Luis Rubio

Life has its cycles and the calendar too. A year is about to end and the next one begins: the expectation never ceases to be present in the form of hope and fear, opportunity and possibility. As in other years, I take this moment to quote some of the great thinkers, this time regarding one of the great aspirations of all members of the human race: happiness.*

“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” GK Chesterton, 1905

“One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.” La Rochefoucald, 1664

“Here you are, my dear child, my necklace, my feather, my offspring, my progeny, my blood, my color, my blood elation. Now please understand, please listen, for you came to life, you were born, for our omnipresent lord, the maker, the creator, has sent you here to earth…And now that you already see, that you observe how things are, that there is not contentment, there is not happiness, but that there is torment, there is pain, there is weariness; out of it comes misery, torment and pain. It’s difficult on earth; it is a place of weeping, a place of suffering, where affliction and hardship are common. And as cold, chill wind comes up and passes through. It is truly said that the wind cools the sun’s warmth ro4 people. It is a place of thirst and hunger. That’s just the way it is… But on earth life goes on.”  Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex, 1596

“A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.” George Bernard Shaw, 1903

“I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire.” The old man was surprised at this new species of affliction and knew not what to replay, yet was unwilling to be silent. “Sir,” said he, “if you had seen the miseries of the world, you would know how to value your present state.” “Now,” said the prince, “you have given me something to desire; I shall long to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness.” Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 1759

“Goal Post: 1. Be patient. No matter what.2. Don’t bad-mouth: assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him. 3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble that yours are to you. 4. Expand your sense of the possible. 5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change. 6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself. 7. Tolerate ambiguity. 8. Laugh at yourself frequently. 9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than with who is right. 10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong. 11. Give up blood sports. 12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously. 13. Never lie to anyone for any reason (lies of omission are sometimes exempt). 14. Learn of the needs of those around you and respect them. 15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to redefine your mission and pursue that. 16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun. 17. Praise at least as often as you disparage. 18. Admit your errors freely and soon. 19. Become less suspicious of joy. 20 Understand humility. 21. Remember that love forgives everything. 22. Foster dignity. 23. Love memorably. 24. Love yourself.  25. Endure. I don’t expect the perfect attainment of these principles. However, I post them as a standard of conduct as an adult. Should any of my friends or colleagues catch me violating any of them, bust me.” John Perry Barlow, Principles of Adult Behavior,1977

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back on its own weight… The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do.” William James, 1902

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination,” Immanuel Kant, 1785

“The happiness of society is the end of government.” John Adams, 1776

“It is one of the most saddening things of life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost be certain of making them unhappy.” Thomas Henry Huxley, 1895

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Mahatma Gandhi

“Until death, it is all life.” Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

“There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.” H.L. Mencken, 1920

*All quotes from Lapham’s Quarterly, volume XII, Number 3, Summer, 2019

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 Luis Rubio

“Of all of man’s instruments that is not an extension of the body but of the mind, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book”

Jorge Luis Borges

There are few themes as culminating in public discussion, in Mexico and in the world, as the manner in which to conduct economic affairs. Trump, Brexit and AMLO personify the countercurrent in the era of trade liberation: the emphasis being not on what has been won and the benefits attained, but rather the losses, the losers and the resulting inequality. John Tomasi confronts the phenomenon directly, but with an exceptional focus: in Free Market Fairness he takes a philosophical approach arguing that it is indeed possible to achieve both things: the economic efficiency that supplies the markets with the justice for which the population clamors. His proposal is that it is feasible to couple the arguments of F.A. Hayek, hero of the liberals, with those of John Rawls, hero of those pursuing justice on the part of equality. For Tomasi, democratic legitimacy is only come by when achieved in the presence of social justice and rights to property, the mainstays of each of the philosophical currents.

Noah Rothman writes a text on social justice, entitled Unjust, in which he affirms that the emphasis on social justice in terms of political activity entails an “identitarian” victimhood view that does nothing other than undermine democracy and freedom of expression. Situated within the context of United States politics, in which the identity of persons or groups has become the central factor in question, Rothman advocates for a well-balanced vision in democracy and the search for equity that lead to social mobility. Read in the Mexican context, very distinct from that of the U.S., the book permits visualizing easily employable philosophical guidelines to improve our own domestic debates.

I came by chance upon a relatively old book, on the nature of the Mexican presidency. In “The Man Who Could Everything, Everything, Everything” Juan Espíndola Mata analyzes the myth of the all-powerful presidency. This is a retrospective analysis of the presidency of the PRI era seen from the dysfunctionality that took place in the Fox years. Instead of absolute powers, the author asserts, the president abides within a constant negotiation with interest groups that procured the advance of their objectives. The president, in the nucleus of the system, surely had more power than that which the author concedes, essentially due to the pairing of the party and the presidency itself, but the argument is implacable.

