Luis Rubio

People migrate for any number of reasons, and have done so for millennia: climate, the search for opportunities, fear, and insecurity. Sonia Shah* explains that the prototypical migrant tends to be the kind of people who don’t have big bank accounts or landholdings, but are rich in good health, skills, education and social connections with people in other places. Nobody doubts the contributions that migrants make to the societies in which they settle or the benefits to their communities of origin but, says Shah, the relevant question to ask as massive waves of migrants take shape is not why people migrate, for migration is a force of nature, rooted in human biology and history. “The relevant question to ask is what are we going to do about it.” This question is key as migration became a powerful force behind Trump’s victory and Brexit.

One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave

Michel de Montaigne, 1580

A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts, and most of us never dreamed of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term refugee has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees. Before the war broke out, we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove… that we were just ordinary immigrants.

Hanna Arendt, 1943

A stranger always has his homeland in his arms like an orphan for which he may be seeking nothing but a grave

Nelly Sachs, 1959

Migration isn’t a one-directional process; it’s a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years

Moshin Hamid, 2017

I am not an Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world

Socrates, c 420bc

Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?

Victoria Wolff, 1943

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul

Horace, c20bc

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story

Suketu Mehta, 2019

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home

German proverb

All of man’s unhappiness stems from one thing, his inability to stay quietly in one room

Blaise Pascal, c 1660

Here everyone is equal. There are no poor, no rich. He spouts names like Columbus, Shakespeare, and Buckle and big words I don’t understand like civilization. He wants to write a song about them but has no ink, pen, or paper. My brother Elyahu tells me that if he doesn’t like this country, he can go back.

Sholem Aleichem, 1916

In 1937 the Dewey Commission conducted and investigation into the charges against Leon Trotsky made during Joseph Stalin’s Moscow show trials. “Of what country are you a citizen, Mr. Trotsky?” the commission asked. “I am deprived of my citizenship in the Soviet Union. I am not a citizen of any country,” Trotsky replied. “What, if anything, did you do when you were informed of the deprivation of your citizenship?” “I wrote an article about it,” he said. I am a man armed with a pen.”

Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed

Paul Collier, 2015

In June 2021 the city of San Antonio inaugurated its North American Friendship Garden, a rest stop for migrating monarch butterflies featuring native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. The garden’s aim is “the friendship and goodwill of three countries working toward common goals,” one city official said. “As a migratory insect, the monarch is a representative of migration.”

Shrimps may dance, but they do not leave the river

Japanese proverb

In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportations in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Iris servants.”

Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Emma Lazarus, 1883

According to an Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sent a group of Mexica on a journey to establish the new center of the world. After some two hundred years of wandering, they saw an eagle resting on a cactus with its “wings stretched outward like the rays of the sun.” Taking the bird to be a divine sign that they had reached their destination, they “began to weep and dance about with joy and contentment.”

Heaven and earth and all things change and transform into something new every day

Guo Xiang, c300

Human migration is unstoppable and, given the vast and growing differences between Southern and Northern nations, it is bound to keep growing. The big question is whether it can become orderly to serve and complement each other’s needs.

*The Next great Migration, Bloomsbury, 2020

Happy New Year!

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Luis Rubio

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) says that “the True University of these days is a collection of books.” Here is my best attempt to share some of the readings that have most impacted me this year.

Two emblematic dictators-Stalin and Hitler- were allies at the beginning of theSecond World War, each because of his own interests and reasons, only to later end up in a fight to the deathuntil the Soviet Union’s occupation of Berlin in 1945. Hitler started the war and is the figure that has received more attention in the historical literature, to the degree that    WWII has frequently been identified as “Hitler’s war.” Sean McMeekin[i]argues that this is an erroneous focus becauseit was Stalin who took advantage of the circumstances presented to himat every juncture until gaining incomparable strategic benefits.While it was the United States that achieved the unconditional defeat of Germany and Japan,this iconoclastic account concludes that the undisputed winner of the conflict was Stalin, who imposed a very much longer-lasting tyranny.

InThe Spectre of War”, Jonathan Haslam venturesthat the Russian Revolution of 1917 altered international relations forever and that those who continued to adhere to the previous frame of reference erred in all their decisions, some extraordinarily transcendental,beginning with that the new Soviet regime was as important in Hitler’s rise as the Treaty of Versailles. Yet more important, it led Western leaders to believe thatespecially for the British (Chamberlain), Hitler would be a key factor in containing Communism. No one can know what would have happened had the West and the Soviet Union become allies in the thirties in order to impede the growth of Germany, butHaslam’s speculation is key: “the lesson of theinterwar years is that in political lifethe extremecan tooeasily become the mainstream.”It is key, Haslamgoes on, not to ignore history,because “History does offer warnings, if we care to recognize them for what they are.”

Michael Nieberg wrote on the fall of France in 1940, a collapse that no one anticipated given the famous Maginot Linethat the French, and the rest of the world, thought invulnerable, only to find that Nazi Germany invaded France through The Netherlands, circumventing formidable fortifications. The book[ii]deals with the impact of the invasion of France on the U.S. and the approach transcends the immediate matter-at-hand. In essence, the argument is that the folding of France swayed theU.S. because our neighbor to the North had conceived of France as a wall of contention that would provide protection from any enemy on the Atlantic side; the fall would oblige it to rethink its entire conception of the world and, thence,to build the mightiest army inthe history of the planet that not only won that war, but that also became henceforth a world factotum. Of particular interest is the description that Nieberg portrays on howthe U.S. decided who would be their allyin France, wagering on Vichy, the government of the Occupied France, going against the British government that had carried out a conscientious   analysis of the French situation and concluding that the ideal partner would be de Gaulle. The book is itself fascinating, but it seems to me especially relevantbecause of the U.S. propensity for ignoring the local situation, thus blundering in the identification of its allies, as evidenced inVietnam, Afghanistanand Iraq.

Manuel Hinds wrote a book thatbreaks with the tendency of the last years on seeing in the government the solution to all the problems. In Defense of Liberal Democracy is a peculiar book in thatit is authored by a Salvadoran addressing the Americans. The central argument is that periods of technological change produce severe disruptions that, as now,  translate into income inequality and greater poverty, but that liberal democracy is the best instrument that humans have devised to confront these evils.  Hinds analyzes complex periods such as the French Revolution and Nazi Germany to conclude that the key to development and democracy lies in the consolidation of a horizontal society that he denominates “multidimensional,”which immediately creates checks and balances that strengthen  the capacity of the generation of ideas, projects and productive activity becausethese align the incentives of persons with those of the development of their country.

The best book that I have read on the China–U.S. relation was written by a former Australian prime minister, who describes the complexity of the interaction of these two societies, its historical misunderstandings and, especially the points of convergence and divergence.  Its title,“The Avoidable War”[iii], is suggestive: the route of suspicions and conspiracies that are assumed by both sides have a sole possible outcome, lest both parties recognize the need to come to key understandings for them and for the world.

Luis Rubio

The way that the current presidential term closes will be determinant for the potential future of Mexico. Given the enormous power and legitimacy that President López Obrador has accumulated during these years, the matter turns in good measure to a very simple dilemma:  Which will win: the narrative or the reality?

In a recent video that went viral, the political consultant Antonio Sola states that AMLO is a transitional president who decodes the national reality with which he will create the conditions for governments of the upcoming decades. His argument is essentially that AMLO owns the narrative because it is he who dominates the technique of telling stories that touch the emotions and that he can do this because he has no competition, in that the opposition plays the president’s game instead of building an alternative narrative. While not new, the argument is powerful because it could determine the evolution of this president’s term of office and, in consequence, the nature of the next.

The flip side of the coin is that not all of it is narrative. Piquing the emotions of the voters, that which politicians do, is central to the exercise of leadership in a nation, but it is no substitute for the government’s performance, especially in the economy and security, which at the end of the day is fundamental for each of the members of the society.

In so far as the reality walks in parallel to the narrative, that is to say, one complements the other, presidential leadership marshals strength.  Contrariwise, when the distance between both results unsustainable, one of the two culminates in imposing itself on the other, usually the reality… That is the tessitura that, from my point of view, will determine the next two years.

The way this government ends will be determinant of the capacity that the president retains in terms of nominating his preferred candidate and, not of scant import, avoiding the fracture of the Morena party.  To date, the president has been able to have the upper hand over the political panorama with his exceptional narrative skill, but his unwillingness to promote economic growth and his stubbornness in controlling everything, now including the electoral institutions and processes, has stagnated the country and provoked ever deeper divisions within society. In addition, the institutional destruction and concentration of power creates negative incentives for investment as the perception of risk rises. The result has been that, however marvelous the narrative, its distance from the day-to-day reality is growing.

In this context, there are two means of focusing on what is to come in 2024: one is the way in which the economy and security situation evolve during the subsequent two years, in that the latter will determine the distance between the narrative and the reality, as well as the strength of the president. On the other hand, independently of how the government ends, the liabilities that this administration will leave will be monumental, with dramatic repercussions that will be measured in terms not in years but in generations.

Even the believers in the presidential project will have to recognize that structural liabilities have been created that will not be easy to correct. Here are some of the obvious ones: first and foremost, the destruction of trust and of institutional sources of certainty. Part of this is due more to Trump than to López Obrador (for weakening NAFTA), but the aggregate effect is devastating, and it will require decades to build something liable to secure wellsprings of sustainable, not politicized, trust. The change in the structure of the governmental budget will reverberate with the lack of growth beyond this term because it will be exceedingly difficult to eliminate expenditure items that are politically and socially transcendent (especially cash transfers to the president’s clienteles), but that do not contribute to the general growth of the economy. Third, deriving from the latter, the same is true of expenditures that are today executed by the army and that, in addition to its being prone to corruption, does not contribute to the chief function of that public institution while diverting resources that are necessary for the promotion of economic development. Finally, the educational system, already a long-standing burden regarding development, especially in the digital era, will not only have not advanced, but it rather acquired a deeply ideological profile that could lead to generations of graduates with no possibility of being employed in the productive apparatus.

These four examples illustrate the nature of the current government that, past the scope of its dogmas and obsessions, has entertained, as its sole objective, power, not a better future. The narrative has served to amass that concentration of power, but it will not be benign at the moment of succession. Of course, this does not alter the immense challenge facing the opposition to convince the electorate of a better future to dethrone the, up to now successful, presidential standing.

In addition to economic stagnation, the structural deficits that the present government will leave behind    are incommensurable.   Therefore, it is rash to extrapolate into the future supposing that nothing will change: the Latin phrase ceteris paribus, that implies conditions remaining the same. For a society accustomed to a permanent transactional relationship with those in government -votes for benefits- no narrative will compensate for the lack of jobs, opportunities, security and, not inconceivable, another crisis.

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Luis Rubio

The central characteristic of our time would seem to be the tensions that generate real or perceived inequalities in the distribution of the benefits of economic growth. Countless nations around the world have elected leaders whose calling card has been the rejection of whatever existed. Obvious examples include Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and now Lula and, in the same fashion, Chávez and López Obrador. The motion of the pendulum has been extreme in some nations, much more moderate in others, but the desire is unmistakable: to take refuge in a known past and to abandon the milk and honey of unfulfilled promises. The question circulating the globe is how distinct the future will be.

Seen in retrospect, it is very clear, and easy to arrive at the conclusion that the narratives accompanying the golden era of globalization along the last three decades resulted in being utopic, thus impossible to satisfy. In fact, one of the lessons furnished by one survey after another, in Mexico and worldwide, is that people are more unappeased by the sluggishness of the advance than by a longing to return to familiar ground. The great problem of globalization does not lie in the lack of results, but instead in the unequal distribution of these. The citizenry thus recognizes this:  what it yearns for is to be part of the success, not to boomerang back to an uncertain past and one of poverty.

On the other hand, the political attractiveness is evident of exploiting the sentiments and resentments that engender the disruptions giving rise to the accelerated change that the world has undergone during these years, nearly all this more the product of technological advances and changes than of the economy per se. The technological change has been the chief component of economic globalization and, above all, of the alteration of value chains.

The first component of globalization are the instantaneous communications that have transformed the economic, but not the social and political, reality. Today any person has access to more information than the governors knew only a few decades ago; the possibility of communicating and sharing information has radically revolutionized our daily lives in a more pronounced manner than any other factor in the history of humanity. Telephones sixty years ago were mechanical contraptions assembled by factory workers in simple production lines. Smartphones, veritable computers that they are, entertain enormous creative power and, relatively little manually incorporated material. The value relationships have been recast, explaining why very-high-quality education is so important.

Clearly, technology has made globalization possible while simultaneously underscoring social differences significantly, provoking the political, nationalistic and introspective reactions we experience every day. To this one must add the geopolitical competition depicting the world powers: certain nations have reinforced their industrial-policy strategies, while others, especially the U.S., have begun to adopt the latter in explicit form. Part of this responds to the unionized base (paradoxically) of Biden as well as of Trump, but much of this derives from its competition with China. Parenthetically, it is of import to annotate here that these changes in industrial matters constitute an immense opportunity for Mexico, but that is another affair.

About which there is no doubt is that there has been a profound alteration in the approach to perceiving economic processes.   Today politicians claim to determine the way economic matters are decided upon, and that constitutes the most prodigious change undergone in the world in decades. Some argue that the supply chains are too intricate for these to be modified, but the reality is that political pressures and incentives are eroding these at fast speed.

There are two things that seem apparent to me: first, technology will continue advancing and that will affect the economic course of action. The other is that many of those demonstrating the most against globalization are also those who will most suffer the losses of deglobalization. As with all pendula, novel tendencies sooner or later start to exhibit the limitations of the new policies and a new backwash will come. The world moves in cycles, and today’s is only another of these.

Borja Sémper sums up the dilemma clairvoyantly: “We are living through the first great backlash of the new world order arising from globalization, a world that is not static and that is characterized by constant change. A change that bewilders many. ‘Worldization’ is a reality charged with opportunities and challenges, it is a creator of wealth (the new capitalism requires adjustments, as have been needed in all changes of era, but it continues to be the system that has created and distributed the most freedom and wealth in the history of humanity), nonetheless still possessing the Achilles’ heel of the absence of governance that allows us to know and correct its overreach. The crisis is of confidence, and confidence is one of the basic pillars of democracy.”

The question for Mexico is the same one as always: Will it respond with a sense of future or try to control uncontrollable processes?

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Luis Rubio

In “The Seventh Seal”, a 1957 film by Ingmar Bergman, a knight returns from the Crusades to find his homeland ravaged by the plague. Suffering and devastation had shaken his faith in God. When Death comes for him, the crusader proposes a game of chess to eke out enough time to commit an act—any act—that might bring meaning amid the pestilence.

Mexico has lived with a stink for years, which has left no one satisfied: neither those who benefitted nor those who felt infringed upon. The demand grew to furnish meaning and transcendence in view of that feeling of uneasiness, but also of the systematic growth of the middle class. The breeding ground was ready for a shakeup. The 2018 election represented a break with the restive years and, we now know, also with the advances that had been achieved.

There are at least three indisputable factors in what happened in those elections: first, the country had been undergoing for nearly three decades profound changes that had improved innumerable factors, but that had not resolved fundamental problems that had been dragging on, such as insecurity, corruption, poverty and inequality. Many indices have improved, but the quality of the governance, at all levels, has waned and no government at least since the eighties, when those reforms began, had the capacity or disposition to propose and advance integral solutions regarding these circumstances.  The improvement was notable, but also the lags, above all because they affected an enormous portion of the citizenry.

A second factor, the proverbial straw that broke the camel´s back, was the prodigious incompetence and corruption that characterized the administration of Peña Nieto. A president who won in 2012 due to his skill in communicating capacity of execution, he resulted absolutely ignorant about the circumstances in which the country lived, of the outcry for solutions and the eagerness for clear headed leadership. That president grasped the need to finalize the reforms that impeded the attainment of the objectives, at least in the economy, of the reformer project from the eighties on, but was incapable of getting the population behind them.  Paradoxically for a purely political president, his acting was absolutely technocratic, nearly sterile, in terms of how he advanced reforms of huge political transcendence, disrupting sacrosanct constitutional articles. In addition, envisioning himself in another era of history, he could not realize or acknowledge that the old political ways, and the corruption that accompanied them, were unsustainable in the era of social media.  It could almost be said that he conscientiously dedicated himself to setting the stage for his successor and, with his response to the Ayotzinapa murders (2014), to guarantee the triumph of López Obrador.

The third factor was the perennial candidate who had for two decades criticized the reformer project, fueling the resentment and providing a means of expression to all the unrest and despair that had been accumulating for centuries and that had been exacerbated by the reforms he denominated “neoliberal.” His discourse and his person had acquired moral authority on his expressing the turmoil that had overtaken many Mexicans.  After two defeats, he arrived at the presidency with the table set by his predecessor, who seemed to have mapped out his script expressly to match the call to arms of today’s president.

On being in the government, the president has proven to be a native PRIist. Very much in the style of his predecessors, he has devoted himself to reconstructing the old presidency, though with a bias not at all PRIist: his deep rejection of any institutional sense. The authority of the person of the president is sufficient to resolve the problems afflicting the country, all these the product of the lack of will of his forerunners. It is not necessary to fix the problems that he promised: attacking his adversaries will cover the record.  The results to date speak for themselves and are manifested in the brutal contrast between the president’s popularity and the rebuke typifying his government. The president retains his credibility as a person, but not due to the performance of his administration.

The mismatch is obvious, particularly among the middle classes, that is, the great achievement of the PRI era, which was not modified one bit during the two administrations of the PAN.   The objective of the postrevolutionary regime had consisted of development with stability, the latter based on a growing and increasingly affluent middle class. That middle class, disenchanted by the unequalness and corruption of the last decades, mutated toward López Obrador in 2018 in a virtual uprising.  It is paradoxical that an electorate worn out by so many unfulfilled promises would usher into power a president rabidly opposed to the very idea of consolidating the middle class. Disparate partners, unsustainable alliance.

Now that the end of this administration is approaching, everything is up for grabs. The coalition -formal and informal- that seconded the president in his election of 2018 is fragmented, as illustrated by the result of the referendum on the President back in April, when AMLO obtained half of the votes than in his original election. Absolute power demoralizes, wrote Lord Acton. Mexicans live this every day.

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 Luis Rubio

All societies face risks, but the risk that Mexico and Mexicans confront today is immeasurable, above all because it is self-inflicted.   Mexico and the U.S. are advancing in the direction of a potentially uncontainable train wreck that, with enormous ease, could lead to the cancellation of the principal engine of the country’s economy.

The scene is not at all difficult to visualize. On the Mexican side, the government is preparing itself for war with its sparce arsenal. With the knowledge that its stance contravenes the content and spirit of the existing trade agreement, the United States-Mexico–Canada Treaty (USMCA), which links the three nations economically, the president is absolutely unwilling to alter the electricity-related legislation that is the motive of the dispute. Consequently, in his logic, the only way out is to go to war: thus, the recent changes in the Ministry of the Economy.

On the American side, President Biden has tolerated one after another of the pranks that President López Obrador has pulled on him; the question is whether the midterm results modify this circumstance. Trade negotiations must be ratified by the U.S. Congress, while the Office of the Trade Representative, an entity created by the Congress, but which belongs to the Executive Branch, reports to both. This circumstance obliges it to act and confers great latitude with respect to the administration. In a word, the key decisions of following or not the constitution of a panel for resolving the controversy, while subject to political criteria, depends substantively on that entity and not solely on the president’s objectives. Additionally, the new political circumstances for President Biden, who came out better than expected from the midterms, could be defining for the bilateral relationship, given that it could determine whether President Biden will run for re-election. Incumbent upon that scenario, released from the burden of having to deal with multiple flanks, Biden could opt for no longer allowing the continuation of the abuses foisted on him by President López Obrador.

The Mexican Government appears to be blind to the transcendence of what is at play with its (pathetic) defense of an autarkic regimen in electric issues. When the new Minister of the Economy was formally appointed, the President stated that: “We are no more under the conditions of maintaining the same neoliberal policy that had the government sequestered. Imagine 36 years of dominion of neoliberal policy.” Just imagine! Thirty-six years of lower prices for consumers, greater economic and political freedoms, certainty regarding the availability of energy and better-quality and better-paid jobs.  Just imagine!

It is obvious that everything was not good during the last decades, but (nearly) everything that was good, in economic concerns at least, took place during those decades, thanks to the reforms undertaken and the Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. After decades of crises every six years, the country achieved many years of stability, sufficient international reserves to avoid recreating the years of crisis that preceded it, and a growing export sector that guarantees the country incomes, jobs, better salaries and foreign currency.

Placing at risk the instrument that has afforded the country these opportunities constitutes a senselessness that can only be understood from a dogmatic ideological posture, blind and perverse. USMCA is crucial for guaranteeing access of exports that, due to the indolence of one government after another (exacerbated by the current one) became the sole relevant engine of economic growth. Instead of worrying about opening spaces for investment in the domestic market and generating conditions for a better distribution of the benefits, the country remained limited in its potential for development to this unique instrument that enables Mexican economic activity. In addition to that, on undermining private investment in energy, the government shut off one of the sources of greatest growth potential that also is crucial for attracting investment in other sectors. From indolence Mexico passed to negligence and from there to an intensifying risk of instability.

The president is vexed by the technocrats, those who know the factors that make possible the development of the economy. But affairs of trade and investment are absolutely technical and require personnel trained and experienced. What lies in the balance is monumental: beyond the question of the current controversy and the likely panel to settle this controversy, disputes with  European and Asian nations with respect to the same issue regarding electricity loom in the horizon; then come the lawsuits of the private companies, whose criterion is not that of obtaining compensation for their investment, but rather for the cash flows that they are (or would be) no longer receiving. That is, the matter in financial terms could easily end up as an exorbitant amount. Unless the president wishes to become a universal pariah (e.g. The IADB), with what that would imply in terms of incomes for the population, the issue merits care and a very different approach from than the one he is assigning to it.

It is natural for a politician to consider that all conflicts can be settled on those terms, but not on these issues, which are technical and call for less dogma. The government is playing with fire without realizing that fire burns.  Everything to it seems simple and hand-in-glove with an easily executed political solution. This time certainly not.

@lrubiof

a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx

Luis Rubio

“Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules.” In the last half century, Mexico was propelled from a world of rules established from the helm of power and for the power -the important ones always being the “unwritten” rules and, among those, the first was that no one would dispute the authority and the legitimacy of the president- toward a system of rules codified and instituted in black and white. It was a praiseworthy attempt, but one undertaken without conviction further than some areas of the economy, especially those linked with investment and foreign trade, and in the electoral ambit. The remainder continued, and continues, the old pattern. Now Mexicans are witnessing the return to the reign of the supreme overlord. The key question is whether those two areas -the economy and the electoral system- will lose that unique quality that has made them pivotal and distinctive for the prosperity and democratization, respectively, of the country.

Rules, says Lorraine Daston,* are an inherent part of human nature, but not all rules are the same and each culture develops their own and modifies them   to the extent possible in their evolutive process. Each society, writes the author, sets into motion two types of rules: those thick and those that are “thin.”  The former are dispensed by judges or experts because they are accompanied by circumstantial exceptions, such as occurs with judicial processes, the game of chess or the leading of military operations. These cases require the interpretation or judgement of experts or individuals specialized in applying rules that, by nature, entail an elevated degree of discretionary latitude. Therefore, these are the type of rules that lofty politicians prefer because these confer on them extraordinary powers, with a heightened propensity toward  arbitrariness.

The “thin” rules are explicit, precise and not subject to interpretation: writing (with its alphabet and grammatical rules), geometry, vehicular traffic and other similar rules that make possible coexistence and human interaction because they generate basic disciplines. All societies develop rules that are codified and published naturally.  In serious countries, obtaining a driver’s license requires an examination of knowledge (of the rules) and of driving, both essential requisites for living together peacefully.

While there are always rules that stand in need of interpretation, the development of societies and the growing complexity of economic activity demand trustworthy rules (and laws) that are known by all, not subject to interpretation and applied in a uniform manner. An exporter counts on that the fiscal and customs rules of the country he sells to will be respected; an importer hopes that, on arriving at customs, his merchandise would pass through expeditiously, so long as all requirements have been complied with. In parallel form, an investor who attempts to manufacture goods in a certain country counts on the rules being applied equally to all, according to what is established in the respective codes or treaties.

One can easily imagine the process that led to the adoption of rules for driving automobiles: when only a few vehicles were in transit, especially in what today are city centers with narrow streets, each driver drove as they saw fit; the same for parking or the direction of the streets themselves. Little by little it was necessary to espouse rules so that the circulation of the traffic would flow. When these rules are invoked, they become social norms, with which they acquire permanence and legitimacy. This is what has happened in the electoral realm which, despite their complexity, became the norm that the citizenry recognizes as a distinctive and crucial characteristic for determining who will govern us.

The pretension of repelling this scaffolding is inborn in a government that prefers to impose its own rules, to interpret them and, along the way, maintain an ample margin of discretion. But there is no greater risk for an organized society than a governor who acts in that way, particularly when matters of enormous volatility are concerned. For example, the electoral reforms, from the end of the fifties but significantly from the nineties, were undertaken not by divine mandate but instead due to the imperious necessity of avoiding political violence. The Morena party would never have come into power without the existence of that normative framework. The same happened in Mexico’s relation with the U.S. and Canada: the treaty that binds us exists to render the flows of goods and investment in both directions predictable. The country would become paralyzed, politically and economically, on placing in doubt those two sources of peace and certainty.

Carl Schmitt, an enthusiastic promoter of the Nazi regime, defined sovereignty as “the power of deciding on the exception.” It is not by chance that he would detest the existence of laws and the due process of law because these limit the governmental powers. That is the type of company that Mexicans would be keeping if, rather than advancing toward civilization, they would proceed embracing this trail of destruction of everything that makes the country function, without contributing anything better to achieve it.

*Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

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 WILSON CENTER
By Luis Rubio
on November 07, 2022

 The Supreme Court of Justice was the first branch of government to experience drastic transformation in modern Mexico. In an attempt to advance the consolidation of a new political regime, one based on democratic elections and checks and balances, the Supreme Court was thoroughly revamped at the end of 1994. The objective was clear: to begin an arduous process of institutional development that would lead Mexico into a democratic era.

Over the following quarter of a century, Mexico saw the gradual constitution of an independent electoral institution, a strengthened and autonomous competition commission, and its telecommunications counterpart, and, later, as part of a far-reaching energy reform, entities to regulate rapidly-developing electricity and oil markets. Every administration from the early 1990s on, abided by these institutions’ rulings and helped solidify the process of institutionalization.

President López Obrador never subscribed to the objective of turning Mexico into a market driven economy and a democratic society. From the moment he was inaugurated, AMLO, as he is known, went to battle against each and every one of these allegedly independent entities. His first target was in fact the Supreme Court, where, using his majority in Congress, he immediately appointed two new members to the Court, negotiated with and subordinated the president of the Court and, through extorsion, forced the resignation of a fourth member. Mexico’s Supreme Court is one of only two in the world where a two thirds majority (eight of eleven votes) are required to issue an opinion. Hence, by controlling four votes, the president owned the Court from the very beginning.

Getting thorough control of the Supreme Court was only the first step. López Obrador quickly moved on to neutralize, eliminate or control entities such as the Hydrocarbons Commission, the Energy Regulatory Commission and the Telecommunications Commission. He decided not to appoint any new members to the Competition Commission, leaving it in some sort of limbo. He made appointments of people close to him to the Central Bank and has been in permanent battle against the National Electoral Institute from the start. The president’s thrust in simple and clear: to recreate the old, president-centered political system.

With a couple of exceptions that were not critical to the president, the Supreme Court’s performance has been dire. Chief Justice Zaldivar has shamelessly aligned with the president, to become his man inside the Court, where he has specialized in delaying critical issues, watering down others and, in one word, doing the president’s bidding. In striking contrast with the old Mexican tradition of at least attempting to cover the Court’s decisions with constitutional legalese, Zaldivar has been blatant, direct and unbashful. He has even declared that he is ready for a new appointment, presumably a presidential one.

President López Obrador’s onslaught has proven that the institutional buildup of the previous three decades was nothing more that a Potemkin village. Not that AMLO’s predecessors believed that they were playing a role in a big charade, but that most of those institutions proved to be no more than frail entities that could not withstand a presidential frontal attack. It has all proven to be a house of cards.

Previous Mexican presidents were aware of the potential frailty that they were building. Understanding well the nature of Mexican politics and the vulnerability to extorsion that characterizes most politicians, Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) sought outside help to create a strong, credible and sustainable institution that would not be subject to similar vulnerabilities. His vision was not that of an altruistic politician but of a realist statesman: he realized that Mexican institutions were always vulnerable and thus he went on to seek American support for his endeavor.

NAFTA was the result of those negotiations. Though clearly a trade and investment agreement, the political subtext was unmistakable: the US was willing to lend American institutions to support the reforms that Mexico’s government was attempting. In the words of General Scowcroft, in an interview I conducted with him in the early nineties, NAFTA was “a no brainer” for the US: “a prosperous Mexico was in the best national-interest of the United States.”

Mexico’s institutions are decaying and the elimination of NAFTA with its geopolitical content bodes ill for its ability to recover a path to development. Not that all was successful in the previous decades, but at least parts of Mexico were moving along. The challenge today, for both Mexico and the United States, will be to find a way to lever on the ever-expanding economic relationship to build new institutions capable of sustaining long-term development for Mexico.

Nothing can undo the damage caused, successively, by Trump and by López Obrador, but the challenge remains: Mexico is clearly vulnerable to the criminal organizations that sprang to satisfy American demand for drugs, while it has been unable to reform its system of government to truly transform itself into a modern, civilized nation.

Some of Mexico’s institutions might be saved, beginning with the Supreme Court, for it is individuals who have done the damage, not the institution itself. But the issue at heart is that one person can do enormous damage. That is the true challenge for Mexico. Back in 1929, then-president Plutarco Elías Calles called for transforming Mexico from a nation of caudillos to a nation of institutions. A century later, the task remains the same.

LUIS RUBIO

Global Fellow;
Mexico Institute Advisory Board Member; Chairman, México Evalúa; Former President, Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI); Chairman, Center for Research for Development (CIDAC), Mexico

Luis Rubio

The fight for the National Electoral Institute (INE) entails two very simple explanations. First, it is evident that at this point there is no guarantee of the continuity of the so-called Fourth Transformation (4T) or, at best, of the Morena party. Natural attrition and absence of results lead the president to seek means to avoid a potential catastrophe for his political project. The other explication, more benign for the regime, is that, to stay in power, it needs to tie down a key loose sail: the Electoral Branch. As supposedly stated by Stalin, “The people who cast the vote decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Controlling the voting process becomes a categorical imperative: the only way to preserve the power is to annul the right of the citizenry to decide, as in the good old times.

The electoral system is a hindrance for the failed project. This syllogism makes it evident that the problem does not lie in the INE and in its counterpart in the Electoral Court, but instead with the pretense of recreating a world that disappeared a half century ago and that cannot be recreated nor is it repeatable. The mere pretense of imposing an all-embracing vision of the country and of the world on 130 million citizens, practically twice the population of Mexico in the seventies, is impossible in that it is unreachable as well as because it ignores -or consciously rejects- the diversity and dispersion that characterize the country and due to which there is no way back. Feigning the reproduction of an epoch that has been already eclipsed by time and by the changing reality is nothing more than a mirage and, at the end of the day, a fantasy.  A population that has become accustomed to the exercise of its life without the omnipresence of the government cannot be submitted anew.

Of course, not that the entire population enjoys full freedoms. Lack of access to the modern economy, to justice or to personal and patrimonial security, to cite three obvious examples, limits the capacity of the development of individuals and, in general, of the country. That is where the lack of a government that is competent and one with clear objectives manifests itself acutely and decisively. It is also there that President López Obrador, without commitment to the previous status quo, had the enormous opportunity to modify the game rules to make possible a government willing to engender conditions for the whole population, especially the most poverty-stricken, that which most lags behind and that endowed with the least opportunities, to break with that apparently abstract, but absolutely real, barrier.

Rather than making a difference by the building of a more equitable and successful country, the 4T project has been nothing else than a vain attempt to control everything and to reconstruct the old presidency, the one that wreaked poverty on the country in the seventies. The government consists of a permanent rhetoric -the daily presidential speeches- that are high sell-outs in terms of the president’s communicating with his social base and exploiting historical resentments, but without offering anything in return. Popularity, like all emotions, is volatile and dissipates with the greatest of ease. However much the president capitalizes on and sings his own praises about his lofty score in this regard, he would do well to observe his predecessors from the nineties on: there is nothing more ephemeral than popularity. Worse yet when the distance between the evaluation of the government is found so far from that of the president: a faithful representation of a government that talks but that does not govern.

The fifth year of any six-year presidential term in Mexico is always crucial because it is then that the results of the four prior years become patent, vividly revealing the successes and the failures therein: that is where the results of the term are presented in summation. Never, in the decades during which I have been witness to one government after another have I seen fewer investments in the future than during the current government. Some of those governments were cautious, other ambitious; some competent, others inept; but uniting everyone was a common endeavor to improve the future.   López Obrador has done nothing more than invest in the past -an oil refinery, a provincial airport- without there having been a proper assessment of any of these: his vision sufficed.

And that vision is not even developmental in the sense that it was employed during the era in which the president takes such immense pride, the so-called stabilizer development, which afforded the country a duo of decades of high economic-growth rates. Contrariwise, the manifested purpose is one of impoverishing the population, eliminating the main economic-growth sources and consolidating an omnipotent presidency.

Lashing out at the INE and against the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Treaty (USMCA) (in the form of a rejection of resolving the dispute with our partners, leaving open the possibility of the cancellation Mexico’s membership) is inscribed in this strategy. This could be a conscious or an unconscious project, but evidence of the intention is increasingly widespread.

The death rattles of a government that begins to languish but that refuses to accept the verdict of the citizenry. Better to decide on its name; better to impose a succession than respect its desires, concerns or preferences. As Yogi Berra would say, “You got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” The country runs the risk of losing its way in this road of good intentions which, as the saying goes, could lead to hell.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof