it’s clear that they had the power to change them, as AMLO has proven.

What matters is that, despite the failures in results, most Mexicans supported the process because they could see how the modern part of the economy—the one tied to NAFTA and, today, USMCA—worked. Unfortunately, the hope to join the winners became ever less likely to materialize as violence and the lack of a proper judicial and police system eroded not only hopes but also the daily livelihoods of most Mexicans, which led to the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

AMLO follows a very different paradigm. For him what’s wrong is not the old political institutions that hamstring the economy, but the fact that the country is pursuing modernity when it should be sticking to its traditions. In a revealing visit to a small town in Mexico two years ago, he spent an inordinate amount of time visiting and praising an old, donkey-driven sugar mill. His message was clear: Mexico would prosper only to the extent that it went back in time. Therefore, his thrust has been to undermine the modern side of the economy while seeking to strengthen the presidency and the old national oil company. He’s aiming to solve the conundrum created by the disparity in economic and political reforms by backtracking on the economic reforms.

The last time Mexico took a similar route, back in the 1970s, the government went virtually bankrupt in 1982. The reforms that followed sought to break away from the vicious cycle of a government-led economy. But the lesson that AMLO derived from that era, when he was the PRI leader of his home state of Tabasco, was that fiscal excesses produced the collapse. Had those presidents been thriftier, goes his line of thinking, Mexico would have thrived.

None of what the president has done addresses the issues the average Mexican faces today, nor those that he himself identified, rightly, as the country’s core problems—like poverty, corruption and inequality. This augurs badly for the end of his term. Of course, if the election were held today, AMLO’s nominee would win outright. But 15 months from today, things may very well be radically different; the costs and liabilities he has piled up and the lack of results will likely take their toll. No less important is the fact that his party is now the incumbent and Mexicans have voted systematically against incumbents since 1997, the first election managed by the independent electoral authority IFE (now INE).

But now the INE itself risks being weakened and could be seriously undermined before the election. Meanwhile, the administration continues to challenge its partners in the USMCA, first with the energy reform and now effectively changing the rules on corn imports.

One can only wish that Mexico were facing a crossroads with at least one attractive alternative. But this will happen only if there is a truly competitive election in 2024, not the most likely scenario as institutions are being systematically curtailed. All of this bodes ill for both Mexicans and our neighbor to the north.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rubio is chairman of the think tank México Evalúa. He writes a weekly column in newspaper Reforma, and is the author and editor of dozens of books, including Unmasked: López Obrador and The End of Make-Believe, published by the Wilson Center.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/mexico-is-killing-its-golden-goose/

Luis Rubio

One of the great paradoxes that military dictatorships exhibit, reflects  Tom Stevenson,* lies in that they in the last analysis make their own troops less effective because of their imperious need for protecting themselves from a blow that would wind up in their removal. The paradoxes of power are always obtuse because their rationality proper is opposite to fortifying the conditions and circumstances that rendered them possible. Power is a Herculean-magnitude aphrodisiac but, when it fails to confront limits and counterweights, it is finally sustained on exceedingly flimsy moorings. The greater the concentration on power, the greater the contradictions and fragilities of the pillars bolstering it.

Unlimited power constitutes a threat for those not possessing it, the reason for which the evolution of societies, from traditional to modern, incorporates a parallel process of institutionalization. Those lacking the high dungeon of the powerful can be very distinct among themselves, but all share the same common denominator. When Robespierre denounces ever more persons, including many of his coreligionists, as traitors to the Revolution on the famous 8^th day of the Thermidor in 1794, it gives rise to the union of the entire convention, with his subsequent decapitation two days later. It took France three hundred years to build the institutions that govern it, one of whose central characteristics, similar to those of the whole modern and civilized world, is the institutionalization of power.

The creation of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), grandfather of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), nearly a century ago responded precisely to that institutional rationale. The Revolution had concluded, but the country was without a functional governmental structure; additionally, many of the disputes of the day continued to be resolved in gruesome fashion, a period that concluded with the death of Obregón, President-Elect at the time for a new term of office. That provoked the decision of Plutarco Elías Calles to build mechanisms that would guide politics and bring the era of political violence to an end. The mechanism served for what it served during various decades, with the contribution of two great virtues and an enormous defect: the virtues comprised stability and economic growth; the defect  was its extraordinary inflexibility, which ushered in the crises of the seventies, eighties and nineties and to its   dramatic finale with the government of Peña Nieto.

The question today is, once again, how to institutionalize power but in a flexible manner that allows for the alternation of persons and political parties in government, all the latter ensconced in their capacity of abuse and imposition. Much of this was being constructed in this regard from the eighties, but everything has come to fall like a house of cards during these last few years, evidencing the immense fragility of the institutions that were developed with the purpose of channeling power and curbing its worst outrages.

Today we know that all that scaffolding was insubstantial and much of it unsustainable. Step by step, the President has been dismantling each of the scaffolds that purported to institutionalize the power. He has executed this by hook and by crook, never losing his sense of direction. From the beginning of his six-year term, the President changed the game rules, ignored the existing ones and imposed his own, these very simple: I am in command. Little by little he eliminated the relevance of nearly all of them.  He (almost) nullified the Supreme Court by means of appointments and menaces and the National Electoral Institute (INE) is presently up in the air, his claiming to de facto reincorporate its functions into the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación). That is, as in other fields, he advances toward the recreation of that seventies fantasy world which, it shouldn’t be necessary to recall, ended up collapsing due to its unfeasibility.

Whoever watches the President’s daily early-morning media rants would immediately doubt the risks stifling the country today. In that novelesque and supernatural scenario the control of perceptions is unlikely, but absolutely real. The President fills the space for news and converts his obsessions into dogmas of faith. Like with a religious act, the message is profound and takes root in the consciences of millions of his fellow citizens who see themselves represented there. People believe in the President: that is his virtue, but also the breeding grounds of what easily could become in a not-so-distant future.

In contrast with other “hard” governments, which if they have anything in common it is a developmental spirit, the current government in Mexico procures solely two objectives: control and popularity. Both have made headway in this government, but neither counts on a fount of sustenance that could last. More to the point, the characteristic of those two elements, control and popularity, is their ephemeral and passing nature. Few Mexicans, encompassing the majority of those who approve of the President, want a regimen prone to abuse such as this one to be perpetuated. The error of many of those aspiring to govern is the contrary: they think that what is urgent is to return to what was resoundingly rejected by the electorate in 2018.

As Mexicans steadily approach 2024 the relevant question, the only transcendental one, is how to institutionalize the power in a way that those counterweights cannot be dismantled again, and, at the same time, avoid an inflexibility such that it paralyzes or makes the future impossible.

*LRB, v44 n19

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The verdict in the trial of García Luna directly affects the individual accused but, along the way, the questioning exposed the entire Mexican political system and exhibited a world of ambivalences concerning justice, drugs, corruption and the Mexico–United States relationship. It was not Mexico, but instead the political establishment that sat on the bench of the accused. And the result is not commendable for anyone.

What was extraordinary and exemplary about the trial, beyond the drama inside the courtroom, were the narratives, emotions, and opinions manifested throughout the process. To begin with, there appears to be nary a Mexican who does not think that García Luna is guilty. Some think that he is guilty of what he is accused of, the rest think that he is guilty of many other things, but all think that he deserves what is happening to him. The trial was about his participation in narcotrafficking, while the majority of Mexicans were picturing corruption in their minds. The ambivalence with respect to the essence of justice -that culpability must be demonstrated- is a subtlety that escapes Mexicans’ way of being. Decades of a corrupt judicial system that never achieves what the Constitution promises -prompt and expeditious justice- has made Mexico a country of cynics when it comes to criminality or corruption. The inexorable supposition is that everything is corrupt, which contradicts that often-hinted-at presumption (by AMLO in his daily rant) that “we are not equal.”

