Luis Rubio

What is it that is left in the wake of a disruptive president whose objective -de facto- has been tearing down instead of building? That is the question that Mexicans should be scrutinizing as the present administration begins its final third.

The daily news reports do not deceive the people: inflation, unemployment, unconstitutionality, purposeful deterioration, thievery, deaths, extortion, mockery, attacks and counterattacks, and an entire series of impositions, such as those related with the new Mexico City (CDMX) airport. All signs of the deterioration that the country is undergoing. Rather than growth, opportunities, possibilities and a perspective likely to transform the country into one with a promising future, reality begins to catch up with the country and its government.

Clearly, none of that has made a dent in the popularity of the president. Also, the Morena party governs two thirds of the states, both marks of a president who holds in his grip the attention and close proximity of a great number of citizens. These same surveys show a highly unpopular government, reproved in practically all indicators. The paradox has been analyzed multiple times from many vantage points and only time, or the upcoming elections, will return a verdict.

With respect to the state governorships won by the party of the present government, the surveys reveal an opposition that confounds instead of inspiring certainty in terms of the future, and an unaltered propensity of the electorate to vote against incumbents, regardless of their stripe. That is, Morena secures benefits from being the new party on the block, implying that, on the persistence of the anti-status quo sentiment, its candidates could be spurned the next around. In a word, Mexican politics are intensely volatile and no one’s future is guaranteed.

I have no doubt that if the presidential election were to take place today, the president could name his favorite candidate and be victorious in the election, but 20 months are left until the next election and that is a world of time in politics. At this stage of the presidential term what’s left is to harvest what has been sown during the past four years, and in this respect the current government has little to offer beyond transfers to their clienteles and an enormous animosity within the Mexican society. All the same, what was not sown will have to be paid for and that will not yield advantageous outcomes. The harvest will be bleak in the best of circumstances.

The matter of cash transfers to clienteles is more transcendent than is apparent because it has implicated an extraordinary distortion in the public accounts and a tremendous incentive not to work for those who are the beneficiaries. The president has done everything imaginable to shift budgetary funds to his pet clienteles, chalking up massive deficits in the most basic public services and creating vulnerabilities regarding emergencies on draining the respective trust funds. Whoever turns up in the government in 2024 will encounter a huge financial problem and will confront severe dilemmas that will render them eminently unpopular.

Up to now, the government has enjoyed an internal and external milieu that, despite the pandemic, has been benign toward it. The population has resisted a stringent recession, interest rates had remained very low and the market for Mexico’s exports has grown much more rapidly than anticipated. All of that -in addition to the remittances, transfers and the narrative skill of the president- have allowed politics to bask in stability, endorsing the governing party. Now the complicated period begins, at the precise moment of the natural decline of the government.

The president initiated his government offering a change of course towards lower levels of poverty, an end to violence, less inequality, greater growth and less corruption. In all those fields an advance has only been notable for having taken steps backward. The pandemic can be blamed for some things, but not all of them, certainly not the transcendent ones. The population continues being besieged by criminality, corruption is in its heyday and the economy is more dependent on exports than ever before.

The balance is not commendable and two long years are in the offing in an international environment that could be exceptionally inhospitable and for which there are no longer protection barriers. The mechanisms and trust funds that existed as reserved for difficult times were extinguished. What is left is feeble and subject to a tide that might not continue being calm.

Worst of all is that the president presses along the course that he plotted from the start and from which he does not seem willing to veer off even one inch, independently of the circumstances. The robust indices of popularity spur him on to proceeding ahead without rectifying, but that is not a trustworthy mainstay. However elevated, popularity is a mercurial indicator, as history has shown myriad times in the past.

On the horizon are two years of growing uncertainty that, in the best of scenarios, will bequeath a fragile and brittle platform to the subsequent government. As the saying goes, the president has sown winds and will reap storms. What remains is to observe the price of that so very volatile end-of-the-presidential-term climate that used to shape such periods, but that appeared to have been transcended. Until now.

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Luis Rubio

 According to Ecclesiastes, there is “a time to destroy and a time to build… a time to tear and a time to mend… a time for war and a time for peace.” The pertinent question for Mexico is which of those ways of going forward have characterized the president. While alternatives have existed, he has done more to destroy, divide and attack than to build, mend and pacify.     Nothing indicates that his nature will change from here to the end of the administration.  Statesman or prophet?

Statesmen, says Kissinger, understand that a couple of essential tasks must be developed: preserving the integrity of their society, driving change and progress while preserving the essence; and attenuating visionary attitudes with caution. Statemen tend to be conscious of the myriad hopes that have been dashed, the good intentions that have not been achieved and the dogged persistence in human affairs of egoism, the thirst for power and the violence. For their part, prophets set out from imperatives: “prophetic leaders invoke their transcendent visions as proof of their righteousness.” Believers in ultimate solutions, “prophetic leaders tend to distrust gradualism as an unnecessary concession to time and circumstance; their goal is to transcend, rather than manage, the status quo.” Among the former, states Kissinger, are Atatürk, Roosevelt and Nehru; typical of the latter are Robespierre, Lenin and Gandhi.

Where will Mexico be at the end of the López Obrador six year term? Six years of systemic battering, relentless destruction and polarization as a strategy will leave the country divided, in permanent struggle and without a natural sequence to follow. Worse, the fiscal situation in which the outgoing government will leave the country will oblige the successor to confront an inexorable reality: the Treasury will have been drained, perhaps not by corrupt functionaries (although there are also plenty of those), but instead by means of a systematic diversion of the funds of the elemental governmental functions (such as health, education and security) to Pharaonic projects and, above all, to the president’s pet clienteles. An empty Treasury vault and one without a future will obligate a revision of everything, beginning with the ruinous dogmas that comprised the sum and substance of the current government.

Six years of a prophet certain of his probity, but without the least concern for the daily problems that the citizenry bewailed (such as employment, security and incomes) will have left the country on the brink of bankruptcy and with few options for forging ahead.  While the president’s popularity may have been high, this has been a reflection of the person’s nature and of the media–narrative success of his master plan, but not of a capable government and one accomplished at attending to the immediate needs of the country or setting in place the structures and institutions that would foster long-term development.  The prophet incapable of discerning the circumstances of the country, the world or the citizenry.

Precisely when Mexico necessitated the presence of a statesman with a clear vision of the future, accompanied by solid centering on the reality of the country and of the world of the time, AMLO arrived on the presidential scenario with far-ranging popular backing, but without a grasp of (or interest in) the circumstances of the moment. Convinced of the probity of his vision, the president ignored the rationale -correct or incorrect, but not dishonest- that had urged on his predecessors, to tear down everything that existed. Rather than the purported “new” regime, he leaves a nation bereft of opportunities and engulfed in contradictions.

There will come a new government that will have no better alternative than to begin to work the soil from zero. Some are concerned that a Morena government will persist, others fear that someone different will come, from a party or alliance that is today in the opposition. The truth is that, come what may, the problems that will confront the new president, man or woman, will be enormous. After decades of building fiscal structures designed to confer stability on the economy, the president has wagered on things turning out well on their own. Why save during the years of plenty if, with luck, the lean years will never present? He sapped the coffers and trust funds, wiped out institutions, violated all sorts of legal and regulatory precepts to finance his popularity. The mark of a prophet, not of a statesman.

Leadership, to be sustained and effective, must be greater than personal ambition. The challenges accosting Mexico and Mexicans are incommensurable and do not improve by financing the deficits of companies such as Pemex or the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), which are going nowhere, and they are much less resolved with transfers to a resentful and desperate  population that requires instruments for transforming itself and going forward, as well as opportunities to grow and form part of the development. These six years will have come to be a great waste not only because of the annihilation of possibilities, but also above all because of the creation of myths that will render the task difficult for whomever comes in 2024.

Herbert Stein, a famous economist, coined a law of economic stability that bears his name and that describes toward what Mexico is going: “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The world of fantasy that the president imagined and to which he devoted huge resources is not sustainable, which is why it cannot go on. Regardless of who comes next, the task-at-hand will begin by chipping stone.

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Luis Rubio

In their novel entitled 2034, Ackerman and Stavridis extrapolate the currently prevalent tendencies in cybernetic matters a decade in advance to describe a world of extraordinary complexity in which computers cease being a tool for the processing of information and facilitating the daily life of persons and companies, becoming, instead,  mechanisms that dominate all aspects of everyday life worldwide, from education and health to armies and public administration. While the novel devotes itself to military affairs, its message is razor-sharp: what previously were mere tools are now transformed into ubiquitous factors of the quotidian agenda,  in all of its facets and no one can  abstract themselves from it. In that world, only those who possess the capacity to employ computers, program them and use them deftly can thrive and be successful.

It is not necessary to read works of fiction to observe how the world is advancing and what that would imply for all inhabitants of the planet. As increasingly more aspects and activities of life are incorporated into the world of cybernetics, two things occur: on the one hand, it becomes even more obvious that what adds value in productive supply chains Is human creativity and the ability of individuals to participate in that life dimension. On the other hand, the person who does not have the ability or possibility to access that segment of the supply chains remains thwarted in advancing economically. In a word, if the inequality experienced today in Mexico and, in general, in the world, is already extreme, what’s coming will be a thousand times worse.

Any government with a modicum of common sense and clarity of vision should be asking itself how to face the challenge and what it should do to skew the probability of success. The key factor characterizing the world of knowledge, of which cybernetics comprises a core factor, is that the success of persons lies in their capacity to add value and this no longer relevant to the traditional factory assembly lines, but rather to the individual’s creative capacity. This is not an ideological statement as the government’s new educational policy assumes.

That world requires skills that are only developed through an education favoring mathematics, science and language and that rewards merit to achieving a population with all the capacities demanded by the new reality that humanity is approaching by the minute.  It is not by chance that nations -essentially Asian, but also certain European ones- that prioritize education are those at the vanguard of the cybernetic world. The big question is where Mexico stands in that race and whether it will be possible for it to be a successful player in the world beginning to take shape.

Education has evolved into the transformative lever in the entire Asian milieu because, on providing youngsters with skills, it contributes to breaking decisively with the sources of origin of the inequality plaguing Mexico today. In Mexico, given the educational policy (old and new) of preserving the status quo and its consequent inequality, that is to say, thus avoiding the upsurge of individuals with capacities to be successful in life, there is a guarantee that inequality will remain true, thus impeding an integral development of the country.

Inequality is not privy to Mexico; what impresses about Mexico is the indolence with which the importance of education is ignored, and even more so in the information and knowledge era.  In contrast with those Asian nations, our system of education is designed to hold back the progress of persons not only by the way education is conducted but also by the absence of understanding the way the world’s economy has been evolving. In successful countries, children not coming from homes that provide them with benefits stemming from the very fact of having environments and tools of modernity, find in education a means to gain achievements such as those of children of privilege. An educational system oriented toward transformation breaks through inequality, promotes social mobility and raises productivity with its consequent benefits in terms of consumption, well-being and economic growth. No one can say that takes place in Mexico today.

In the last twenty years there were at least two serious attempts to transform the education of the country (2007 and 2017), both failed due to the might of the teachers’ union and the preference of governments such as the PAN as well as that of the PRI to ally with that’ union for electoral purposes. The result is a stagnant and unproductive economy that predates the current and very destructive government which not only consciously ignores the world’s evolution, but that also considers that turning education into indoctrination will allow it to return to an idyllic past while reducing inequality and being successful.

Nearly 250 years ago. harkening back to another era of the world, Benjamín Franklin affirmed that “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” His clairvoyance is astounding, but the message is transcendental. Only a political project that favors the control and subordination of the population could ignore this now that the evidence of its importance is inexorable.

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Luis Rubio

The decisive challenge for major powers, according to historian John Lewis Gaddis, is perfecting the “alignment of potentially infinite aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.” Every government around the world faces complex security challenges. Unfortunately, Mexico is not even in the phase of “aligning aspirations with capabilities” as Gaddis suggests. In Mexico, security is not a priority, nor has there been the slightest intention of building a suitable justice system that is compatible with the circumstances and needs of the country.

The core message of films and television series such as Presumed Guilty and, more recently, The Cassez-Vallarta Case: A Criminal Novel, constitutes a true and documented indictment of the entire security and justice apparatus of the country. What is described there is a politicized justice system without suitable structures for its (supposed) mission: accusations are made but no investigation is carried out; the rights of the victims and perpetrators are violated; illegal and uncivilized methods, such as torture, are used to extract confessions; and judges tend to follow the guidance of prosecutors (who do not investigate). Nobody cares about the victims, while the accused, guilty or not, can go decades without being sentenced or released. In a word, justice is absolutely non-existent.

The same thing happens in terms of security: the police, with few exceptions, are not professionals and have not been trained to ensure the safety of the population. Much more importantly, the vision that has prevailed in this arena is a direct heir to the old authoritarian political system of the 20th century, which was never reformed. Instead of reforming (or, really, creating) a security system, the army, the only asset in the hands of the Mexican State, was used to cover the sun with a finger, and that has gone on for more than half a century.

The point is very simple: the political system became institutionalized throughout the 20th century, but it never developed checks and balances or qualified institutions to make effective governance possible. It was not done for two reasons: the most obvious, because the real objective was the centralized control of power from the presidency. In the matter of security and justice, what kept the country relatively calm was the enormous power of the federal government and its tentacles through the PRI and shock forces such as the Federal Security Directorate, whose objective was to maintain control, not the development of a stable, secure and prosperous society.

Second, the country grew, society diversified, the economy liberalized, and the political system democratized, but security and justice lagged, along with (almost) the entire state apparatus. Starting in the 1990s, there were some projects to reform the security apparatus, but they never came to fruition, partly because these were not a priority and, perhaps more to the point, because political competition and, eventually, the alternation of parties in the presidency, prevented political circles from understanding the changing context in which the security issue was evolving. Although kidnappings multiplied and criminality grew, the priority of Mexican society -and, certainly, of its rulers- lay elsewhere.

For its part, organized crime underwent a profound mutation after the Colombian government took increasing control of its territory and of its mafias, which Mexicanized the drug business, increasing its criminal capacity and violence within the country. The once all-powerful federal government suddenly found itself confronting a growing power without the means and ability (or willingness) to counter it.

Instead of building police and judicial capacity at both the federal and local levels, Mexican politics veered towards idyllic scenarios of democratic competition, decentralization of power and the budget, opening the door to criminal organizations without a plan to confront them. In retrospect, President Calderón’s response was inadequate, but not for that lacks merit for the very fact of recognizing the presence of an existential threat to the Mexican state. That was in 2006 and nothing has been done since then.

The aforementioned films show all the vices of the judicial and security reality. The nature of the police and of the prosecutors guarantee that criminals go free, as might have happened in the Cassez case, because all the procedures established by law, but which nobody respects, are regularly violated. The due process or law, the essence of legality and the rule of law, is crucial in any country, but in Mexico it is the main weapon in the hands of those who commit crimes. The victims of extortion, kidnapping and homicide are right: nobody cares about their rights or welfare. As one of the interviewees in the video says, in Mexico even injustice is egalitarian.

President López Obrador had everything to change this reality, but he never had that inclination. Now it is imperative that Mexican society demands whoever intends to govern in 2024 to propose a serious and responsible strategy in this regard.

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Luis Rubio

“Great cases [before de Supreme Court] like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.” Oliver Wendell Holmes* thus characterized the issues that, due to their high political explosiveness, end up yielding results of dubious practical relevance, if not counterproductive. When the issues become litmus tests of loyalty and identity definition, the products inevitably end up being extreme, with little probability of contributing to solving the problem that they were intended to address.

This week Mexicans went through two burning issues that call into question the stability and collective sanity in terms of security, one of the most transcendent issues in public life today. Both preventive imprisonment without a ruling by a judge and the role of the National Guard are crucial elements for the security of the population. In both cases, the positions of politicians, scholars, commentators and authorities in charge for these topics were polarized to such an extent that it was impossible to develop a responsible debate inside or outside the legislative sphere and the Supreme Court itself.

The very notion of preventive imprisonment without a judge’s ruling is contemptible because it defeats any basic conception of justice. A person who is sent to jail for the mere presumption of a crime and without the intervention of a judge is something unacceptable in any civilized society. At the same time, it is impossible, and clearly absurd, to ignore the context in which that figure came to exist. In a country where hundreds of thousands of homicides, robberies, kidnappings and extortions are committed every year, crimes that almost always go unpunished, it is obvious that Mexicans are far from living in a framework of civilization in which the rules of the game are respected in state institutions and between these and private individuals.

Unjustified preventive imprisonment was conceived for violent crimes that merited special treatment to avoid evading justice, such as drug trafficking, homicides, and the like. The problem was that this figure was extended to an endless list of potential crimes, with which it ceased to be a mechanism for highly serious cases due to the violence that they entailed, to become an instrument of virtual extortion by tax, administrative and political authorities. Thus, the issue went from a mechanism of limited use to an instrument of unlimited abuse. Paradoxically, completely eliminating the mechanism could imply greater impunity because now it will be the judges who would have to rule on the so-called justified preventive imprisonment, which would expose them to reprisals and infinite corruption. A judge could be forced to abdicate his or her responsibility in order to protect his family or, alternatively, to accept a payment in exchange for not ordering preventive detention. In a similar situation, Colombia resorted to the so-called “faceless judges” to avoid personalizing these decisions, with poor results.

The context matters because Mexicans do not live in Denmark, nor do they have the implicit security strategy of that nation, its police, judicial officials or institutions. One would have to be blind to pretend that what works there is applicable to the Mexican reality without further ado.

The National Guard, whether formally inside or outside the army, is only one component, not the largest, of what a security strategy should be. The military -by far the majority of the members of the contingent that makes up the National Guard- are not trained to be policemen, it is not their function, nor is it a solution to the problem of insecurity and violence that affects the country. Although its formal inclusion in the Ministry of Defense has unleashed enormous passions -and sensible legal arguments- the “debate” lacks the nodal component: security begins from below; it cannot be imposed from above by presidential mandate, a vice that has accumulated since 2007.

The central characteristic of all countries in which their population enjoys full security is that local authorities are responsible for maintaining order and preserving peace. It is the corner policeman, as well as on the local authorities in charge of the justice procurement system, on whom the security of the population depends. Mexico went from an authoritarian system with strong central control to an immense disorder in which most of the state and municipal authorities are not responsible for anything.

In this context, the role of the National Guard should be to create conditions of peace and stability for the development of effective police and judicial systems at the local level, a process that would take years, not a few months. As it stands today, the National Guard serves to temporarily stabilize a locality, a stability that disappears as soon as they move to another part of the country.

De la Boétie** writes that “It has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.” Nothing will change so long as this remains the same.

*Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400-401 (1904).

**The Politics of Obedience

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Luis Rubio
In solidarity with José Sarukhán

 The preposterous is everywhere. Some indulge their preferences rather than embrace the reality. As happened to Kafka in the village of Zürau, where he wrote about the teeming mice in his sanatorium’s surroundings. He speculated on the urgency of attracting a cat that would free him from the mice, but that created a new circumstance:  Who would free him from the cat? Kafka’s absurdities are indistinguishable from those of AMLO’s Fourth Transformation (4T) and, above all, from those of his followers.

All of us Mexicans would like live in the perfect world, but no one seems willing to build it, because that would imply abandoning not only privileges, but above all the visions, when not the entelechies, of those who today are the essence of the status quo. AMLO’s daily narratives obscure the obvious: the narrative -and the preferences, above all ideological- are more prominent than the tangible reality and not only that of the Mexican in the street. The present is perceived, by both Tyrians and Trojans, as unsustainable. Hence it would be indispensable to understand where we are to know not what is desirable, but what is possible.

In the fiction of the morning narratives, the changes undertaken since 1982 comprised the product of a dogmatic zeal that altered -if not destroyed- the course of the nation. Everything was going well until the treacherous neoliberals came into power. (Near) hyperinflation, the dislocation of families and patrimonies never appear in the 4T narrative.

At the beginning of the seventies, the country experienced a radical change in the management of the economy. For two decades, the country had lived through a virtuous cycle of economic growth under iron-fisted political control. But both had begun to take on water. The grain exports, key for financing the importation of industrial goods, had started to decline from the mid-seventies. For its part, the 1968 Student Movement had evidenced the limits of PRI authoritarianism.

The solution advanced by the two heroes who inspire the President -Echeverría and López Portillo- was magic: public expenditure to satisfy one and all. The government can finance poor and rich, supporters and dissidents. Subsidies far and wide. Except that the solution was not to be so: the government ended up practically bankrupt in 1982 and every vestige of civility and confidence had been wiped out. Those presidents were incapable of understanding the forces to which the Mexican economy was subjected and, in a broader sense, the country in its integrity.

The world changed in accelerated fashion, but Mexico encysted itself in its natural refuge. Better to hide its head in the sand albatross-style than face the circumstances determining the fate of the country. Like today.

The so-called 4T project is sustained on a fallacy: the notion of the technocrats, the disparagingly denominated “neoliberals,” carried out a series of reforms on the economy of the country because it dictated to them their ideology or pure-and- simple corruption. The reality is simpler still: the country was adrift; the government was insolvent and the only way for it to recover its capacity -or possibility- of economic growth was by modifying the country’s economic structures.

While Mexico reveled in the lust for oil of the seventies -the era when today’s president was leader of the PRI in Tabasco State- the world was transformed. Instead of closed and protected economies, the planet, in industrial terms, came to be globalized, communications were revolutionized and expectations rocketed. Little by little, added value moved toward the processes of high intellectual content -software, brands, innovation, services, creativity, distribution- above manual labor.

Those functionaries, today reviled, devoted themselves to transforming the foundations of the development of the country -communications, infrastructure, energy, education, health- with the purpose of financing a sustainable platform for the future. Evidently there were errors, corruptive practices and abuses, but the objective was clear: to place Mexico in the proximity of the opportunities for development that were possible, and feasible, in addition to inevitable, in the XXI century.

At the end of four years of the 4T Mexicans find themselves facing the dilemma of always: how to achieve development. Except that today, they are in suboptimal conditions for achieving it. The destruction of institutions that the president has promoted entails consequences. The same is true concerning the dislocation that the public budget has endured: today everything is directed toward promoting presidential popularity and nothing toward the development of the country.  The next president will find himself or herself before an ill-starred panorama, with few opportunities to correct course.

The 4T acolytes swear and perjure -and insult- but they come unequipped with arguments to counteract the devastation taking place.  Today fear, uncertainty and alienation reign. Popularity, the fruit of a fictitious narrative, points in one, but the quotidian reality points in the opposite direction. Sooner or later the convergence of these will inevitably and inexorably point downward.

Nothing is written in stone about 2024, except the fiscal, moral and political bankruptcy brandished by the current government. This now begs the question of what or who offers a way out that is compatible with the world’s reality, not with the fantasies that the government weaves.

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Luis Rubio

It is not clear whether they were betting on civilization, submission or, simply, on that material satisfaction would resolve other human aspirations, such as that of progressing, improving or participating in politics. The tangible fact is that Mexican governments from the sixties on have been betting that the Mexican citizen would endure anything without protest. In reality, it wasn’t a bad bet, except for that all those governments, including the present one, entertained a double agenda: they wanted things to get better but not so much as to alter their political projects.

The projects changed over time, but not the objective. Consciously or not, the objective always was control of the population; some wanted it to enjoy the sweetness of power, others merely to stay in power. But even in that there were levels: the reformers of the eighties and nineties did everything imaginable to accelerate the pace of economic growth; the current rulers prefer impoverishment of the population. A booming economy, the former calculated, would transform Mexico, creating a country increasingly like the successful nations of the world. In a country of the poor, bets President López Obrador, no one complains because they all depend on the government. Different projects, but control always at the ready.

The era of reforms began due to the fiscal crisis of 1982: the bankruptcy of the old Mexican State, sustained by ever more State-owned entities that served for nothing other than preserving power and enriching those running them. That crisis obliged the undertaking of a series of reforms to stabilize the economy and to make possible its return to growth. A frequently asked question during that time -coinciding with Gorbachev’s reforms of the former Soviet Union- was on the viability of carrying out economic reforms without analogous political reforms.

In the end, this mattered little. As books like that of Acemoglu and Robinson (The Narrow Corridor) illustrate but, above all, as does the most recent one by Guriev and Treisman (Spin Dictators), the fearsome Leviathan finds its own way of adapting, staying in power through presumably clean elections, largesse toward the population, and a moving narrative to obviate the commonly accepted democratic practices. What’s important, say Guriev and Treisman, does not consist of being democratic, but instead being seen as such. The prototypical examples charactering that type of tyranny in those authors’ perspective are Putin and Chávez. While they could have come to power via the democratic route, years later they would not pass that test.

The Mexican economic reforms did not achieve their integral purpose for three principal reasons, none of which appears in the catalog of allegations that procured the presidency for President López Obrador. First, the government abandoned its responsibility on generalizing the reforms: engulfed in the crisis of 1995, the government let the economy function on its own, without its engendering conditions for general prosperity. The modern part of the economy, fundamentally linked with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), acquired an extraordinary dynamism, as portrayed by the states of Aguascalientes, Querétaro, Nuevo León, and other, mainly northern, regions. The rest of the country succumbed to organized crime, violence and the absence of justice and, in general, of government. Rather than the government adapting to the new economic reality, the government abdicated its responsibility and no one, outside of organized crime, has assumed it since.

Second, regardless of the number of reforms embarked upon in the economy, there was no advance in properly political matters. Mexico ended up with a strange hybrid: one of the most modern and competent electoral systems of the world confronted by a despotic government and with no counterweight whatsoever, as AMLO has demonstrated. This can be appreciated in all ambits:    from the private monopolies to the teachers’ unions or to the flagrant violation of the laws (e.g., the electoral ones) in recent times. The language of democracy is abundant, but the reality of tyranny has not varied: in any case, it has become more and more underscored, especially in the present presidential term. Finally, the combination of incompetent governments, the absence of legitimacy, the evidence of uncontainable corruption and violence have had the effect of driving away private investment, the sole source susceptible to raising the growth of the economy, generating jobs or improving incomes.

One of the constants in the writings of Thucydides (c.400 BC) is the fragility of civilization, the provenance of wars, social degradation, revolutions and disease. The Mexican governments of the last decades have had the effect of degrading the Mexican civilization and putting it at a grave risk. Before, at least the rhetoric promised advance; today, in place of progress, as was the wager of the reformer governments, the bet is generalized impoverishment. The despotic Levithan wants to stay in power at any price.

Lord Acton could not have said it better: “Liberty: Power over oneself; Opposite: Power over others.” It is in the hands of the Mexican society to decide which wager is most seemly for it.

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

Luis Rubio

The roof was falling in, the leaks had disappeared and were replaced by holes more than 30 centimeters in diameter where the rain, snow and trash came through. One would think that this was about an abandoned property in the middle of nowhere, but it was one of the Mexico’s most important embassies abroad. Confronted by the inexistence of funds to repair the roof, the ambassador had gone ahead with the only alternative left to him: close the upper floor and pretend that the problem did not exist, aggravating the situation and making the later repair process much more costly. The notion that one needs to budget in order to maintain existing assets goes against the grain of Mexicaness…  Even worse if it involves planning for the future.

The deterioration of the country’s physical infrastructure is visible in all its ambits: it can be observed in the Mexico City Metro, in multiple condominiums throughout the country, in the scarcity of water in diverse regions, at the Mexico City airport, and, as illustrated by the case of the referred embassy, in many governmental buildings. The problem is not limited to the government: condominium owners are reluctant to pay the fees for the maintenance of the buildings in which they live.

The water crisis in the Mexican city of Monterrey laid bare an entire sewer of criticisms, political stances and attacks regarding the heavy users of the precious liquid. Crises always present opportunities to draw political advantage, but few take time to realize that this does not concern a situation that came about all of a sudden, but instead one that it is the consequence of not having done the work required, in this case, that of infrastructure, for decades. Since it cannot be seen, politicians prefer to circumvent the need for building capacity in anticipation of upcoming growth: everyone wants growth, but no one is willing to invest for it to be transformed into a great benefit for all.

A few decades ago, a comparative study was conducted[i] on water management in two similar cities -Phoenix and Tucson- both localized in a desert with very little access to natural water sources. The study arose from the extraordinary difference in water consumption per inhabitant that characterized two cities separated by little more than one hundred kilometers in distance.  While in Tucson an average 640 liters of water were consumed daily per household, in Phoenix average consumption was 1,040 liters. The difference lay in the management of the water: while in Phoenix water was seen as a human right, in Tucson it is considered a scarce resource. The inhabitants of Tucson pay dearly for their water, but they never confront problems of water scarcity, which does happen in Phoenix. The same is true in the northeastern Mexican state capitals of Monterrey, Nuevo León, and Saltillo, Coahuila, cities typified by like physical circumstances and geographies, except that in Saltillo water is never scarce. In Monterrey the administration of water is governmental, in Saltillo a company responds to the citizenry.

As the population grows (and, during these years, the economy less so), problems of infrastructure will increasingly beset Mexicans. More inhabitants imply more streets, more water, more communications, schools, hospitals, etc., all of which entails investments in infrastructure and funds for the maintenance and improvement of what already exists. However, none of that is evident in the criteria driving the annual governmental budgets or in plans for development. In technical terms, this is called entropy, i.e., the gradual deterioration that leads to disorder, the absence of predictability and, potentially, chaos. As Héctor Aguilar-Camín[ii] pointed out a few days ago, “the government’s decisions on the airports have placed Mexico City in a Kafkaesque dilemma: the more airports you have, the fewer airports there are that function.” Chaos.

The present government has distinguished itself by its total contempt for anything that could produce economic improvement for the population or the country, but the deterioration it inherited and that its apathy accumulates does nothing other than magnify the situation, as witnessed by the botched handling exemplified in its response during the pandemic. Rather than a coherent plan for modernizing the institutional structure of the health sector, the elimination of popular insurance in Mexico happened at the worst possible moment and without a duly articulated plan of action to replace it. The chaos that it caused was not particularly distinct to that of its predecessors, but its indolence exacerbated the predicament due to the government’s indisposition to act in the face of a critical situation. Lack of investment in basics and their maintenance.

When a (system of) government refuses to prevent these extremes, chaos becomes inevitable. Steven Pinker[iii] says this in an exceedingly clear manner: “Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.” Whoever watched the recent scenes of the Morena elections for its congress will appreciate this in its maximal expression…

                                                                Luis Rubio

Those who play with fire, goes the saying, get burnt. That is how the Mexican government is presently operating regarding the issue of the trade dispute with the U.S. and Canada. Of course, the government seeks to defend its vision of the electricity industry, the grounds for the USTR action, but the president’s natural tendency to politicize everything and to convert it into a wedge issue entails risks that he has clearly not evaluated.

As always occurs between neighboring nations, relations between Mexico and the U.S. entertains dual dynamics: that of the daily reality and that of their political leaders. The reality derives from the constant, growing and frequently conflictive interaction that takes place at every level of the vicinity. It has ever been thus and there is no doubt that it will continue being so in the future: the exchanges move in both directions and each moment is different; suffice to illustrate this with the fact that Mexico was key in sourcing arms to both sides in the U.S. Civil War.

Certainly, it would be possible to improve what exists were the ideal institutional arrangements in place, but dynamism does not depend on the moods of the political leaders; instead, it derives from the true forces of the economy and of the human exchanges. Trump attempted to cancel NAFTA and AMLO would prefer it not to exist, but both had to cope in the face of the inexorable reality.

The conflict of the moment concerns the politics of the current government in matters of electricity. The treaty in force, the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA), establishes that the parties must afford equal treatment to all economic agents, regardless of their nationality. It also impedes modification of the rules of the game without a negotiation taking place, in that the objective of a contract of this nature is precisely that of conferring certainty on the potential investors. In this regard, there is not the least doubt that the Mexican government has been modifying the rules in electricity matters, formally (with the law approved in 2021) as well as in practice, with the extorsion to which the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has submitted private companies, coercing them to cast aside private energy suppliers. What is up for grabs in the procedure initiated by the U.S. government and seconded by the Canadian one is whether Mexico backs down in these practices or is sanctioned through the mechanisms that the trilateral treaty foresees.

The rationale of having negotiated in the nineties and re-negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during the last five years lies in having established the rules of the game that oblige the three governments to abide by procedures that exit and that are known by all. This happened because as soon as commercial liberalization materialized in the eighties, a massive number of commercial clashes was untethered. NAFTA was conceived to avoid those disputes, to facilitate commerce and to make possible bourgeoning productive-investment flows toward Mexico.

NAFTA was born from an understanding between Mexico and the U.S. with respect to the relationship, the future, and their coexistence, a condition necessary to institute a base of trust for two nations that one hundred thirty years ago prior had been at war.  The agreement consisted of the development of a common vision concerning the direction of the incremental interaction that had been coming into being and that was sustained in shared fashion until Trump arrived at the U.S. government and, two years later, AMLO at that of Mexico. Both would have preferred to annul the geography and the reality of the burgeoning exchange.

From the Mexican perspective, the key to the original NAFTA (1994) resided in the implicit political guarantee that the U.S. Government conferred on investors. It did not do this with charitable aims, but instead due to its recognition that U.S. national security would be strengthened by way of a good relationship with a successful and prosperous Mexico.

USMCA no longer enjoys that political element (except for services), therefore a commercial conflict at this moment could be devastating for the Mexican economy.

The disappearance of a common vision has implied the degradation of the mechanisms of interaction between the two countries, the growth of sources of discord between the governments and the increasing indisposition to address their problems in common. The conflict on electricity is potentially major due to three reasons: a) because of the enormous amounts of investment at play; b) because of the transcendence of energy for the long-term growth of the economy; and c) because of the energy transition that the world is undergoing and, in particular, that of the most prominent industry in Mexico, the automotive. If something comes out wrong in that negotiation, these factors could place the stability of the Mexican economy in doubt.

The Mexican government has two options: the ideal would be to take seriously the challenge that this entails devoting itself to negotiating an exit, as it did with the gas pipelines in 2019, before time -or the reality- wins out. The other option, its natural inclination, would imply distracting the public and persevering in its nationalistic rhetoric, literally in the face of the tremendous opportunity that the U.S.–China conflict represents for Mexico. Proceeding via the rhetorical and satirical route would be equivalent to playing with fire.

Unlike the pipeline issue, the point in time of the political cycle and the already unleashed process of presidential succession guarantees an immense volatility that in no way are of benefit to the government and even less so to the country.

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