Wilson Center
  Luis Rubio   March 16, 2022

A referendum is supposed to be about initiatives undertaken by citizens or organizations of society to advance their agendas and garner support from the voters at large. In Mexico, the proposed referendum for next April (a new means of direct democracy that was only approved in 2019 by presidential prodding) was promoted by the president and has much more specific –and largely pernicious– objectives: it is meant to advance his own personal interests and agenda.

The proposed referendum was conceived by the president as part of his objective to dominate and control the country’s politics and agenda and to legitimize his government. In its original version, the idea was to establish a new foundation for the president’s party to remain in power for the long haul, much like the PRI did in its time. As things stand today, it has become not more than a means to enhance the president’s gradually waning popularity.

The law establishes that, for it to be binding, a referendum requires the participation of 40% of registered voters – an impossible feat. The previous similar exercise back in 2021, about whether to prosecute former presidents, attracted less than 7% of voters. Nobody expects much more than that this time around. Regardless, the president’s immediate objective is far simpler: to be able to claim that 95% of those attending voted for him. But there’s more to it than this.

Nothing better illustrates the imbroglio that national politics is presently undergoing than a December 2021 Alarcón comic strip on the so-called “revocation of the mandate” of the president: “We don’t want him to go, but we want to be asked whether we want him to go to say that we don’t want him to go.” The objectives of the president in promoting the referendum are transparent, but that does not make the process devoid of deception. The original thrust was to give citizens the possibility to vote for the president to resign; the actual wording that citizens will vote on reaffirms the president’s tenure, making impeachment impossible.

There are two independent dynamics advancing around this alleged citizen feast. One is the strategy being advanced by the president’s allies to convince as many voters as possible to show up on election day. The other one is taking place within the cohort that supports the president. In its attempt to increase popular participation on referendum day, the former promotes the illusion that the referendum makes it possible to force the president to resign. The latter aims to make certain that the beneficiaries of the president’s largesse (monthly cash transfers to his base) show up to vote. The ultimate objective is to raise the threshold of voting as much as possible.

Back in 2018, Lopez Obrador won the election with 53% of the vote. After that, his popularity reached 67%, but has since declined to 54% because of the exposure of several cases of potential corruption by the president’s brothers and son. As a result, the referendum has recently become much more than a tool to re-legitimize his rule: it has become his survival strategy. Today, nothing is more important to him than the referendum; for the president, everything hinges on the result.

Nobody, starting with the president, expects the referendum to change the status quo. His true aim is to gain an edge in the polls and to exploit his (alleged) victory to reload his popularity. Regardless of the actual outcome, the president will celebrate that the majority of voters approved of his presidency. He will repeat this over and over, even while most citizens, starting with those that refuse to participate in what many see as a charade, will have stayed out. Should the outcome be truly extraordinary in the number of participants, he may launch a frontal assault against the National Electoral Institute (INE) to reestablish executive control of elections, like in the old PRI times. As Stalin is supposed to have said, what matters is not who votes, but who will count the ballots. Retaining power beyond the current presidential term is the critical agenda of the president’s hardline advisors and supporters and the referendum is a key means to accomplish that.

Beyond the narrative and its daily expression in the form of a press conference, the president is experiencing the avatars of declining control, an inevitable trait of all governments as they advance through the second half of their administration. The real question heretofore is how negative the slope will be. The steeper the decline, the more likely Mexicans will experience a true competition for presidential succession; alternatively, if the government succeeds in maintaining a semblance of stability and order, the easier for him to nominate a successor and control the outcome. A truly fluid process.

Were the referendum to turn into an actual exercise in citizen participation, the competition would become far more vivid. So far, it has been Morena and its organizations that have been promoting the vote. However, many other organizations, most of them opposed to the president’s policies, have become quite active in attempting to convince them that a presidential defeat is actually possible. Hence, the competition will surely linger.

For an avowed student of history, President Lopez Obrador never understood Napoleon’s maxim that “to get power you need to display absolute pettiness. To exercise power, you need to show true greatness.” Reaching out to those who did not vote for him has not been part of his equation. Thus, the referendum is a perfect example of his persistent pettiness, for his objective has nothing to do with building citizenry, leading a true transformation of the country’s politics or improving the peoples’ livelihood, but with his unflinching desire to increase his power and impose himself on the half or Mexicans that do not follow him blindly.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/mis-referendum

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

Luis Rubio

Mexicans longed for -such was the spirit of the moment thirty years ago and again in 2018- a successful country, developed, more equal and without the corruption that corrodes everything. But they were never willing to do what was necessary to achieve those aspirations. The result was to be expected: many promises, great expectations, followed by enormous disillusionments and their consequent political impacts.

Reform or transform, the two verbs employed to promote changes in the structure of the economy, the society, and Mexican politics during the last decades, mean the same thing:  modify structures to procure a better social and economic performance. What exists is changed to build something better. However, what happens when those changes are inadequate, insufficient, erroneous, contradictory or non-existent?

This is the history of Mexico in the last decades and now it is repeating itself, but inversely: formerly attempting to construct something new, now seeking to restore what there was before. The easy part is to blame this or that on what was done in the past or what is being done now, but the reality is that Mexico has for decades been subject to experimentation without the commitment (or even the real intention) or carrying out those reforms or the present “transformation” in integral fashion.

The countries that have executed flourishing transformations are characterized by political negotiations -among the politicians who represent the society and their diverse interests- to define and agree upon the final objective, and the costs they are disposed to assume.  The case of Spain is exceedingly eloquent: the famous debates of Felipe González during his years as leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) show how he faced his counterparts head on to define objectives, arrive at solutions, and attend to the consequences of these. Once the political negotiation was resolved, the “technicians” were put in charge of implementation, the way already paved.

In Mexico the process was exactly the opposite: here the objectives and strategies were defined by the technicians and then the politicians, lacking any incentive to cooperate, had to deal with the consequences. Yet more importantly, though it may seem paradoxical, that manner of proceeding limited the reach of the proposed reforms because the technicians themselves adjusted them to the political realities that they perceived. That is, instead of subjecting the transformation that they envisioned to broad political negotiation, they resorted to the circus stunt of preserving the status quo (maintaining the political system in form and the party in power) while the structures of the economy were altered, with evident impacts on the social order.

In this context, it is not by chance that in Spain a democracy was consolidated while the economy was being transformed, while Mexicans ended up with a split economy (modern and old, exporter and protected, productive and unproductive) and a political system in permanent strife. Additionally, Spain is not exceptional: there are multiple nations in Asia, South America and Europe that have carried out sensitive transformations in an integral way.

President López Obrador has been a stubborn critic of the reforms initiated after the 1982 economic collapse, but his own proposal, beyond his moral streak (attack corruption, poverty and inequality), suffers from the same transgression as that of his very indefatigable predecessors: he tries to impose it relentlessly, without discussion and, in the best of cases, with rigged surveys, and an interminable gift of gab designed to hush up a most incommensurate reality. Worse still, in contrast with the “neoliberals” he so revels in berating, on eliminating the entire technical capacity the government used to possess there can be no advancement of projects susceptible of generating income, wealth or jobs.

Looking back, past the scope of individuals and political parties, the results produced by governmental management since the end of the sixties to date are atrocious. Certainly, advances in various rubrics are impacting (and AMLO himself benefits from the financial stability as well as from the vitality of the export sector), but it is equally certain that an immense portion of the population does not sense improvement, above all in contrast with the expectations and promises accompanying those reforms (former and present).

López Obrador delights in beleaguering his predecessors, but before the cock crows, he will find himself on the other side of the podium with infinitely fewer valuable results (in fact, the majority of these negative) with which to defend himself.  Suffice to observe the corruption typifying his government, the burgeoning poverty and the incessant insecurity. Worst of all for him would be a scenario in which whoever succeeds him were to persist in the tactic of confrontation: confrontation with him.

The question now is what is it that is required to get out of the hole in which Mexicans find themselves and the one that the president continues to dig deeper one a.m. press conference after another. AMLO built his career by enlivening and exploiting social resentment which, while containing and diminishing the risk of a social explosion, has done nothing, aside from his narrative, to channel that capacity of mobilization toward the transformation of the national structures to achieve a more vigorous and equitable economy. No one, beginning with the president himself, should harbor the expectation of a promising future.

www.mexicoevalua.org
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 Luis Rubio

In 2014, when Russia invaded and took control of the Crimean Peninsula, President Obama’s reaction was that this is “so 19th century” and no longer done in the 21st. Everything indicates that this memorandum did not reach the Kremlin. The invasion of Ukraine, of which Crimea was then a part, shows that geopolitics is as alive as ever. Nations are moved by interests, not by ideology, a memorandum that has not reached Mexico’s national palace either.

Behind the invasion of Ukraine there are two elements: one is the strategy of the West (the United States and Europe) throughout the decades after the end of the cold war; and the other is Russia’s ambition to restore its sources of strategic depth. For many years, US policy focused on distancing the then Soviet Union from China, with the aim of preventing the other two major world powers from approaching each other. However, starting in the 1990s, this strategy was abandoned less for clarity of direction than for the inertia generated by the victory of the West over the former communist power.

What the West did not contemplate was the impact that this would have on Russia, a nation that, under the leadership of Putin, has devoted itself to recreating its zone of influence. In 2008 it invaded part of Georgia, in 2014 it took Crimea, in 2020 it forced an electoral result in Belarus, which was followed by Nagorno-Karabakh and, more recently, it restored peace in Kazakhstan, remaining as the guarantor of internal order. The strategy is evident, leaving only two weak flanks: Ukraine and the Baltics. Putin has employed a variety of means, not all of them violent, to achieve his goal. The invasion of Ukraine -direct action and without proxies- could well change the course of the world because now no one can ignore its implications.

The reverberations of Ukraine are beginning to be felt in immediate indicators, such as the prices of raw materials, particularly oil, because that region is especially relevant in this matter, and grains, and, eventually, in the growth rates of the economies most affected, especially in Europe. But the greatest impact of this intervention will foreseeably be felt in the return of the zones of influence in the world, a phenomenon that had already been taking shape in the South China Sea and around Russia. The one that is missing, and the one that affects Mexico, is the Western Hemisphere.

The end of the cold war was interpreted very differently in Russia and in the West. Although history could have been different (newspapers, magazines and social media these days are saturated with lamentations to this effect), the tangible fact is that instead of converging, the West and Russia moved in opposite directions. Beyond recriminations, some valid others not, the West took advantage of the end of the cold war to focus on improving the lives of its citizens, assuming that Russia was nothing more than, in the words of a famous politician, “a gas station with nuclear weapons.” Well, now it turns out that this gas station is forcing the West out of its lethargy and that has fundamental implications for Mexico.

In the 1980s, just as the cold war was winding down, Mexico chose to approach the United States to solve its economic problems. Contrary to the prediction of the catastrophists, the rapprochement gave Mexico enormous freedoms in terms of foreign policy because NAFTA constituted an agreement on the essence of the relationship, a shared vision of the future. The point was not to agree on each and every issue, but to commit to resolving them so that closeness would confer security to the Americans and development to Mexico.

In terms of development, the scheme worked less well than desired because Mexico did not carry out the internal transformation that this would have required; however, in terms of the bilateral relationship, perhaps the most complex border in the world, problems were resolved and both governments did what was necessary to avoid unnecessary conflicts.

Two things have changed. One is called Trump and the other López Obrador. Trump violated the essence of the understanding of 1988 in two ways: one, attacking Mexico and blaming it for his country’s problems; and the other, by link issues (migration vs. exports) he violated the explicit agreement never to do that.

López Obrador was key in the process of ratifying the TMEC, but his vision is clearly opposed to such closeness. Step by step, he has distanced Mexico from American priorities and, like the kid who challenges his teacher, he flirts with China and Russia as if it were a game.

In recent weeks, the Americans have abandoned their obvious decision not to respond to López Obrador and have begun to define their “red lines” clearly and precisely, most of these aimed at forcing Mexico to avoid further internal deterioration. Putin’s actions can only accelerate this process because the US will once again begin to see the world with a geopolitical logic, where Mexico is in the front row. The Mexican government no longer has much room to maneuver, especially if it wants to protect what little is left of economic growth, all linked to exports to the US.

www.mexicoevalua.org
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Luis Rubio

The catastrophe to come was ever more evident. Errors and losses accumulated, the destruction was uncontainable and the end was imminent, yet no one rebelled. The population backed the government to the end, though this would imply total destruction. Thus begins the book of Ian Kershaw entitled The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944-45. The historian relates the last months of the government of Hitler, a tragic moment at which the Soviet and American troops advanced systematically from opposite sides, the bombings destroyed entire cities, devastating apartments and iconic buildings, leaving the population in the street. The rational thing to do for the German government would have been to begin negotiations for a conditional surrender, but it wasn’t like that: the obsession with not reproducing prior historical moments (Germany’s surrender in 1918) led to total collapse. The relevance of this anecdote lies in that it was not only the government that that was obsessed: the population (with natural exceptions) was hand in glove with its government and not willing to think differently.

What renders this fascinating and tragic story relevant, and the conclusion at which Kershaw arrives, is that the population had been blinded to the surrounding reality because of its obsessive devotion to the leader. Nothing could make them grasp an alternative even if that meant the physical destruction of the cities or of their living conditions. The charisma was so powerful that no one seemed capable of thinking for themselves, of recognizing how dramatic the situation was, understanding the consequences of their actions throughout the war or realizing the massive disaster that the government and its messianic project had been.

Mexico is not Nazi Germany nor is the president Hitler, but there is an obvious similarity in the manner in which a certain part of the Mexican population follows López Obrador blindly and refuses to recognize that the deterioration is growing, and the absence of solutions is crystal-clear. The charisma of the president has permitted him to build a narrative that (so far) dominates the political panorama, controls the public discussion, holds in distain any critical posture or alternative. The problem, which will be increasingly apparent as the inexorable political cycle advances, is that people do not live by words alone.

The success of the narrative, which is also reflected in the president’s popularity, will not be sufficient to compensate for the absence of investment, jobs or opportunities. Without doubt, the strategy of social transfers aids in solidifying the credibility of the government, given that the latter represents a source of sustenance that is of utmost importance for a massive portion of the population. However, there are two factors that suggest that the strength of the charisma in Mexico’s case is very different from that described previously. First and foremost, after a decade during which the migration of Mexicans to the United States was minimal, in this last year it has literally exploded, amassing hundreds of thousands of aspirants to cross the Rio Grande in order to incorporate themselves into the U.S. workforce. Those individuals are going because they do not see opportunities in Mexico. Receiving a “support”, as the president terms it, is very nice, but does not compensate for the lack of economic growth, the only way that poverty can be reduced in a definitive manner. People are voting with their feet.

The other factor is that Mexicans have withstood decades of unkept promises, governments of diverse stripes that promise nirvana, only to end up with business as usual. All those governments offered solutions that were, nearly always, unfulfillable, and the population understands it thus. The handouts that a family receives are always welcome, but the recipients of   this largesse know that it is in essence a mere exchange of favors, a process that is repeated every six years: the names and the methods vary, but however charismatic the figure, that same population that discerns so few options in their daily lives knows that someone else will come to offer more funhouse mirrors, reinitiating the cycle once more.

None of this diminishes the extraordinary capacity of the president to manipulate perceptions and expectations, hence his popularity indexes, but for decades Mexicans have been observing the same phenomenon and there is no reason to expect something different this time around. Of course, there are many imponderables along the road that will determine how this all ends, aspects concerning the economic performance (especially the exchange rate), the appearance (or not) of some alternative figure outside the presidential entourage, and the ability of the president himself to avoid greater fragmentation in the Morena party. The coin is in the air.

The story that Kershaw tells is terrorizing because of the suffering, fear and irrationality that dominates the thought processes not of the leaderships (who understood perfectly well what was coming) but also of the population in general in the face of the certain defeat. No one had the capacity nor the desire to drive a change of course to evade a catastrophe. To follow the leader blindly was its nodal characteristic and determined how all ended. With luck, the nature of the Mexican and a long history of shattered expectations, will avert a catastrophe, but nothing will diminish the extraordinary costs of a government that knew how to foment the conflict but not to resolve the problems or create conditions for progress.

www.mexicoevalua.org
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Luis Rubio

“The curse of man, and the cause of his worst woes, wrote HL Mencken, is his stupendous capability for believing the incredible. He is forever embracing delusions, and each new one is more preposterous than all that have gone before.” That’s what Mexican politics seems like these days.

The great question with an eye toward 2024 is to what degree will the social base of the president and his popularity be relevant. Though it is not the sole pertinent variable, its transcendence is more than evident.

Three factors appear to be true. First, to date there has not been a single individual who agglutinates the opposition. This variable is key because the president dominates the stage, as if he were the only actor, scarcely complemented (or distracted) by the pre-candidates in his own stable. Although there are some individuals and potential candidates who occasionally show their face, none has been able to capture the imagination of the electorate nor who has come to represent a salient point of competition (or confrontation) for the presidential rhetoric. Time will shape potential options, but only one recognizable and accepted by the wide-reaching electorate would be prone to altering the current vectors of national politics.

Second certainty: popularity is not transferred. The surveys demonstrate that the president’s popularity is not linked to traditional gauges, such as economic growth, which benefits him. But this has the effect of isolating him from day-to-day life, including the fate of his candidates, which could exert an effect on what happens in 2024. One election after another has shown that the party of the president and its candidates wins or loses due more to the mobilization capacity of the Morena party (and of the threatened governors) than to the popularity of the president; where the (diminished) opposition has achieved mobilizing the electorate, Morena has confronted greater rivalry. But where it has lost has been to a greater extent the product of the electorate itself than that of any mobilization.

And, third certainty, the president is a communications genius and has procured that his narrative dominates public discourse and discussion in all orders of Mexican politics. However, as Emilio Lezama fittingly argues, everything has its consequences: “from the pinnacle of political power, AMLO has wrested a convincing narrative that he is not the power, but instead the spokesperson for the general struggle against the ‘true power’… the president has maintained his popularity but has lost a historic opportunity to transform the country. His confrontation with institutions and public personages empowers him but weaken the State. In the final analysis, that is one of the great differences between Lázaro Cárdenas and AMLO, the former employed his coming into power to transform the country and the latter to nurture his popularity.”

The narrative of AMLO has triumphed, but he has done this at the price of his project of national transformation; the president’s success in monopolizing the narrative has come at the cost of forfeiting the advance of his agenda. The president has also distanced himself from his government and Morena, to the degree that on more than one occasion he threatened to withdraw from his party. That distance also enriches his popularity and creates a peculiar phenomenon that will moreover be accompanied by its own consequences: in Fidel’s Cuba, the suffering of the population was legendary because his revolution did not translate into more production, better services or products or a better quality of life. But the Cubans did not blame Fidel Castro: “they don’t tell Fidel how things are, they fool him,” “if Fidel only knew.” That is, the fault was of the government, not the president’s, his strategy, or his poor decisions. Perhaps this explains the enormous and bourgeoning gap between the popularity of the president and that of his government.

Each of these factors obeys its own dynamic, but the totality furnishes a panorama that is increasingly more complex and simultaneously clarifying. The country lives under the spell of a narrative that exalts accumulated resentment and deposits it in the limelight as the political factor that is concurrently the mobilizer of the social base, but also the paralyzer of the economy. One feeds the other, limiting the potential for the country´s development and, paradoxically, impeding the articulation of policies likely to resolve the causes of the inequality and resentment. The strategy of political confrontation is in the end very useful for boosting a person’s profile, but not for improving life levels or the possibility of achieving it.

Nothing better illustrates the imbroglio that national politics is presently undergoing than a December 2021 Alarcón comic strip on the so-called “revocation of the mandate” of the president: “We don’t want him to go, but we want to be asked whether we want him to go to say that we don’t want him to go.” The objectives of the president in promoting the referendum are transparent, but not for that reason does it not end up as a mere deception. Yet another.

The panorama is clear; the country demands a contest to determine its future, a debate which establishes the options going forward, forces clear decisions because the current lack of definition does nothing other than deteriorate the present and cancel out the future. The way out will not come from the spell, but rather from the debate -and the evidence- that unmasks it. While that does not happen, everything will continue in limbo.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

1982 was a watershed in Mexican political life. For one part of society, that year’s financial crisis constituted an unequivocal sign of the unviability and, in fact, of the collapse of the economic model that the country had followed at least since 1970. For others, during that period the highest economic-growth rates had been reached in history and, had it not been for the excesses on the financial front, the country could have continued along that pathway in permanent fashion. That discussion is still in force because therein lies the heart of the strategy that urges President López Obrador on.

For the president, the problems that the country experiences are the product of the reforms embarked upon from 1982:  from his perspective, those reforms derived from an erroneous diagnosis, thus creating the reality of inequality and corruption, which he turned into his standard bearer to win the presidency. What were for some attempts at a solution, for others were the cause of the dilemmas of today.

That diagnostic dispute has been the essence of national politics for nearly four decades and diverse presidential candidates along the route represented contrasting opinions on the trajectory in each electoral vote-casting. A crucial issue in that confrontation of views is whether the 2018 election was the product of a change of perception by most of the electorate with respect to the road the country should pursue. Another no less relevant is whether the current government brings Mexico closer to a solution of the domestic problematic, beginning with the evils that the president himself calls central, specifically corruption, poverty and inequality.

Of course, no one truly knows what motivates each voter when expressing their electoral preference. However, the evidence suggests that there were at least three factors that were definitive in the most recent presidential result: the perception of the corruption of the outgoing administration; being fed up with the lack of results (above all compared with expectations) in terms of growth, social mobility and general well-being; and finally, manipulation of the conditions of competition during the campaign period on judicially giving chase to a candidate and impeding the other from an equitable performance.

A factor that adds another dimension to the time of that election is that of the nature of the reforms that Peña Nieto undertook. Until the arrival of that president no government had dared to recast the three sacrosanct articles of the constitution so intensely and even radically: Peña not only disrupted the three (Article 3 on education; Article 27 on energy; and Article 123 on labor), but also did so without building a coalition with the relevant political supports behind each of these reforms to attenuate the opposition that existed (open or underground), nor did he erect a political and cultural scaffold that would sustain them. That is, he ignored the need to build support for those reforms and obviated all political action despite their enormously ambitious and politically risky nature. Therefore, the innumerable interests affected were not considered or mollified. Many of these then did nothing other than, as the Japanese proverb says, “sit by the river long enough to see their enemy’s body float by.”

If to all this one adds the enormous -and evident- corruption generally accompanying that administration, everything that was lacking was a fuse that would turn that moment into a politico-electoral opportunity.  And that fuse was supplied by then-candidate López Obrador, who found himself at the optimal point in time and circumstance to take advantage of it. One needs to go no further than to observe the extraordinary coalition that he rallied under the auspices of the Morena Party to see many of those vested interests affected by Peña watching the enemy float by…

Whatever the comprehensive explanation of what happened in 2018, what is not up for discussion is that President López Obrador is convinced of the need to return to the past during which things, from his perspective, worked well. His entire focus is on the dismantling of everything reformed since 1983, for the sake of recreating the seventies, with the sole exception of minding the fiscal accounts.

In the presidential vision, there is no recognition of how much the world has changed since the seventies or, especially, of the exceptional degree of complexity that characterizes the Mexican economy of today. Nor has there been learning, further than that in the fiscal arena, of the nature of the problems confronting the country today, or of the features of the digital world of the XXI century.

Furthermore, there is not the least intention of enlisting the population in his project. Thus, his future will not be distinct from that of Peña, even if the causes are.

Lord Acton, an English politician and historian of the XIX century, wrote that the objective of a nation and its citizenry should be “to be governed not by the Past, but by the knowledge of the Past – different things.” For President López Obrador no such distinction exists: aside from his clear acknowledgment of the financial immoderation of the seventies, his objective is the recreation of that past just as it was. Much rhetoric but too little learning.

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Luis Rubio

The objectives that defined the agenda and electoral proposal of now President López Obrador are THE problems of Mexico: poverty, corruption, inequality and insufficient growth. The strategies to defeat these wrongs can be argued, but  no one can dispute their transcendence in today’s national reality. The true dilemma lies elsewhere: it concerns structural and systemic problems that must be understood in their dimension because, contrariwise, the president -and the country- will be in pursuit of nothing more than another mirage. Another of the many that accumulate at each morning presidential-press-conference.

“Many of the problems are systemic, says Charles Murray in his new book,* but they will not be solved by going after their appearance. They will be solved, or ameliorated, by going after systemic educational problems, systemic law enforcement problems, systemic employment problems.” That is, instead of claiming that a better teacher or a better textbook is going to transform the system of education (or the equivalent in matters of Rule of Law), the only way to achieve the sought-after transformation is recognizing its structural nature and conceiving public policies expressly designed for such a purpose.

In Mexico, the latter implies beginning with the objectives of the educational system, which were never about the education of the population, equalizing opportunities, or training for life. Education in the post-Revolutionary era was always an instrument of political action oriented toward control of the citizenry and manipulating their way of thinking to construct aideological hegemony. Rather than it being a transformative factor, education was always conceived for control, due to which it not only tolerated the growth of powerful teachers’ unions, but this also was an express objective of corporativist Mexico. Just as procuring control of industrial-sector workers, control of teachers and subordination of the populace was sought through an educational system tailored with that objective in mind. In this, the Mexico of the XX century was much more like the old Soviet Union than the rest of the Latin-American nations and nothing more contrasting with the emphasis adopted by the Asian nations to convert education into the transformative factor of their societies.

In Asia, especially in countries such as Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, education became the transformative instrument of their societies. Nations without great natural resources, all of them viewed education as the means through which they could raise the productivity of their economies, improve the incomes of their populations, and enter triumphantly into the developed world. It is not by chance that the second wave of governments dedicated to the same objective -like China and Vietnam- have regarded education as the key element in their economic project. The rapid rise in their per-capita rates of income speaks for itself.

Try as the diverse educational reforms from the nineties up to those of the Peña government might, the tangible fact, measured by results, is that the country remains stagnant in this matter. Now, with a president who thinks that the sole legitimate objective of a government is political, -that is, ignoring any technological or analytical consideration- Mexico has returned to the logic of the seventies in which the express purpose of education (not merely de facto) is control of the citizenry. Moved by the notion of throwing overboard anything that does not contribute to the concentration of power and the subordination of everything and everyone to the president, the current government threatens to remit thecountry to neolithic political post-Revolutionary times.

Why educate Mexicans if all that is needed to employ Colonial-era technologies is, at most, basic education? In other words, instead of bringing about the elevation of the population’s income levels and their opportunities to make it in life, starting with the most impoverished, the government of President López Obrador is in the quest of equalizing down: for everyone to be poor. That may not be its avowed objective, but it is the one toward which its policies are advancing, and its result will be decades of lagging behind, in addition to amassed resentments that will do nothing other than complicate the panorama. Additionally, this is the reason for an enormous growth in the number of Mexicans migrating to the United States.Instead of pursuing the development of Mexico, the aim appears to be having a hand in the development of our neighbors.

Inequality and poverty are a palpable reality, the product of an entire system devoted to preserving those circumstances. Even the most ambitious governments in developmental matters omitted the attacking of structural problems -social, political, petty fiefdoms- the daily bread in the lives of most Mexicans. It is paradoxical, but above all pathetic, that the most radical government in its rhetoric in these affairs is also the most reactionary, one that will contribute most over the last half century to increasing poverty, inequality and, why not say it, corruption. Life is full of surprises.

*Facing Reality

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