The trial essentially dealt with the importation of drugs from Mexico into the U.S. and the alleged assistance that the Ex-Minister of Public Security could have provided to the narcotraffickers. For the majority of Mexicans, those charges are perceived as irrelevant (or perhaps superfluous) because they are seen as different from those that are truly transcendent, that is, those that have something to do, in that line of thought, with his passing through the government and the corruption he might have entertained as much through government purchases as with links to organized crime. Of course, one does not exclude the other. However, for many Mexicans the issue of drugs continues to be seen as a U.S. problem that, by derivation, affects Mexico, as if the petty problems of insecurity, the mafias that create them and the incapacity of the Mexican government to deal with them did not exist.

The President became the privileged narrator of the trial because he supposed that this would emit a direct hit at his nemesis, Ex-President Felipe Calderón (which did occur), but the narrative ceased the day that the blows rained down on everyone, including the current government. Although nearly all the witnesses of the trial were convicted criminals seeking to reduce their sentences (which could well have biased their testimonies), what cannot be invented is the corruption that permeates the whole Mexican political system, from which no government can save itself.  Naive were those who thought that the only ones sullied would be the others.

García Luna was transformed into a symbol of the national state of affairs: whatever the sources of his fortune, all seemed to be related with his stint in Mexican politics. And that is the crucible through which he is viewed in Mexico: the trial served as confirmation of all the prejudices that characterize Mexicans with respect to their system of government.  Independently of political or party predilections, all politicians -and the system in general- emerge from the trial scratched and bruised. As proof, it is sufficient to remember that the drugs (and the corruption) continue to flow without limit despite that it has been ten years since García Luna left the government, proving that he was no more than one cog in a big machinery.

The trial evidenced the incapacity, or indisposition, of Mexican justice to sort out matters of corruption openly and transparently. One of the central elements of the trial, as seen from Mexico, was the fact that the process and all the testimonies were made public, in severe contrast with the opacity of the national judicial processes. The mere fact of exhibiting the corrupt practices became a milestone. In the face of that, it is inevitable the presumption that everything in Mexican justice is no more than an arranged (and politicized) fight.

But, above all, the trial exposed the ambivalences that distinguish the bilateral relationship, the positive as well as the negative.  In the same way that there are natural spaces of cooperation and mutual benefit, there are others in which resentments and grudges dominate on both sides of the border. Despite the enormous advances in building closeness between both nations, especially in economic and commercial matters, suspiciousness persists.

Because, at the end of the day, the AMLO administration has not faced the security problems or the ever-growing corruption, both at levels never before seen. And now the government will begin to see the wrath of American extremists that believe that they can fix it all from the outside. The liabilities never stop piling up.

Indeed, those who seem oblivious to all this coming and going are those who persist in engaging in corruption without realizing that in a few years they could be sitting on the same bench where the Ex-Minister recently sat in a New York court. 

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The great success of capitalism   has been the generation of wealth and prosperity for billions of global inhabitants and at the heart of that system of economic organization lies a crucial concept:  the separation of political power from wealth. Although capitalism and democracy, with all their tensions, advanced by means of distinct conduits over time, their convergence has been the highest transformer of the history of the world.

The tension between capitalism and democracy is natural and inevitable, but it diminishes or increases according to the circumstances. In concept, the distinction between them is logical: capitalism is a system of organization that makes possible the participation of economic agents in the process of the creation of the goods and services that the population demands. For its part, democracy, at least in its modern version, is exercised through popular representatives who are elected   and who procure the satisfaction of their voters and simultaneously advance the interests of their country.

Democracy and capitalism complement each other and function by way of a critical  linchpin: the Rule of Law, which institutes the rules of the game,  the limits to action, respectively, of the government and of the private citizens. In a perfect world, the tension between the two ambits -the political and the economic- generates opportunities for growth and development. In like fashion, during moments of difficulties or of divergence between both spaces, crisis situations are produced.

Those moments of crisis bring about excesses and abuses that are propitious circumstances for the establishment of tyrannical governments.

At his arrival to the presidency, López Obrador insisted on his conviction that economic decisions should subordinate themselves to the political power. The President was correct, except that his remark ignored that crucial linchpin: the nodal function of the law, and everything underlying it in terms of the protection of the rights of the citizens, for the country to be able to work.  In contrast with the central principle of prosperity, which separates power from wealth (while considering both equal), the presidential approach derives from the principle of subordination. Instead of clear, transparent and general rules, the government seeks special arrangements for each case, as happened with Tesla and Constellation Brands. No one should be surprised by the lethargy that the country is experiencing because of that way of governing.

The use of the verb subordinate is revealing because it implies submission, subjugation and humiliation. That is, the objective is not that of procuring the best balance between the economy and politics, but instead the control of one over the other. This is not a new problem in Mexico’s history: from the end of the revolutionary joust, the country has undergone permanent ups and downs, typically marked by moments of crisis that obligate the correction of the previously earmarked course. That pendular nature of functioning  of Mexican politics over time has cost enormous opportunities for development and  generated an interminable propensity toward thinking in the short term.

The politicians, impeded from attending to the citizens because that is not fruitful for them in any way, bend over backward to be at the service of the powerful one at the palace because therein lies the opportunity for their next job. Despite there evidently being great professional politicians in the country, none of them devote themselves to building a career founded on specialization, as occurs in the world’s successful democracies. That lack of specialization facilitates presidential control above all the political world, in that it makes impossible the consolidation of effective and permanent counterweights, a key factor for economic progress.

On their part, the entrepreneurs see themselves as obliged to think in terms of presidential cycles because they never know what occurrence will guide the next owner of the presidential ball. Historically, the economy followed a six-year cycle because everything depended on the mood of the governor-in-turn.

The North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) introduced a new dynamic into the Mexican economy in that it created sort or a watertight compartment that favored long-term investments on establishing clear and guaranteed game rules by an internationally recognized regime. Beyond the (huge) errors that hindered the conversion of the entire country into NAFTA territory, it is not by chance that the only part of the economy that continues to prosper is the one associated with that legal regime, today much more vulnerable than at the moment of NAFTA’s conception due to its renegotiation into the Mexico–United States–Canada Agreement (USMCA).

NAFTA’s chief political achievement was precisely that it made possible, for the first time since the Revolution, the separation between power and the generation of wealth. The greatest cost that AMLO (with the help of Trump) will have infringed upon the country consists of his having brought back to daily life, political control and the subordination of the productive sector. Rather than extending NAFTA’s “reign” to generalize the separation between the political power and the entrepreneurial world, he rolled the country back to its worst moments and vices.

At the dawning of the presidential succession, it is time to begin to reflect on the costs of a paleolithic administration in the era of informatics and what that implies for the magnitude of the correction that will have to take place if a generalized collapse is to be avoided.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/aq-podcast-luis-rubio-on-why-mexicos-amlo-is-more-vulnerable-than-you-think/

Podcast

AQ Podcast: Luis Rubio on Why Mexico’s AMLO Is More Vulnerable Than You Think

MARCH 1, 2023

Despite AMLO’s popularity, judicial and political challenges may hamper his electoral plans for 2024, argues a leading analyst.

More than 100,000 Mexicans protested last weekend against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed changes to the country’s electoral institute. The marches highlight the leader’s relative vulnerability, despite his enduring approval ratings above 60%. Indeed, while the path may seem open for AMLO, as the president is known, to overhaul the country’s electoral institute and bring to power a candidate of his choosing in the 2024 elections, there are judicial and political obstacles to AMLO’s plans, argues this week’s guest. In this episode, Luis Rubio, chairman of the think tank México Evalúa, discusses AMLO’s current situation and the consequences for Mexico’s economy, 2024 presidential elections, and its relationship with the United States.

Subscribe to The Americas Quarterly Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google and other platforms

Guests:

Luis Rubio is Chairman of think tank México Evalúa

Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly

Any opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Americas Quarterly or its publishers.