Victor Bulmer-Thomas* argues that the United States is an empire (a term harshly disputed in that country) and that it is on the way to becoming a “normal” nation, which will not be as powerful but that will be at peace with itself.  This is a controversial argument but a powerful one because, in addition to its being sustained upon an thorough historical investigation, it responds to the logic that showed Trump the way to the government, positioning him as one additional symptom of the cause at the very bowels of the war that nation is experiencing with respect to its power, responsibility as a world power and the internal requirements for the solution to daily problems. Good read.

Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman, was a revelation, thanks to Leonardo Curzio. A novelized chronicle of the Soviet Union’s Stalinist era, the content showcases human fallibility, the destructive capacity of an oppressive and incompetent system of government, human relationships subjected to the fears and manipulations of power and an unviable economy, social tragedy catapulted into broad daylight. Nothing like the absence of freedom to evidence human vitality.

Sophia Rosenfeld** attacks one of the most politicized matters of the moment, truth in political life. Conforming to an historical sequence, this author evaluates the statements in the sense that “fake news” is something novel and comes to a conclusion that is of utmost relevance for the world as polarized as that of today: truth does not exist: like democracy, truth is something that is forged consciously and collectively. Only thus will there be “facts” and perspectives that everyone shares and commends. An enormous challenge for modern society, bedazzled by ubiquitous information, instantaneous and always subject to discordant interpretations.

Peter Pomertansev published this year a sequel to his extraordinary book Nothing Is Certain: Everything Is Possible. In that volume, he described the absurdities of his work on Russian television and the manner in which reality was deformed to house the interests of power. In his new work, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, Pomerantsev goes beyond the world of Putin to that to which his first work referred for expanding reality toward the trend that has made the strategy of false news its own, the famous “fake news.” What is extraordinary about the book is that, on contrasting the structure of absolute control of communication in the era of the Soviet dictatorship with the media chaos of our times in which anything goes, the world of today lays itself bare, evidencing itself as something not very distinct from that of those former times: the potential for infinite manipulation to control did not change much, it only acquired other modalities.

*Empire in Retreat, **Democracy and Truth

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Luis Rubio

Politics in the era of the ubiquity of information is about narratives: contrasting visions of the world that exaggerate the differences and attenuate the coincidences, all for the sake of capturing the support of the citizenry and its vote. The essence of politics has not changed, but the speed of the message, the social networks and the confrontation inherent in instantaneous communication produce very different effects from those of the epoch of direct or unidirectional politics, through television. The result is a direct face-off that does not contribute to advancing the objectives that all politicians say they wish to procure, such as peace, security, economic growth and stability.

Over the last four decades, Mexicans have experienced two contrasting narratives: one that exalts the transformation that has produced the structural reforms whose implementation began in the mid-eighties, and the other that reviles the current reality, reproves the reforms and extolls an idyllic past. Between those two narratives exists a reality that the population undergoes daily and that probably entails something of each of those extreme positions, which naturally impacts the perception that the citizenry entertains of politics, of the government and of the future.

The narrative of the reforming success is very clear: reforms allowed for breaking with times of financial crises, stabilized the economy, laid the foundations for an elevated and sustained economy and eliminated inflation as a matter of concern for the population. According to this world vision, integration of the Mexican economy into the international technology, trade and investment circuits has permitted Mexico to become an exporter power, whose modern industry has transformed and converted into one of the most competitive worldwide and one in which all of the personnel associated with this segment of the economy are able to find better paying jobs and with greater benefits.  Entities such as the Mexican states of Querétaro and Aguascalientes are paradigmatic of what a good strategy of development can offer the citizens and the country and shows that, on following the chosen pathway, the country will be consolidated as a robust economy with a democratic political system governed by an all-encompassing Rule of Law.

The narrative of economic, ecological and social chaos highlights the poverty by which the reforms have been accompanied, the lack of economic growth (a mere 2% on average), the insecurity under which the population lives and the poor, uncertain means of livelihood without perks, which characterize the majority of Mexicans. The point of departure of this narrative is the high economic growth that typified the decade of the seventies, the social tranquility experienced and the public security that was the norm. This narrative occupies states such as Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas as paradigms that reveal the worst results of the reforms, the poverty that distinguishes those entities and the inequality that accumulates and that is increasingly obvious in the country. Instead of opportunities and achievements, this narrative has at its fore corruption, insecurity, impunity, and excesses of those in government at all of levels and dimensions. Its proposal is to return to the eras, and the strategies, that rendered possible the steadiness of the old days, which would fortify democracy and citizen participation. The problems started precisely when things deviated from the course with the reforms of the eighties, the very reforms that need to be cancelled to restore the capacity of economic growth and social development.

Each individual will amend and embellish the description of these narratives, but what is important is that, due to their nature, polarization is pursued: for some everything is right, for others everything is wrong. For the former what is consequential is to do more of the same; for the others everything must be changed. Were one to analyze the concrete data, the differences are less stunning than the narratives suggest, but the relevant part is less the narrative -that concentrates all the attention- than the reality of everyday life.

A more objective vision of recent decades would suggest that the Mexican economy demonstrates extraordinary diversity, that there are regions growing  at more than 7% while there are others that are lagging behind; that the greater part of those who are employed live in a state of relative precariousness; that insecurity is not associated with the reforms but instead with the lack of a transformation of the government itself and the political system; and that it is not possible to return to the past, but that more of the same clearly will not resolve anything either. In addition, the county is not moving in the direction of democracy or the Rule of Law. Perhaps of greater import is that Mexico’s problems are real and transcend the narratives that polarize but do not solve anything.

The great success of former President Salinas in his first five years of government was that he was able to achieve a single narrative and one which enabled the population to look ahead to make this narrative a reality. His failure in his sixth year in office had nothing to do with the reforms themselves but caused the confrontation of narratives that polarize and generate mistrust. AMLO would do better by displaying an ability to join with the citizens and bring that exceedingly destructive gap to an end.

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Luis Rubio

The bullets did not do the job. Hugs aren’t working either. Insecurity and violence increase and there is no reasonable diagnosis of the problem nor of how to solve it. A threat by President Trump was enough for those responsible of security to forget about the problem or its terrible consequences for citizens, ever more abused: government officials preferred to wrap themselves in the flag, ignoring even the very fact of the violence. Neither coarse nationalism nor the absence of a strategy will fix the problem.

It is imperative to separate two components of the issue: the American dimension and the violence itself: these are two perspectives that respond to different circumstances, although there may be links between the two. On the American side, the debate about the nature of Mexico’s problems has been going on for decades and has changed over time. For many years, after the Revolution, Americans watched as Mexico stabilized its economy and managed to settle a social and political peace. Then, with the beginning of the era of crises in 1976 and, above all, 1982, the debates there began to use terms such as the “failed state” when referring to Mexico. From the American perspective, the NAFTA negotiation at the beginning of the 1990s was a way to help Mexico for it to address its core problems and take a “great leap” towards development, once and for all.

Two decades later, the debate returned: Mexico did not turn NAFTA into a lever for its integral development; rather, its implementation did not go beyond the transformation of a part of its economy. As much as NAFTA has been extraordinarily successful in consolidating an export platform, it was evident in USs eyes (and for all those who wanted to see the reality) that Mexico had used the NAFTA as a mechanism for not altering the political order or affecting the interests close to the political class. It was in this context that ideas began to be debated on how to force Mexico to eradicate corruption and modify its political-bureaucratic structures. Those debates went nowhere, largely because, for the United States, the consequences of adopting an unsuccessful American strategy in Mexico could easily translate into a sudden mass emigration of Mexicans to their territory. In this sense, the natural propensity of Americans to be careful when acting on Mexican issues (even if this does not always appear obvious to Mexicans) has had the by-product of making it ever easier for Mexico’s most pernicious special interests to strengthen the status.

From the Mexican perspective, American concerns of Mexican corruption or violence can be seen as wrong, naive, ludicrous or interventionist, but that is no reason for Mexicans to pretend that there isn’t a major problem. Mexico suffers from a dysfunctional system of government, growing and intolerable violence and a world of corruption and impunity, all of which have the same origin: a political system designed by the winners of the revolutionary movement to prey and plunder. Instead of transforming itself to be effective in the 21^st Century, the system has incorporated new members, while preserving its core objective: to privilege the powerful in the broadest sense of the term.

While the economy has undergone diverse changes and transformations, some very favorable and others not so much, the world of privileges and corruption remains. It was functional in the thirties of the last century, but it is no longer so, no matter how much the president wants to reinforce it with the renewed concentration of power that he’s advancing. Instead of building a new system of government, the country has been paralyzed in this area for almost a hundred years. Therein lies the origin of the current dysfunctionality and, therefore, of the government’s inability to end the violence.

It is in this context that evils such as those of impunity and corruption remain in place (both components inherent to the post-revolutionary system) and, more to the point, that the government is unable to face its undesirable consequences, such as violence.

It is clear that much of the violence is linked to the drug trafficking business that, at least in a significant proportion, originates in the United States. However, the fact that violence takes place in Mexico and not in our neighbors’ turf constitutes proof that the problem lies in our system of government, since the same phenomenon of drug trafficking in the US does not translate into violence.

The fact that Trump might declare drug gangs to be terrorist organizations would have all kinds of repercussions, but it will not solve the problem of violence in Mexico. Hence, instead of Mexicans wrapping themselves in the flag, it would be much more appropriate to carry out a profound and honest diagnosis of the nature of the problem so that, in such context, decide what should be done and, where warranted, to request the type of support from the US that could be relevant to Mexico.

The problem of violence will not be solved by Americans with legal changes or with drones because these do not attack the causes of the phenomenon. Mexico requires strategy to develop a new system of government capable of dealing with the challenge of violence before the US attempts to impose solutions that will not solve anything, but that could end up dismantling the little that does work well.

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WILSON CENTER – Mexico Institute
Nov 24, 2019,
by Luis Rubio
@lrubiof

As the López Obrador administration ends its first year in office, Mexicans can look back to a period of unrestrained change, mostly to recreate the legal structures of the past. The president has not been shy or modest in his objective to establish strong personal control of all institutions and processes; rather, he moved, step by step, to subordinate the Congress, establish control of the Supreme Court and neutralize all the regulatory entities that were supposed to be autonomous.

The rationale is simple: he believes Mexico was successful back in the 1960s when the president had full control of the political arena, the economy and society in general; by recreating that era he expects to bring back the economic growth, stability and peace that characterized those times. Accomplishing this has meant backtracking on the reforms of energy, education, the tax system and the legal structure in general. With an extremely large series of reforms passed by Congress, many of them constitutional amendments, the president has amassed vast discretionary powers to threaten anyone and everyone.

Not surprisingly, the economy has slowed down. Investors, both local and foreign, distrust a government that is destroying the few checks and balances that had been built over the previous four decades and cannot function in a context of a government with ever more discretionary powers and ever changing rules of the game. Government and business clash on the fundamental rationale that divides them: whereas the president wants, in his words, to subordinate economic decisions to politics (that is, to the government), investment decisions in the 21^st century are based on markets, considerations of efficiency and clear-cut rules of the game. The divide is unbridgeable.

Nothing illustrates the nature of the AMLO administration better than its foreign policy, or lack thereof. The president sees no value in participating in international meetings such as the G20 or in developing close links with nations of interest to Mexico. He refused to receive Chile’s president, Sebastian Piñera, but did invite Argentina’s incoming president, Alberto Fernández, to visit Mexico: he will only deal with his ideological brethren. In contrast with most nations around the world which compete for investors’ interest, López Obrador can do without them.

Despite its popularity, the administration is facing dicey prospects. It’s security policy, based on the notion that if the government does not attack organized criminals they will respond in kind, has floundered in Culiacan. Its energy policy -essentially suspending the reforms of the previous administration by not auctioning any more fields or farmouts- has reduced investment in the sector and entails ever growing subsidies for PEMEX, which the government can ill afford given its rapidly diminishing revenues. All that the government can show a year into its six-year administration is a few casualties of corruption in the form of an imprisoned former secretary in Peña-Nieto’s administration, a fallen minister of the Supreme Court and some other prominent figures in jail. The circus these actions permit help sustain the president’s popularity, but solve nothing: they do not even diminish corruption.

The key to the president’s actions, and of his support, is the profound resentment that many Mexicans, but above all his own coalition, hold against the past, the business community, the United States, the reforms carried out in the past few decades, the freedoms that Mexicans have secured, and corruption. Hate is the major impulse that animates his constituency and the president exploits it relentlessly. The problem is that neither the hate or resentment nor the arbitrariness of the government’s actions on the corruption front are conducive to economic progress or less violence. The president has concentrated power remorselessly, but this has not brought back the positive results of the 1960s.

At some point in time, the lack of delivery on economic promises will begin to undermine the president’s credibility, which will force him to respond. The big question is how he responds then. During his campaign, he famously said that “I always think the same but act according to circumstances.” He has proven to be consistent in the pursuit of his objectives and rejects any call to shift direction. Yet, he has also shown to be pragmatic (as in fixing the crisis his own team created on the issue of the gas pipelines), as well as responsible in the management of the fiscal accounts. These factors are more likely to bring him to a standstill than to overstep and, with that, to provoke a financial crisis. Except that it’s no always obvious what might bring about a sudden change in sentiment within the financial markets.

If one takes a long view of Mexico, none of the conundrums that López Obrador is facing (whether he sees them that way or not) are new. In fact, recognizing the nature of Mexico’s legal system and the weakness of its institutions, previous administrations pursued novel ways to provide certainty for investors while gradually institutionalizing the country’s politics. Thus came NAFTA, which was, and is, the key to Mexico’s long-term stability and economic development, which is why the United States agreed to go for it back in the 1990s.

What differentiates AMLO from his recent predecessors is his conviction that Mexico has to retreat from the reforms and changes of the past four decades, rather than move on towards a different future. He deeply believes Mexico ought to look inwardly and diminish its international links and commitments, starting with those with the United States.

He has just finished one year of extraordinary activity and activism. Five more of the same would bring Mexico back to the stone age.

Opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/year-retreat

 Luis Rubio

Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote that modernity –“the fate of our time”- consists of the advance of rationality and the retreat of the mystery, which he denominates “the disenchantment of the world.” Modernization implied, in his conception, the abandonment of magic in order to incorporate rationality into the making of decisions and the bureaucracy to implement them.

From the Revolution on, the Mexican government advanced the formalization of the political, governmental and bureaucratic structures, rationalizing decision-making and assimilating mechanisms of predictability above all in relation to economic policy making. In this manner there arose institutions such as the Banco de México, the regulatory entities in matters of insurance, securities and, eventually, energy and access to information. The same objective was followed through the negotiation of international treaties and lines of credit, as well as membership in multilateral organizations of diverse types. This entailed a process of institutionalization that from its initiation recognized the transcendence of informing and providing clarity of course to the citizenry as well as to the economic agents. Possessing information and transparent rules of the game builds the trust of the population in making decisions, above all in the era of infinite alternatives.

The objective: to consolidate the development of the economy and guarantee its continuity beyond the normal market highs and lows, changes in governments and unforeseen situations. The premise at the outset was that no government would attempt against what is “rational” in the sense of Weber: permanence and predictability in governmental decisions.

Recent events in economic as well as in security matters in Mexico make it plain that Weberian logic does not form part of the tool set and logic of President López Obrador. From his perspective, the systematic deterioration of the economic indicators and the growing violence in the country are insufficient evidence (and perhaps unnecessary in his view) of the lack of viability of the economic as well as the security strategy. His rationale is another and does not adhere to the traditional cannons of Mexico or the rest of the world.

The new rationality is political and comprises part of the rejection, not only of everything that has been accumulating in legislative matters and in the governmental decisions of the last four decades, but also of the way the world has changed during that same period. For the present government, the changes in matters of economic strategy, that the President calls, in pejorative terms, “the reforms,” were the result of internal decisions owing to ideological considerations and not as a consequence of the changes the world was undergoing, the product of trade liberalization, the transformation of the way of producing and the explosion of information (and its accessibility) all of this due principally to technology. Mexico is a sovereign nation and ought not attach itself to standards alien to its history.

From this perspective, the new rationality that guides governmental decisions breaks dramatically with the recent past, given that the government associates liberalization with corruption, technocrats with elitism and any counterweight with abuse. In this logic, Mexico has not experienced a democratic transformation, but rather a growing disorder that must be controlled. The “old” Constitution should be substituted with a new constitutional assembly which guarantees democracy, understanding the latter as a demarcation of the de facto powers that have only brought suffering, inequality and oppression. Thus, the current government did not win a clean and democratic election, but instead seized power and possesses the mandate and the obligation to transform the country,   implying, to start with, the dismantling of all structures and institutions that mark off and delimit presidential power, thus impeding the consolidation of this new democratic State.

To put it in plain words, the government is not anguishing over the deterioration that characterizes the economy or the distress that the population is undergoing because of the flourishing insecurity. Its “higher” objectives transcend these conservative and elitist gauges. In a word, those who doubt the new rationality or the strategies the government pursues are part of the morally defeated opposition, thus not worthy of any legitimacy whatsoever. It is the government that establishes the rules of the game (such as that prescribing that economic decisions should be subordinated to politics) and, more importantly, it is the president who defines the yardstick by which the results of his actions will be evaluated. With this criterion, measurements such as economic growth, inflation or the number of deaths are inadequate units for determining the degree of advance or retreat of the government. What happens outside of Mexico and the options that citizens or investors have are irrelevant.

No government in the XXI Century can ordain its rules and advance development. It’s one or the other. To date, AMLO has been able to count on the support of the citizens; he has no idea what will hit him when that changes.

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Luis Rubio

According to a tweet that went viral, in the year 2192 the British Prime Minister flies to Brussels to ask for a new extension of the fatal date of the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union.  “No one remembers where that tradition originated, but each year it attracts many tourists from all the confines of the Earth.” The complex negotiation that has characterized these two entities, Britain and the E.U., lends itself to all kinds of derision because it reflects a profound institutionality that has called for the following of steps, procedures, collegiate bodies and parliamentary votes and of the diverse legislative and judicial instances of each of the parties. That institutionality, as the tweet suggests, can be paralyzing, but it possesses the virtue of conferring permanent stability and predictability on daily life and on the decisions of every person and family, in all of their facets, that they make throughout their days.

The constitutional matter is a suggestive example: in Mexico, constitutional changes have been, historically, the sport of the six-year presidential term during which, as anyone could observe in the reforms of the Peña-Nieto administration, the governors competed to be first in attaining the approval of their legislatures in terms of the amendments that the president desired, in order to be in his good graces. The objective was not the purpose of the reform, but rather to endorse the authority of the president. With AMLO, this process has been refined, in that not even the governors are necessary, given the majority that the Morena Party commands in nineteen of the federal entities: a mere instruction emitted is sufficient for approving the disposition issued by the executive branch.

In contrast, in countries with great institutions, a constitutional amendment process is extraordinarily difficult. In Denmark for example, a constitutional amendment requires, first, the approval of Parliament, later a parliamentary election and then the vote of the new Parliament. In addition to the latter, the support is insisted on of at least 40% of the population in a referendum among the entire population in voting age. That is to say, it is a tedious process, lengthy and uncertain, designed precisely so that any constitutional change that is carried out be the product of popular consent and not a partisan, governmental or bureaucratic imposition.

In India, an enormous, relatively poor and extraordinarily complex, but a deeply democratic country, the advance of an legislative bill requires innumerable procedures and political and bureaucratic layers but, when it is approved, it enjoys wide political support, thus legitimacy and permanence. Those structures render it difficult for presidents and prime ministers to act, but they guarantee the stability of the citizenry.

Of course, one part of that series of structures and processes allows the participation of special interests concealed behind the procedures and mechanisms designed to merely protect themselves and those are the ones that President López Obrador wished to eliminate with the massive firings in the ministries at the beginning of his term. However, at least in theory, the structures surrounding the acts of a government in a system of divided government (that is, with separate branches: judiciary, executive and the legislature) are supposed to work as checks and balances to ensure that no one can abuse power or overreach.

In the PRI era, Mexico was always referred to as a highly institutionalized country, a statement deriving from the way that public affairs were conducted, the discipline exhibited by the politicians and the compliance with the procedures. Time went on to prove that the supposed strength of the institutions was a myth. As soon as the hard presidency collapsed, all of its instruments of control, persecution and imposition at its command, adherence to the forms, obedience to orders from on high, the subordination to the presidency of politicians, governors and citizens and, above all, respect for the procedures and formal rules, all disappeared.

From a country that was apparently strictly attached to certain rules of the game (the most relevant of these always the “implicit” ones), Mexico’s proceeded to be a society without rules, without self-discipline and with an infinity of groups and persons willing to employ any method at all to advance their interests and objectives. Lately, the country has gone back to the old system of personalized imposition.

The institutional weakness that characterizes Mexico made possible the great and transcendental reforms between the eighties and 2018, because presidential power, utilizing changeable methods according to the moment and the circumstances, was sufficient to modify the legal regime in ways that Europe and the U.S. would never have been able to achieve. The considerable advantage of the lack of institutional strength was exactly that: the government could act with determination to advance its own projects as well as to respond in the face of exceptional circumstances, such as the crises of some decades ago. In the same fashion, institutional weakness has made it possible to dismantle everything that the current president has wanted to.

Permanence is only guaranteed by solid institutions, the quintessential requisite of civilization and democracy.

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Luis Rubio

“The reality of the myth is the unreality of the country”, wrote Monsiváis, a philosopher of everyday life.  The sixties qualify as mythological in Mexican politics, and more so at the current juncture. The sixties were years of great achievements, but also the seed of the dispute that, from that time, has devoured the country. On its mythological side, the sixties are venerated -in all quarters- as the golden age of growth and stability; on their retrospective side, that decade was characterized by conflict, mostly underground, which from that time consumes national politics.

In the sixties, the country was living through an idyllic moment that no one wanted to end, except that it was buried by the reality. The decade was distinguished by two great circumstances: on the one hand, very high growth rates (nearly 7% annually, in average), and with minimal inflation levels, all of which contributed to the consolidation of an urban middle class and an accelerated social mobility. Not by chance did many refer to the period as the “Mexican miracle.”

However, the flip side of the coin was no less relevant: two events of those ten years showed the limits of the “stabilizing development” model that, from the forties, had bestowed on the country very favorable results. The first of these events heralded economic risks: 1965 was the last year that Mexico exported corn. This might not appear to be a serious problem until one takes a moment and realizes that the entire functioning of the economic model depended on exporting grains and mineral products to finance the importation of machinery and equipment required for import substitution. The fact that there were corn surpluses no longer indicated that the model was coming closer to its expiration date. The reason for this is simple: because of its orography, Mexico had never been a great grain producer.  The economic model required an adjustment that, had it been implemented then, would have accelerated development: the country has demonstrated an infinite capacity to export industrial and agricultural goods and services. That should have been the answer, but it would be twenty years before its political time would come.

The other event was the 1968 Student Movement, which revealed the political limits of the economic model. Although the economy had yielded extraordinary results, many beneficiaries of its social mobility were unsatisfied with an authoritarian political structure that impeded them from expressing themselves and participating in public life.  In addition, the manner in which that movement ended created a new symbol, with enormous consequences for the following decades.

The two circumstances –that of the corn and the Student Movement- became the casus belli of Mexican politics. The economic flank of the government promoted liberalizing measures to initiate a gradual economic transformation, while the political quarter advocated the use of public funds as a means of recovering the high growth levels of the recent past. The politicians won the dispute in the 1970 elections but, by 1982, the government was insolvent, leaving in its wake massive foreign debt, a deep recession and an exceptionally divided society. From that moment on, the economic sector of the government regained control and began to restore a semblance of order, trusting in being able to procure elevated growth levels in this fashion. A few years later, it was evident that it was impossible to reconstruct the sixties and that the only way out was a much more profound reform of the government and of the economy.

Four decades later, the fight continues. The reforms allowed for the restoration of economic stability that created a base for the expeditious growth of exports and generated more productive and better paying jobs. However, what really happened is that the country ended up divided into halves: the half that made the reforms their own, and the half that remained bound to the previous economic model. The former sustains the latter, but the political dynamic in the end engendered the political result of 2018 elections.

What is relevant here is that the Mexican society, through its vote, disapproved of the results of the reforms undertaken from the eighties on, but not necessarily the reforms themselves. I doubt very much that those who voted for a change of course wanted to rid themselves of the jobs generated by exports or by the country’s modern industry. What they did disapprove of, resoundingly, was the so blatantly biased, tantrum-wrought and ineffective way with which public affairs had been conducted, the corruption that, in many cases, accompanied the process and, above all, the huge contrasts experienced by the distinct regions of the country.

Who can object to the presence of ultramodern investments that produce remarkable goods, good jobs and a great wealth of economic spillover? The problem is that it is not possible to change the general trajectory without losing those opportunities. The tessitura in which the government has placed the country gives rise to an unacceptable choice of all or nothing. Mexico needs to eliminate the biases that generate vast inequalities, not the destruction of everything that exists. But everything points in that direction.

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Luis Rubio – Americas Quarterly – November 14, 2019

Mexico
What to Make of AMLO After His Most Turbulent Weeks as President

  How Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has defied expectations – and not necessarily for the better.

MEXICO CITY – Two things appeared certain when Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president of Mexico last July.

First, that he would abandon the paradigm of free markets and democratic transition that began to take shape in the country in the 1980s. And second, that he would have little problem implementing his policy agenda, as he had been able to do as mayor of Mexico City.

After nearly 12 months in office, AMLO’s distaste for liberal economics and the institutional trappings of democracy has been largely borne out. But surprisingly, he has achieved very little progress in pushing his agenda, and has even failed to appease many supporters. Rather than advance by pursuing a carefully crafted strategy, López Obrador continues to open ever more fronts on both domestic and international issues. Security, energy and the offer of political asylum to Bolivia’s deposed former President Evo Morales are just the latest examples. By now it is clear that López Obrador’s presidency will be tumultuous, to say the least.

There is an internal dichotomy in AMLO that has been apparent since his days as mayor. The AMLO who is committed to a regressive agenda coexists alongside a more responsible self, one who will not kill the hen that lays the golden eggs (as seen in his push to secure a new NAFTA deal).

But where AMLO has been a surprise is the actual conduct of his government. He essentially took over the country the day he won the election and has kept a relentless pace ever since. He holds a daily press conference that informs little and mostly serves to speak to his base. Instead of the practicable plan for government he stuck to in Mexico City, as president AMLO has continued to act as a candidate: dogmatic, unapproachable and lacking a plan beyond concentrating power in his own person.

Hardly a day goes by in which López Obrador does not launch an attack on something or someone (the media, the armed forces, the rating agencies, business, opinion leaders, institutions), in the process alienating ever more figures who could otherwise have played a role in supporting his agenda.

The political benefits of his actions may be clear, but the tangible result has been a lack of private investment (which began in 2016 with Trump’s election and continued once AMLO’s successful bid to the presidency became apparent) and an economy inching towards recession. On top of this, the president’s new approach to security (labeled “hugs, not bullets”) has shown serious limitations in at least two recent cases (Culiacán and the murder of the LeBron family). For the first time since he won the presidency, AMLO’s approval has begun to erode: while still high, above the 53% he enjoyed in July 2018, it no longer looks so immovable.

Back to the past

The paradigm shift that Mexico began to undergo in the 1980s, from a government-centered political and economic system to an open trading and democratic regime, was not supported by all the players in that system. Many laggards, particularly on the left of the then-ruling PRI party, rejected liberalizing moves first promoted by former President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), on the grounds that they would put Mexico’s nationalist-revolutionary tradition at risk. Much of that contingent abandoned the PRI in 1987, when Carlos Salinas’ candidacy was announced, and went on to join forces with the Mexican Socialist Party (PSM) to create the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989.

Over time, the two contingents inside the PRD proved incompatible, largely because the former kept on looking through the rear-view mirror, while the traditional left that comprised the core of the former PSM evolved in the direction of a modern social democratic party. López Obrador represents the old leftist wing of the PRI that split away from PRD in 2011 and became Morena, the movement that made it possible for him to win the presidency in 2018.

Critics rightly point out that the paradigm of free markets and democratic politics never truly materialized. While Mexico did privatize hundreds of companies, deregulated many sectors of the economy and liberalized imports and exports, not all sectors were liberalized and some big players in the economy (notably PEMEX and CFE) retained enormous sway in key decision-making processes. Even today, competition in several sectors of the economy remains limited, thus diminishing the potential benefits that a truly open market economic regime could have brought about.

Similarly, political competition remains tightly controlled, and access by wholly new actors is virtually impossible. Despite an extremely professional, competent and proven electoral authority, the left (first the PRD and more recently Morena) has refused to legitimize the system in general. Despite having won the election (and so overwhelmingly), AMLO and his allies act as if some imagined powers that be had finally relented and granted them victory, and not as if they won an open, legitimate and democratic contest.

This inability to recognize that it’s time to govern has been costly. López Obrador has frozen new energy auctions, decapitated most of the (theoretically autonomous) regulatory agencies, allocated contracts of all sorts without transparency, subordinated the legislature and the judiciary, cut successful and popular programs such as a network of privately-organized children’s day care centers, and shifted major components of the budget to fund pet projects (like pensions for the elderly and unemployed youngsters), whose true aim is to create and nurture an electoral clientele for himself. The one thing he has not attacked – in fact, he has been a key factor in advancing it – is the new NAFTA.

Rather than recognizing the need to rethink some of his policies or, at the very least, a better way to advance them, López Obrador keeps relentlessly down his chosen path. He knows he can count on a legal framework that has been deeply reformed to grant the government vast discretionary powers to jail bureaucrats, businessmen and labor representatives, without realizing that the flip side of that coin is that such powers constitute an absolute disincentive to cooperate, invest or save.

Thus, a solitary president pushes on. Where to? That’s the key question: Will AMLO move ahead regardless of the consequences, with the risk of provoking a crisis? Or, once (not if) he runs up against a wall, will he realize the risks he’s running and, finally, start looking for ways to advance more assuredly?

Sometime in 2020, Mexicans, and the world, are likely to know how far AMLO is willing to push.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/what-make-amlo-after-his-most-turbulent-weeks-president

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rubio is chairman of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. He writes a weekly column in newspaper Reforma, and is the author and editor of dozens of books. His most recent book, Unmasked: López Obrador and The End of Make-Believe, was published in July 2019 by the Wilson Center.

Luis Rubio

The cartoon depicts Herman Munster, the abnormal fictional personage of the T.V. series of a half century ago, seated kindly next to a little girl who tells him: “I thought you were a monster, but you’re tender and sensitive,” to which Herman responds, “The thing is that I’m only campaigning for votes.”

Whatever went on before the election of 2018 ended there; now, AMLO is responsible for whatever comes next: a circumstance that is not always benign, for there’s where biases hit the pavement.

No single matter affects the citizenry in such a direct and brutal manner and with such consequences in the long run as security. Families and companies are forced to live with permanent insecurity because the government has been unable to act successfully. A family that has undergone the abduction of a loved one continues to experience it throughout their existence, and this affects their decisions on savings, consumption and behavior. Insecurity acquires political connotations because those responsible for guaranteeing it have failed, and that’s true at the federal, state and municipal level and involves all political parties across the board.

Enterprises and institutions suffer from insecurity in many ways. Part is the result of what those who make them up endure: How can a university investigator in their laboratory, or an employee at a store counter, concentrate on their work if they do not know where their daughter is? Commercial enterprises with a presence on the street experience insecurity especially in the form of extortion and they know that the authority is corrupt or inexistent.

The big companies devote themselves to prevention, assigning immense resources to contracting police officers, guards, security walls, patrol cars that follow delivery trucks and such. It would be infinitely more productive to devote all of those resources to novel productive investments that generate more growth, jobs and opportunities.

Insecurity destroys the most essential part of the human being because, as Umberto Eco wrote, it “kills the possibility of being able to hope.” No country can prosper under a regime of insecurity such as that which has been our fate to live through.

One of the factors that defines the State is the monopoly of force, but the inverse of this is likewise defining: tax collection. This concerns two sides of the same coin: the one responsible for security is also in charge of collecting the funds allocated for defraying expenses for the operation of the government. In both cases, this is about a monopoly, in that if this does not exist because organized crime charges taxes in the form of extorsion, the State ceases to fulfill its raison d’etre.

The Mexican government long ago lost the monopoly of force, thus it does not control the entire territory, it does not impede the bands of thieves from stealing, killing, extorting and kidnapping in all quarters and does not satisfy condition number one of the governmental function: citizen peace and security. The president rejects the scheme that prevailed to combat crime, but his plan is clearly insufficient. To begin with, it concentrates on attempting to hinder organized criminals from recruiting unemployed youths but does not address the essence of security: a functioning government that protects the citizenry, which entails police forces and the judiciary from the bottom up. This cannot be created in one moment, but it will never come about if it’s not started immediately.

A businessman explained his perspective of the problem clearly and directly: the Tax Authority is bent to collect taxes, intimidate the taxpayers and erect obstacles, by means of interminable bureaucratic procedures, to the functioning of economic activity. However, the businessman went on, no one worries about the new “tax” collectors: not those who send out citations but rather those who burn down stores or factories when protection money is not paid. From the taxpayer’s perspective, both are the same: the two collect taxes and extort the taxpayer, whether the latter is a professional, the owner of a company or a simple employee. Whoever does not pay the taxes will have to deal with the Finance Ministry or, in recent years, with the mafias of extortionists who are infinitely more persuasive, besides being lethal.

It’s clear that the issue of security did not start with the Lopez Obrador administration, but the events of Culiacan and the murder of the LeBaron family attest to the fact that its strategy does not match up to the challenge. But, given that the previous strategy was not a paragon of virtue, what’s serious is the government’s rejection to carrying out an honest diagnosis of the true nature of the problem.

I have no doubt but that the main failure of the last decade in this matter has been one of focus and of concept. The essence of security is simple: a) above anything else, the objective is to protect the population, not to confront the criminals; b) security starts from below, on every block and in every neighborhood, and cannot be imposed from the heights of Olympus; c) the federal forces, including the Army, should become central components of the process, but their function is to support the development of local capacities, not to make these forces permanently responsible for security; and d) there is no greater problem nor one accompanied by more wear and tear in terms of a government’s legitimacy than security. If you doubt this, ask Peña.

www.cidac.org
@lrubiof