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.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

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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@lrubiof

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.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof
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.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

Paraphrasing Marx and Engels, a specter haunts the world, the specter of populism. This is a struggle among different models of development and ways of conducting politics. Today two models that embrace economic orthodoxy are head-to-head: the democratic-market model that characterizes most rich nations around the world, with the model of Chinese authoritarian capitalism.  But there is another dispute, that of the political leaders: there are heads of state who follow institutional rules (those which Weber denominated “legal domination”), while others have instituted charismatic profiles, whether of the Left or the Right (Trump, Bolsonaro, Chávez, Erdogan), all of which fall under the rubric of populism. Behind all this is a battle between two radically distinct modes of conceiving of the world and of adapting (or not) to the prevailing international and technological milieu.

The conflict presents itself at two levels: on the one hand, the yearning of innumerable politicians to break with the impediments imposed by the globalized economy and the constriction of the world due to the technological advance. On the other hand, the irrepressible logic of the decentralized production both far and wide, the pervasiveness of information and, especially, the revolution of the expectations deriving from the latter two factors. The key question that every political leader comes up against is whether there is really an option. Margaret Thatcher inaugurated the phase “There is No Alternative” (TINA) to explain the imperative need to reform the British economy. Whether or not one agrees with the philosophy of the so-called “Iron Lady,” the phrase that she employed sums up the nature of the dispute that still depicts today’s world

Ernesto Laclau* wrote that “normally it tends to be left to globalization to justify the TINA dogma and the most common assertation is that the fiscal constrictions that governments confront comprise the sole realistic possibility of a world in which the markets do not permit even the most minimal deviation from the neoliberal orthodoxy.” From this approach, Laclau proposes passing over the republican institutions to transform the reality.

So attractive is this overture that countless political leaders worldwide and of ideologies as diverse as those mentioned previously have attempted to pursue the route of breaking with the institutional framework as proposed by Laclau. Trump’s war cry was “drain the swamp,” a notion not distinct, in a conceptual sense, from what Podemos advocates in Spain or the Kirchners in Argentina, Correa in Ecuador or López Obrador in Mexico have procured.

The problem with voluntarist projects, those in which the ruler defies the orthodoxy and tries to ordain his own preferences and rules, is that these hit a wall, also known as reality. Mexico underwent severe crises in the past century precisely because diverse presidents felt free to do as they pleased. The same would happen were the government to adopt a collision course in the matter of the consultation on electricity that the American government has launched.

The phenomenon has worsened in the knowledge era for two reasons: first, with a couple of exceptions (such as Cuba and North Korea), the world has become integrated due to communications, which has rendered it supremely difficult for a country to abstract itself from the rest of the world. Formerly, when those circumstances did not prevail, presidents celebrated the entire production of automobiles or refined oil products in their nation, without any need to mention the global context. That is impossible today because there no longer are plants that manufacture the totality of a product and, more importantly, the population demands high-quality and immediate satisfiers. The idea that it is possible to ignore what is happening in the rest of the world is unthinkable not because of the pejoratively mentioned neoliberalism, but instead because the electorate no longer tolerates it; contrariwise, it expects answers here and now.

Laclau’s approach and that of his followers is very appealing in political and emotional terms, but all the same it is dysfunctional in the real world. The only certainty that can be stated of the voluntarist projects (those not constrained by the institutions’ strength, as in the case of Trump) is that these have been a disaster regarding economic growth and poverty reduction. Although many of the governing group consider the Venezuelan regimen a success, evidence of the disaster that is that country is overpowering. The rhetoric can be generous, but the reality is absolute.

As Jan-Werner Mueller has argued,** the evidence shows that citizens who sustain voluntarist-populist governments are not a Silent Majority, but rather a Vociferous Minority. Therefore, practically all intents at defying reality in the knowledge era end up badly. Bill Hicks, the late comic and grouch, dreamt of a political party for “people who hate people.” He just couldn’t get them to come together in the same room. The great egoist movement was undone by its central principle. Reality cannot be defied and that is what ends up terminating these unsustainable voluntarisms.

*Hegemonía y estrategia socialista; **The Myth of the Nationalist Resurgence

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Luis Rubio

A Palace of Versailles guide once said that Louis XIV built the palace, Louis XV enjoyed Versailles and Louis XVI paid for it. Mexico is at a stage in which President López Obrador is enjoying the economic and financial structure bequeathed by his predecessors, those damned neoliberals. The key question after the 2024 election is over is how to pay for what’s been done, and for what hasn’t been done, during the current administration to begin constructing something new and functional with an eye to prosperity and development.

In all the governments I have observed, what distinguishes the current presidential term is the absence of a project for the country’s development. Some of the prior administrations’ strategies were too ambitious, others merely ideological; in some what was noteworthy was the absence of ambition, while others were unreal for their unviability. But none lacked a schema oriented toward greater prosperity and better life levels.

For President López Obrador development is achieved virtually by osmosis: his government concentrates all the power and the rest comes to pass automatically. Instead of strategies, investments or legislation, what there has been here is a narrative devoted to nurturing an electoral base and three investment projects that not only are not ambitious but that also do not entertain any strategic sense or for the regions where they have been installed. This is about a political project, that is, one of power, and not one of development.

Beyond the excuse supplied by the pandemic to justify everything not done and undone, the evolution of the current administration that little by little draws closer to its end has been possible thanks to two decades of building institutions that yielded a financial structure for stability, a comfortable debt profile for the treasury, funds and trusteeships for cases of emergency, periods of recession or natural phenomena.

The administrations preceding the present one occupied themselves with strengthening the foundations of economic stability to avoid relapsing into the crises of the past that destroyed everything –families, savings- in their wake. Without those antecedents, the current government would never have been able to divert so many resources that once were committed to the promotion of investment (infrastructure, the generation of electricity, etc.) in the direction of its favorite clienteles. Because although the president holds forth on austerity, the latter does not exist: resources continue to be spent, only now the criterion is electoral and political profitability, not economic development.

Thus, the most generous prospect that can be computed for the future is that, at the end of 2024, only one presidential term would have been lost and nothing more. The most optimistic calculations inform that the economy will return to the 2018 level toward the end of 2024, when the population will have grown by several million Mexicans. And those are the optimistic calculations.

Today the imperative is to place ourselves in time at the first of September, 2024, the next president’s inauguration day, to start to envision the panorama that awaits Mexico, as if that day Louis XVI were to take possession. In addition to depleted coffers, but hopefully public finances not in crisis mode, all of that for having squeezed those finances to the utmost with the disappearance of the stabilization funds and various trusteeships, the country will find itself with a new government without useful instruments and with a great crisis of confidence.

Whoever the president may be, man or woman, in 2024, their options will be very limited for at the least three reasons: first, because no one will enjoy the vast support that the president achieved in 2018 nor will they be able to count on possessing his abilities or history for preserving the base that their predecessor created. None of the obvious precandidates, on both sides of the aisle, enjoys that exceptional situation. Second, the present-day government will have exhausted the entire fiscal space -resources for undertaking projects- which will obligate them to procure novel wellsprings of financing for even the most elementary governmental operations, without even thinking about matters as urgent and imperative as the security of the population.

Finally, the third reason that the options will be strained is the other side of the coin of President López Obrador’s administration: just as he built and nurtured a broad electoral base, he alienated the rest of the population. Instead of uniting, he divided and polarized, exacerbating the environment to the point of provoking impulsive and visceral reactions by those who supported him as well as by those who ended up hating him. The person assuming the Mexican presidency in 2024 will have to deal with that contradiction and start springing into action to build bridges, diminish tensions and develop institutional and sustainable sources of support. As in the old PRI system, the next government will have no alternative other than to reproduce the pendulum of yesteryear: correct the damage and start over.

This will be the main challenge: the great virtue of the NAFTA was that it furnished reliable sources of confidence that transcended the sexennia. That vanished due half to Trump and half to López Obrador. The prodigious task will be to find or erect a new platform that guarantees certainty, blunted by this government so distraught about the immediate (the electoral) but disdainful of the transcendent, development and peace.

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Luis Rubio

Disproportion, or the sin of pride, which the Greeks called hubris, consists of believing oneself to be more than other humans, failing to recognize and trespassing imprudently beyond the limits of our condition, forgetting one’s insuperable finiteness. This disproportion, or lack of moderation, says Aníbal Romero, includes disdain for the costs that the loss of the sense of scale can exact from others, in terms of anguish, pain and disillusion. A government devoted to capriciousness without an iota of concern for the tie-in between penalties and potential benefits is an inexorable example of disproportion.

Propensity toward disproportion is a constant in human nature. In The Iliad, Homer depicts the diverse forms in which Helene, Achilles and other personages lose their sense of reality. That is what occurs every time a government makes decisions according to myths, dogmas or preferences without repairing on the obvious: the resources it uses are not theirs. Governments utilize resources from the taxes they levy on the population; and they are, or should be, accountable to it. This clearly has not been the case of the present government of Mexico.

Governments, driven by their immense size, allocate their resources as they consider best, impacting daily life by commission but also by omission. The current government designed three emblematic projects whose cost should be measured in two ways: first, by the investment itself and the alternatives available; equally important it is indispensable to assess the consequences of the projects. There is no better example than the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA): the cost of constructing it, the cost of destroying the New Mexico City Airport (NAICM), which already entertained a nearly 40% advance, and the cost of having to build a new airport in the future because the combination of the two airports presently in operation, the AIFA and the Mexico City International Airport (AICM), is dysfunctional and, in any event, insufficient.

The government has distinguished itself by its opacity in the management of public investments, so all the available information leads to mere estimates, but published calculations suggest the following: the cost of AIFA was 5 billion dollars; the cost of demolishing the Texcoco Airport, including repayments to bondholders, borders on some 16 billion dollars. In addition to this, as all users of the old airport know, but that remains a secret for the President, is that sooner or later a new airport will be required to replace the present one (AICM) and that the new one will never be the one in Santa Lucía. The new airport will cost at least another 16 billion dollars. In sum, the president’s stunt will turn out to cost some 37 billion dollars.

Something similar happened with the Refinery and the Maya Train. The most recent estimates indicate that the Refinery will cost nearly 18 billion dollars and that the Maya Train will reach an amount of approximately 11 billion dollars. As with the airport, the calculation must be twofold: what the projects will cost and the potential benefits that the latter will come to supply. If current trends in matters of electric automobiles materialize, the best that could be expected would be that a refinery conceived to function for decades (the refinery that Pemex acquired in Texas was constructed more than a century ago), will operate for a maximum of 10 years: from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties. That is, another enormous waste. The Maya Train constitutes a wager yet more rash, in that it does not even communicate the peninsula’s three important cities: it does not touch either Mérida or Campeche.

There are many ways to quantify disproportion, but the fundamental one is that deriving from dogmas, which never underwent any sort of screening process. I don’t know whether the Texcoco Airport was localized in the best place, but I have no doubt that the two airports existing today share the same airspace and therefore, do not add to, but rather subtract: a zero-sum game. All of this was to demonstrate Who Decides Here, as the title indicated of the book that the President placed near his armchair the day he announced the cancellation of the Texcoco airport. It’s all about power. Thanks to the absence of checks and balances, Mexican presidents wield enormous power during their term of office and exhibit a tendency toward the excesses noted herein, but none like the present one.

Arrogance and arbitrariness mix to produce not only excesses, but also devotion to each other, the best measure of hubris, that very Mexican capital sin so costly to the country throughout its history. For many years, today’s President criticized, with full legitimacy, the excessive cost of the bank rescue of the 1990s, estimated at around 12% of the GDP. The cost of his investment projects will tally close to 6% of the economy. The difference is that excessiveness in the past was the product of a poorly managed crisis; this one was intentional and self-inflicted.

President Benito Juárez portrayed beforehand the events that would take place about one hundred and fifty years after death:  “A democratic system and eminently liberal, such as that which rules us, has as its essential base the observance of the law. Not the whims of a sole man, nor the interests of certain classes of society, form its essence. Under a noble and sacred principle, it bestows the most perfect liberty, while repressing and punishing licentiousness… It is therefore evident that in the name of liberty it is never lawful to commit the least abuse”.

www.mexicoevalua.org
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