Luis Rubio

How strange is the course of action of the government in legislative matters. Despite being able to count on wide-ranging majorities in both chambers, Morena party adherents tend to blunder due to the lack of clarity of the bills dispatched by the Executive Branch. No one can doubt the despotic and frequently arbitrary nature of the procedures of that party, for whose members the search for votes on the part of other parties and even broad consensus is anathema. But none of that explains the inconstancy, if not fickleness, of the initiatives that they demand to be processed.

I explain myself: the prominent characteristic of the world of international relations   is the ambiguity of the rules, because in the absence of a world government, the capacity does not exist to obligate the nations to comply, a circumstance that confers wide latitude to the nations with the greatest power. That explains the frequent instability evidenced by diverse regions and the propensity for conflict that is connatural in that ambit of human relations.

Something similar takes place with governments that do not have strong institutions, in that there too the law of the strongest tends to prevail: a presidency without counterweights, organized crime or all the individuals and special interests who de facto enjoy broad impunity.

Although the rules of the international world may be ambiguous and impossible to comply with, they do indeed exist and may be found duly codified because governments have an interest in order being preserved and in the avoidance of unjustified war-like conflagrations. These also have a place at the national level, where the combination of formal and informal rules constitutes a framework for internal political life. Of course, the more informal the rules, the less predictable and more prone they are to create uncertainty.  And therein lies the relevant issue for Mexico.

Mexico is a country given to codifying rules in natural fashion, as if their mere presence would guarantee coexistence and progress. An old maxim says that the Stone Age did not end because stones were likely to run out: the same can be said of the selfsame Mexican proclivity for passing laws, reforming them and never abiding by them. What is rarely considered is the cost of having so many laws, regulations and procedures, many of these contradictory, which are ignored when convenient for the president-in-turn. Worse yet is when those laws are modified to justify actions that the Executive Branch had already decided to undertake anyway.

But none of that explains the peculiar way that diverse legislations have been advanced in the current government. Typical of Mexican administrations is how they commence with a plethora of initiatives that they later attempt to convert into changes at the level of reality. That has not been the path of the present government, whose legal bills appear to spring forth more from occurrences or, even more archetypally, from the sudden recognition that not all is going the government’s way, in which case new instruments are required not for the general good, but instead for a concrete and specific purpose. As if a series of circumstances, actions and decisions would change the surrounding reality, obliging the modification of the regulatory framework.

That is my hypothesis regarding the origin of the modifications embarked upon against the electoral institutions. It is well known that the President blames the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) for his defeat in 2006 and that, henceforth, he has harbored grudges that manifest themselves in the legislation that is now before the Senate. However, this circumstance has been valid since December of 2018, the moment at which a negotiation would have been more propitious with respect to that which could and should be modified. A reform against the current and without the least interest in building a consensus in that regard reveals other concerns: one, the most probable of these, is the growing dearth of certainty in terms of a clean win in 2024. Another possibility, one which I heard from Niall Ferguson on another topic, is that “authoritarians are always afraid of their own populations.” Thus, it is not impossible that, however much the President bandies about his popularity, in his heart of hearts he has misgivings about the loyalty of the voters on the day his successor is elected. Both factors would justify in the collective mind of Morena any modification that ensures a triumph, independently of what the voters might prefer, or the opposition is able to articulate.

In this manner, the President is mired in the quest for legislating the victory of the Morena candidate in 2024, a version that is more advanced (but also more primitive) of the traditional PRIist finger jerk. Why waste time in elections well organized by professional functionaries when the only thing that matters is for the Morena precandidates to be campaigning around (currently prohibited by law) unhindered, so that whomever the President designates would win outright and become the new Tlatoani, Nahuatl for ruler, like in the old times?

From this perspective, it makes all the sense in the world not only to weaken the electoral institutions, but also to eliminate them entirely. And now that they’re at it, they could proceed with eliminating the Supreme Court and the legislature. After all, one person can do it all.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push —in just the right place— it can be tipped.” This is the way that Malcolm Gladwell explains how things change, frequently and suddenly and without warning or without antecedents suggesting that a change was to be found within the realm of possibilities. As the 2024 presidential elections in Mexico approaches, it is natural to extrapolate the present moment to conclude that what appears obvious or inevitable today will be the reality in that moment. Notwithstanding this, history shows that the very process of succession alters reality, creating circumstances that modify the panorama. Worse yet when the lashing out against the sources of certainty that remain is incessant.

Many things in our world change suddenly. Some are the product of an alteration of specific circumstances (such as a bombing immediately before an election), others result from the gradual accumulation of factors, none of them significant or far-reaching by themselves, but altogether devastating. The revelation of a corruption case changes the image of who is involved, just as an irrelevant leadership suddenly acquires cosmic dimensions. Nobody anticipated the collapse of the USSR or the French Revolution.

For several decades successive Mexican governments dedicated themselves to building sources of certitude. That was how the regulatory commissions were born (competition, telecommunications, energy, etc.), the electoral institutions, the “new” Supreme Court and some others that, with greater or lesser impact, had as their purpose conferring certainty on the electorate, the economic agents, and on the citizenry in general. However, during the last four years Mexicans have been witness to a systemic attack on all those institutions, first in the undermining of their credibility and afterward in procuring their elimination, neutralization or submission.

The great question is whether it is possible to carry out all those changes without there being any consequence. To date the response to this seems clear-cut, in that private investment, especially foreign, has grown systematically, in good measure thanks to the existence of The Mexico—United States—Canada Agreement, USMCA, and to the U.S.–China conflict. Aside from some manifestations and complaints, Mexico has followed its course of deterioration but without confronting any serious crises. There is no better evidence of the latter than the Mexican peso–U.S. dollar exchange rate, which not only has not undergone a severe alteration, but instead has tended to strengthen.

In this context, it is natural to think that it is possible, and even reasonable to extrapolate the present moment to conclude that the 2024 presidential election has already been decided and whomever the President decides to nominate as his candidate will win without any discussion. I have not the least doubt that were the election to be held next Sunday, that would be the outcome. The problem with that scenario is two-fold: first, the election will take place in just over fifteen months and, if history teaches us anything at all, the probability of things staying constant is low. But the greatest problem entailed in that logic, and the reason for thinking that the encounter will be much more complex is the manner of acting of the President himself, who with his fight against the National Electoral Institute (INE) demonstrates that he entertains no certainty that the result will be in his favor, which is what moves him to do away with the INE to ensure  control of the process, all with Stalin’s logic: what’s important is who counts the votes.

My impression is that it is possible to carry out many modifications without any apparent consequence, until all of a sudden one of those results is excessive and everything changes. There is an old saying in Mexican politics: “nothing changes here, until it changes.”

Various commentators have been arguing that the change proposed for the electoral institutions can be the tipping point, perhaps a breaking point, which reshapes the entire political scenario. This would constitute the equivalent of doing away with the underpinnings of the status quo. One might think that one pin more or one pin less does not change the panorama, until one of those pins causes a dramatic reaction that no one foretold specifically, but that ended changing everything: the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Of greater import, once the process is unleashed, nothing can stop it. If not, ask ex-President López Portillo.

In the seventies, everything seemed to be going along nicely, until the interest rates shot up and, with that, the Mexican economy collapsed like a house of cards, in fact bankrupting the Mexican economy and giving rise to a decade of recession and (nearly) hyperinflation. I do not suggest that this would be the probable chain of events in this moment, but it is paramount not to lose perspective. Beyond what people could say or even think, what humans value is certainty, like that provided by the INE voter identification card. The moment at which the population -and its diverse subsegments- begins to perceive that things could change people’s attitudes might be instantaneously revamped.

Mexico is found at an exceedingly delicate moment in which day upon day the few factors of certainty that persist are put at risk. No one knows what can set off a change, but the attempt to test the limits is systematic, incessant and irredeemable.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The great success of President   López Obrador is not to be found in an exceptional strategy or ability, but instead in his having discovered an amorphous and untapped electorate that did not feel represented. His mastery for communicating with that part of the population has equipped him with enormous impetus, much of that the product of the nonexistence of discernible alternatives in current national political formations. That is, his success has been twice driven by the incapacity of the political parties to understand the new realities that characterize the citizenry and to adapt to them. Therein lies the success of AMLO, but also the opportunities for the opposition.

The argument is very simple: the country has undergone immense changes over the last decades; the electorate was transformed; the context -both internal and external- is another; the citizenry comprises a new reality, previously practically nonexistent; and the transmission of information, ideas and dogmas is now instantaneous. Each of these elements has built a new political reality that does not dovetail with the traditional paradigms lying at the heart of the national political entities and institutions. In a word, the country changed, but the politicians, especially the political parties, live on in a remote past that has nothing to do with the Mexico of today.

That maladjustment explains the incoherence among the stances of the political parties -all of them, including Morena- and the national electorate. Suffice to observe the atrophied, clumsy, corrupt and petty leaderships that typify these entelechies dubbed “political parties”. The fluidity of the electorate finds no dwelling place in the mind or game plan of the parties, thence their incapacity to motivate or attract voters.

In this context an astute politician arrived on the scene who identified an electorate that does not respond to traditional party brands, which is resentful of the prevailing corruption and that is (or was, at least in 2018) made up of an extraordinarily diverse fringe of persons regarding their origin or social and economic position. The connection of AMLO with his electorate takes place at his party’s perimeter. López Obrador, like Trump (in another context), chanced upon a new electorate and capitalizes on it each morning, apparently even defying the laws of gravity.

The political parties enjoy a privileged situation because the law elevates them and protects them. The law grants certainty of permanence, funds and stability on the three largest parties, and generates opportunities of association for the small ones for them to partake from those same benefits. That is, the entire politico-legal structure that kindles the political parties is designed to preserve the status quo of decades ago and all the incentives that arise therein rekindle the maladjustment distinguishing Mexican politics.

If anyone doubts the latter,  they have only to look at the way that the reelection of legislators or municipal presidents operates: rather than this functioning to draw near the deputies, senators and municipal presidents and oblige them to respond to the demands of the citizenry, that is, for them to represent the latter, reelection fortifies and secures the power of the party leaderships because it is the latter that decide who can register to run for reelection. The inexorable conclusion is that the authors of the electoral statutes -those that have afforded Mexicans certainty, stability and less political violence- have also made it possible for the emergence of a political phenomenon such as López Obrador. Instead of that legal framework favoring a natural evolution of the political system, its effect was that of paralyzing said system, anchoring it to a distant past, heightening citizen anger and indignation. Paradoxically it now ends up that AMLO wants to alter the very scheme that fortifies him, but that’s another story for another day.

The problem of the political parties are their misdeeds, many of these historic, especially those of the PRI, because they form, like corruption, an inherent component of their former times and nature. The passing of the PAN through power was no more commendable, because in addition to its being sparsely effective as a governing party, it ended up falling into many of the same corrupt practices. Morena will soon come across to face the same dilemmas because, beyond the person of the president, it is not distinct from the others.  But the worse part is not the existence of those transgressions, but the inability of the opposition political parties to grasp the causes of the citizens’ ire or of AMLO’s success.

The strengths that the law confers on party leaderships end up being colossal weaknesses, as recent PRI conduct illustrates. The question is when will the parties and their leaders break free from that partisan dead weight, both the historic as well as the contemporary. That liberation must be the product not only of an elemental congruence with today’s Mexico or of a false morality, but one deriving from cold political calculation: because being associated with corruption, the narco, predatory unionism or a conception of the world long ago surpassed entails ever growing diminishing returns.

In as much as the 2024 mother of all electoral battles is closing in, the question is not about AMLO, who will pass on in history in one way or another. The question is whether the opposition will be capable of reforming itself to be able to ally itself, because without that it will continue to dig the hole of its own extinction. And with it, that of the country.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof