Luis Rubio

New year, year of presidential election: an amalgam of opportunities, but also of risks that no robust country should have to live through. Dual circumstances intertwine the opportunities and risks in a most tangible manner: on the one hand, although there have been enormous advances on multiple fronts, the problems continue to pile up and many, perhaps the majority, are disregarded, as if they did not exist. On the other hand, the power that a Mexican president amasses in his own right remains so vast that the person himself comprises the steadfastness and stability factor, or, contrariwise, that of risk and uncertainty. Thus begins Anno Domini 2018.

The headway that has been made is no small thing.  To start with, in the last twenty years we have procured that votes count and votes are counted, no minor accomplishment after seventy years of ballot-box fraud. Of course, the latter has not disappeared and the adaptive capacity of the old operators is impressive: over the last couple of years the citizens have witnessed the development of a strategy that could be dubbed “Louis XV”, that is, “After me the deluge:” the PRI won difficult elections at an exorbitant price in monies as well as in credibility. Time will tell whether this way of shooting marbles (in contrast with chess, which requires a strategy) brings with it benefits or damages, but when the measure of things is to win and not progress, the result speaks volumes.

In the economic arena, over the last decades Mexico went from a low-productivity economy, with a propensity for interminable crises, low salaries and few satisfying factors, to a thriving economy that, while far from solving the problems of the south of the country, offers a potential for development that was unthinkable in the past. The nation today boasts opportunities that were elusive before, the citizenry has become demanding and the government has no recourse other than responding or losing. Some administrations attempted to respond, others, like the one about to end, opted for losing but, in both cases, these were conscious decisions.

It is easy to criticize everything that has not been done and, doubtlessly, if one looks forward, the complexity of what is to come seems insurmountable. Problems that are the product of political immobility and of the disinterest of those in government (those in charge and those aspiring to be) are so obvious that it is not difficult to explain the currently reigning pessimism, to which one may add the flagrant corruption and impunity –and no one in the political spectrum is safe.

But the flip side of the coin is also true: if one looks back, the change that the country has undergone in levels of life, industrial competitiveness, longevity, the health system, balance of payments and a lengthy etcetera is impacting. The buildings, businesses, scholarships and opportunities materializing every day speak for themselves. Mexico cannot say that it has ventured into civilization, but it has clearly made progress in that direction.

Much is lacking and is also obvious: Mexico still depends on the decisions of a compact group that entertains an excess of arrogance and absolute impunity. That arbitrariness leads to the utilization of the resources of the State -such as the tax and the security institutions- for political espionage, using scare tactics on businesspeople or intimidating the citizens. While Trump seeks change without attaining it in nearly all cases, Mexican presidents possess such infinite and discretionary attributions that no Mexican can feel safe. The inherent risk concerning the person who wins the elections next July is so great that all of Mexico is holding its breath, whatever their choice of party or candidate. No serious nation can live through similar processes every six years and pretend that development is possible.

There are two types of challenges: those that can be termed “technical” and those referring to the power structure. The technical challenges are known and, in general, undisputed: the ineffectiveness of the monstrous parastatal companies, the insufficient and dreadful quality of the infrastructure, the inexistence of an educative system fit for the knowledge era, and everything related with poor regulations, bureaucratic excesses, the allocation of fiscal resources and the lack of mechanisms to make civil servants and politicians accountable on funds furnished by the citizenry through their taxes.

While the technical challenges can be defined, those associated with power are more convoluted and explain both the paralysis as well as why not even the technical issues are attended to. The power structure in the country is devoted to safeguarding the game preserves of benefits and privileges, and to impeding initiatives for raising productivity, facilitating the access of the population to decisions or, even, that elemental things improve such as the educative system. Whoever wins the election, the problem is the same: the system of privilege that controls everything and that, in consequence, drives the sense of unease as well as the anti-systemic factions.

As Womack put it, “It would be blind sight to hide the obvious, that contemporary Mexico demands profound and responsible reorganization, a reorganization that conducts a cleansing of all the ends of the knot, and not only one”.

Happy New Year!

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  Luis Rubio
NEXOS – January 2018

For a long time it was possible to imagine that the politico-economic transition that Mexicans have experienced would lead to a new level of civilization and development. There was no lack of reasons to think this: while it was evident that the changes and reforms required to make it to the other side of the river were not being carried out, at the onset of the nineties the future seemed promising in that we were ringing in new times in all ambits: the economy was recovering; exports were growing; the middle class was burgeoning, and the elections proffered an active partisan mosaic, inconceivable only a decade or so before. Of course, yellow lights were going off everywhere, but the country appeared to advance in a new direction that was delighting in wide-ranging social recognition.

After years of apparently interminable political disputes, those that had led to the crises of the seventies and to a decade of stagnation and (almost) hyperinflation in the eighties, the political debate entered into a stage of lesser conflict and bellicosity. The liberalization of the economy was bearing fruits, NAFTA was moving forward and the pathway toward the future seemed to be ensured. Years of crisis stayed behind and a guarded optimism reigned.

The beginning of the end came more quickly than could have been foreseen. The crisis of 1995 threw Mexican society into disorder, particularly with respect to its incipient middle class, uncorking a new era of political dispute, the one that now, in 2018, will undergo its third (and last?) electoral confrontation.

In 1996 a new window of hope opened with the unanimous approval of the electoral reform that, it was expected, would usher in a freshly minted democratic epoch. Unfortunately, viewed in retrospect, the successive electoral reforms did not solve legitimacy in terms of access to power and even less the manner of governing us.

Perhaps that would be the greatest deficit of the present: our system of government never adjusted. Arising from post-revolutionary times, with a closed economy, entrepreneurs and unions rigidly controlled and lacking in tolerance for debate or checks and balances, the system did not knuckle under. The structure of the economy changed, the means of access to power were democratized and the capacity of deciding and acting was lost. The old way of governing left off being possible (at least at the federal level) and nothing was substituted for it. The reality is that we are living in a dream because we did not build the scaffolding of a civilized and developed future and not having engaged in this task has opened up all sorts of spaces for regressive forces in all walks of our domestic life.

The world of tomorrow can be of two types: the one that is by force of habit, inertial, and that which is constructed by political decision. Inertia is the easy way out, but not the obvious one due to a very simple, and at the same time paradoxical, reason: the six-year presidential term about to end was simultaneously progressive and reactionary and that rare mixture bequeaths a legacy difficult to emulate. It was progressive in that it drove an agenda of reforms that lay bare great potential opportunities for a more balanced development for the majority of Mexicans. It was reactionary because it devoted itself to reverting institutional headway, eliminating mechanisms of transparency and accountability and violating the few existing counterweights.

This leaves us with a potentially optimistic panorama: the opportunity for casting aside the inertia, to be replaced by an era of building on the reforms effected and whose cost has already been paid, which would imply radically altering the structure of privileges and benefits that all kinds of groups and persons enjoy and that hinders development. The contrast between the South and the North speaks for itself: where socio-political barriers to development are virtually insurmountable under the current paradigm, as in the states of in Oaxaca or Guerrero, opportunity is minimal. If, contrariwise, the next government takes the project of combating those structures of privilege under its wing, the potential for development is literally infinite.

Inertia would imply a sufficiently elevated economic growth rate for the country to function, as done throughout the last three decades: insufficient for achieving a transformation, but satisfactory for dealing with the demand for jobs and for the consequences of our poor socioeconomic structure, translating as it does into poverty. Regarding the political, a scenario of inertia entails incessant conflict, in addition to permanent social dissatisfaction, but not a catastrophic situation. This situation could become complicated if NAFTA disappears.

At the end of the day, the country has accomplished extraordinary, if incomplete, reforms. The reforms unleash huge opportunities; lack of their thorough implementation limits them on a grand scale. We have been in this tessitura for several decades, a circumstance that explains the collective humor characterizing us. I personally am remaining optimistic, in the style of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who observed: “I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who takes a raincoat with him.”

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Luis Rubio

The end of each year brings nostalgia for what’s gone, expectation for what’s coming, fear of the unknown and optimism for the opportunities that the New Year might bring with it. Today, the last day of a complex and contentious year, is a good time to reflect upon what the big thinkers, entrepreneurs and statesmen wondered before each one of these emotions.

The future… something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

                                                                       C.S.Lewis, 1941

We must confess that at present the rich predominate, but the future will be for the virtuous and ingenious

                                                                       Jean de la Bruyere, 1688

 Fortune can take from us nothing but what she gave us.

                                                                       PubliliusSyrus, c 50BC

In ages of faith, the final aim of life is placed beyond life. The men of such ages are therefore used naturally and, as it were, involuntarily, to fix their gaze for many years on a static object toward which their progress is ever directed, and they learn by imperceptible degrees to repress a thousand small passing desires so as to satisfy more effectively this one great permanent longing which torments them. When these same men wish to concentrate upon worldly affairs, these habits come into their own. They readily settle upon one general and sure goal as an object for their actions here below and direct all their efforts toward it. You do not see them indulging in new projects every day but they do have definite plans which they never tire of pursuing.This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results. They discovered the secret of success in this world by concentrating upon the next.

                                                                       Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

 Worry over what has not occurred is a serious malady

Solomon ibnGabirol, c 1050

What makes a tyrant frightening?“His guards,” the man says, “ and their swords, and the chamberlains, and those who shut out people who try to enter.”Why is it, then, that when you bring a child in front  of him when he is surrounded by his guards, the child isn´t afraid? It is because he child doesn´t properly notice the guards? Now, if someone is fully aware of the, and of the fact that they’re carrying swords, and has come precisely because he wants to died, as the result of some misfortune, and is seeking and easy death at someone else’s hand, he won´t be frightened of the guards ether, will he?“No, because he wants the very thing that causes them to be frightening.”Well then, if someone who has no particular desire either to die or to live, but is happy to accept whatever is granted, comes into the presence of the tyrant, what is to prevent him from approaching him without fear?            “Nothing.”

Epictetus, c100

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear

Albert Camus, c 1940

It is life, life that matters, life alone -the continuous and everlasting process of discovering it- and not the discovery itself!

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868

The world is equally astonished –and resentful- at every new discovery, but in a short time accepts it as a commonplace.

Gertrude Atherton,1923

Science is a cementery of dealideas.

Miguel de Unamuno, 1913

 What one man can invent another can discover.

Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905

There are men in this city, and also there come other person every day from different places by reason of its greatness and goodness, who have very clever minds, capable of devising and inventing all manner of ingenious contrivances. And should it be legislated that the works and contrivances invented by them could not be copied and made by others so that they are deprived of their honor.

Venetian Statute on Industrial Brevets, 1495

The basic question one must ask is this: Why do people do all the things that, taken together, form the impressive image of a totally united society giving total support to its government? For any unprejudiced observer, the answer is, I think, self-evident: they are driven to it by fear.For fear of losing his job, the schoolteacher teaches things he does not believe; fearing for his future, the pupil repeats them after him; for fear of not being allowed to continue his studies, the young man joins the Youth League and participates in whatever of its activities are necessary; fear that, under the monstrous system of political credits, his son or daughter will not acquire the necessary total of points for enrollment at a school leads the father to take on all manner  of responsibilities and  “voluntarily” to do everything required. Fear of the consequences of refusal leads people to take part in elections, to vote for the proposed candidates, and to pretend that they regard such ceremonies as genuine elections;  out of fear for their livelihood, position, or prospects, they go to meetings, vote for every resolution they have to, or at least keep silent: it is fear that carries them through humiliating acts of self-criticism and penance and the dishonest filling out of a mass of degrading questionnaires; fear that someone might inform against them prevents them from giving public, and often even private, expression to their true opinions.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Oscar Wilde, 1891

Old Year, New Year: what’s gone is gone; now comes the time of opportunities, if we know how to grab them. Happy New Year!

PS. All quotes from the extraordinary journal Lapham’s Quarterly

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Luis Rubio

ARGUMENT

Corruption Is Mexico’s Original Sin

Personal enrichment has always been central to Mexico’s political system — and only a revolution can change that.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto at the National Palace in Mexico City on April 24, 2017. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)

On Dec. 20, a political operative of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Alejandro Gutiérrez, was arrested on charges of embezzlement and illegal use of public funds for his party. It was a relatively high-profile arrest, but one shouldn’t get carried away about its meaning. Mexico’s corruption problem has indeed become dysfunctional. But corruption remains an integral part of the country’s political system and, absent a political revolution, is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.

During the 20th century, corruption helped Mexico attain the political stability that allowed it to achieve long periods of economic growth. It also remains the glue that holds the country’s establishment together. The system is so entrenched that even when the longtime opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), took power during the administrations of Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, it quickly fell into line. 

Mexico’s corruption problem is not a product of chance. Mexico’s political system was created in the 1930s to consolidate the political power of the winners of the country’s 1910 revolution and to provide them with access to government posts and money. The resulting system was based on a simple transaction: loyalty to the president, across all political and judicial institutions, in exchange for access to wealth and political power.

Since then, government posts, both elective and by appointment, have been given out as part of an endless process of negotiations to maintain the political class’s control over the country and its spoils system. Functionaries have long seen their positions as opportunities to make money. Some office holders were provided with nonpublic information that allowed personal gain, while in other cases their appointments facilitated outright robbery. They were only prosecuted when they broke the golden rule — when they opposed the president or ceased to be perceived as loyal. There has been no distinction between political parties in these endeavors; the PRI, which was the only game in town for most of the 20th century, and the PAN have been equally implicated.

The current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto has been a perfect case in point. Although Peña Nieto campaigned as a reformer, since taking power he has attempted to restore the country’s political system to the 1950s, a time when the federal government’s paramount goal was economic growth, which it achieved with an average growth rate of 7 percent. It was also a time when corruption served to secure loyalties throughout the political arena at virtually no cost in terms of popularity.

Over the past five years, Mexico has thus lived through two contrasting processes. On the one hand, Peña Nieto has overseen legislative approval of some major liberalizing reforms, particularly in energy, telecoms, and education. All of these reforms were accomplished through graft, with votes that were duly purchased, while allowing favored economic and political actors to profit from access to privileged information. At the same time, corruption suddenly became the raison d’être of the country’s activist community.

Both these processes went together. The economic reforms were approved through an arrangement among the three major political parties. That agreement resulted in both PAN and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the two major opposition parties, losing their credibility, as they ended up being perceived by the public, most likely correctly, as having sold their principles — and their legislative votes — in order to benefit from the ancestral corruption of the PRI system. All three parties are now seen to be one and the same, at least as far as corruption goes. It’s no wonder that the PRI is now fielding a presidential candidate, José Antonio Meade, in next year’s election with impeccable personal credentials who is not a member of the party.

Corruption has become the nodal leitmotif of Mexican politics, at least in rhetoric. It is the subject around which public discussion, electoral processes, decisions on savings and investment, and — however much they deny it — politicians’ calculations gyrate.

And so the political class did recently pass anti-corruption legislation to please activists. The new legislation creates the office of a special prosecutor for corruption charged with choosing and investigating cases of corruption. Thus, at least in appearance, the law provides an opportunity to prosecute cases of corruption. In this sense, the Mexican political establishment no longer enjoys absolute freedom to misbehave, as can be gleaned from the fact that several governors have been jailed or are being prosecuted.

Still, it’s easy to confuse facts with appearances. First, a special prosecutor has not yet been appointed. More broadly, the anti-corruption law mostly addresses the corruption epidemic’s symptoms, thus helping to preserve the status quo. It does not aim to eliminate the causes of corruption, starting with the arbitrary and unchecked powers that government functionaries, at all levels of government, use to extort the public. It also leaves too much power to decide what to investigate in the hands of appointed officials who are beholden to political bosses.

It’s important to remember that Mexico’s corrupt system hasn’t just included political institutions and parties but also the judicial system. The legal rules governing political institutions have always been defined in ambiguous and discretionary ways. This gives politicians and prosecutors the power to unmercifully punish perfectly legitimate and adequate actions when they find it convenient.

It also allows them to politicize corruption charges as they see fit. Charges of corruption have been used over the decades as a means to punish political enemies and maintain political discipline. Precisely because corruption is so rampant, it has always been the easiest way for those in power in Mexico to attack and undermine their political enemies.

The new fad in Mexico is for any political actor likely to be prosecuted to flee the country and then wait for a request for extradition; the extradition order is then negotiated so that the charges for which the extradited person can be prosecuted are minor. It thus appears that he or she is being subjected to the full weight of the law. But once the headlines shift to a different matter, the person leaves jail, and the entire matter blows away.

There is even plenty of evidence to suggest that many of the governors and other politicians who were recently convicted for corruption negotiated their indictments with prosecutors in order to secure a comfortable passage through the justice system, mostly without much jail time or a serious dent in their persona­l assets.

Mexican politicians know they can mostly ignore the politically active people in the country’s urban areas who are focused on the corruption problem, because they are hardly representative of the broader public. Most Mexicans have no access to the resources, benefits, or power of the political system — and, precisely for that reason, they are not much concerned with how it works. The concerns and interests of the average Mexican instead revolve around the more basic things in life, such as safety, jobs, and income.

Hence, the detention of Alejandro Gutiérrez in the state of Chihuahua makes headlines that add to the malaise that has characterized Mexicans’ mood for the last few years but is unlikely to change much. Those who assume that this, or a similar case of corruption, could unleash a political crisis that will lead to a reshuffling of the political order — of the sort that Brazil is currently experiencing — are bound to be disappointed.

Circumstances in Mexico and Brazil are radically different — not least because Brazil’s judicial system is far more advanced. Back in the 1970s, while Mexico was developing an extraordinary cadre of first rate economists and technocrats, Brazil concentrated on its justice system by developing a school of independent prosecutors. It is not by chance that Mexico has gone much further in reforming its economy while Brazil has made much more progress in developing an independent justice system.

Mexico’s political system isolates, and protects, politicians from the citizenry and provides them with extraordinary powers to do as they please. To be sure, elections these days are contested, and political parties alternate in government. But the system carries on. The only solution is a new political regime, under new rules of the game — that is, a new constitution that would hold government officials accountable through checks and balances enforced by independent institutions.

Absent such a revolutionary change, specific legal reforms can address the symptoms of corruption or other social problems, such as drug activity. But the core of Mexico’s problem isn’t corruption or drugs but the lack of a basic functioning government that is designed to address the needs of citizens rather than the interests of politicians themselves.

For now, the current case of embezzlement in Chihuahua, which follows the governor’s own political agenda against the PRI, may alter citizens’ perceptions of one or another candidate in the presidential race. But it will not, by itself, transform Mexico’s political system. The system itself, after all, is based on corruption.

Luis Rubio

“I always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges

In such a changing and convulsive world, it is of the essence to read about everything, listen to ideas that are attractive as well as repulsive in order to maintain a clear and sharp perspective of the time in which we are living, but also of the context within which things take place. History is particularly useful for this purpose and this year I have read various excellent texts on key moments of the past. Here is a description of some of my best readings, at least those from which I learned the most.

The economic polarization and its consequent inequality are not novel themes, but they have become key issues in the public discussion of the entire world. A few years ago, the Thomas Piketty book appeared on the inequality in the world. From that moment studies were launched on diverse perspectives to analyze and assess the gravity and veracity of the French economist’s findings. The Cato Institute published an extraordinary compendium of these criticisms with the (meagerly creative) title “Anti-Piketty,” also published in Mexico by the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE). Rather than focusing on the past as Piketty does, this volume pinpoints the XXI century, which allows us to understand the enormous differences in the formation of capital and its social consequences. A must-read.

Richard White*, a historian, studies the evolution of U.S. society in the second half of the XIX century, beginning with the end of the Civil War and especially  brings into  focus the growth of the so-called “Robber Barons,”thegreat entrepreneurs who built huge empires, transformed the world and later were the object of anti-monopoly legislation. It is interesting to observe the similarities and differences of that era compared with ours, above all because the common denominator, the technological change,explains much more than the means proposed to combat the evils of our times as they were in times past.

One hundred years after the October Revolution, China Miéville** describes with exceptional expertise the way that Russia went from being an autocratic monarchy immersed in a profoundly unpopular war at the onset of 1917, to arrive in October having gone through not one but two revolutions and attempted to metamorphose into the vanguard of the world revolution. Nothing better details the tenor of this narrative than a quote that the author proffers at the start, asserting that “one need not be a prophet to foretell that the present order of things will have to disappear.”

Perry Anderson unfurls his marvelous curiosity, this time on the theme of hegemony, a term employed frequently in the most diverse ambits of international policyand of social control, but that is rarely spelt out punctiliously. Commencing with Greece, in The H-Word: the Peripeteia of Hegemony, Anderson elucidates the origin of the designation and its use throughout time. In a series of historical chronicles, he proceeds through Gramsci, E.H. Carr, Morgenthau, Kindelberger, Laclau, Arrighi and others, drawing to an end with a reflection on U.S. foreign policy and the complexity of the world and of the struggle among the powers of the moment in which we live.

None of my readings were as illuminating, but also as unsettling, as that of John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, two political scientists who set out to decipher the provenance of democracy and the reasons for its emergence in distinctive nations. The title of the book, Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain, sums up their argument: without war there is no democracy. It is war that made possible the rise of democracy, basically because, in one country after the other, when the elites felt threatened it was then that they were required to seek out the population to save their own skins; that is what made possible a political arrangement for sharing the power, i.e., democracy.

Finally, during this past yearI found myself with several books, some excellent, dedicated more to attempting to make sense of specific, current events,than to “great”explanations, which deserve mention: The Road to Somewhereby David Goodhart outlines the new wellsprings of imparity between those who are “mobile” and those who have been marginalized. Mark Lilla has produced a gem in “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction,” delineating the tensions between a changing world and those devoted to thwarting this advance. Tzvetan Todorov, a historian originating in totalitarian Bulgaria, has published another extraordinary book, The Inner Enemies of Democracy, focusing on the stage after the fall of the Berlin Wall and how the space for freedom and democracy has contracted worldwide. Christopher Hayes trains his thoughts on societies’ loss of confidence in their governments and traditional institutions, including those that clearly possess a rightful place in the society.  While his focal point is on the U.S., much of his line of reasoning is universal: The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev brought out a work on the Russia of today that is not lacking in contemporaneity in the world in general: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible takes on the fictional matter and narratives that governments fabricate to preserve the power, in the hopes that that no one take notice of the reality. Nothing seems to change.

*The Republic for Which It Stands, Oxford; **October, Verse.

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Luis Rubio

I do not know, dear reader, whether things in our daily lives seem normal to you that are not normal: the problems that are not solved, the corners at which people are robbed, the floods that return, the traffic jams and all the “little” things that make life unnecessarily complex, which is already that, and then some. It surprises us that the population does its utmost to aid the needy in times of difficulty or crisis, but we are not surprised that things that should function fail. In reality, this is about two sides of the same coin: the citizenry alienates itself when it sees that nothing works as it should, but acts precisely because it knows that it can make a big difference at a given time. This is a problem of authority.

“Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary,“ wrote GK Chesterton a century ago. And they doubtlessly are: what should be ordinary emerges as extraordinary. Here are some examples of this in everyday life:

• It never fails to surprise me that traffic jams transpire in the same places. In some places this is simply the insufficiency of the infrastructure, even when the latter is new and can only be fixed with huge, additional, investments. However, there is an infinity of places in Mexico City (CDMX) where traffic gets strangled because of the lack of authority: for example, at the beginning and end of schooldays, when parents believe it is their divine right to double- and triple-park and there is no authority at all to regulate or discipline them. The same is true in front of Metro or Metrobús stations, where taxis cue up and compete for passengers without it mattering how. The point is not to impede parents from dropping off or picking up their children from school or passengers from taking a taxi; the point is that the authority is there, or should be there, to ensure that the rights of all the citizenry are countenanced and respected. This is about day-to-day circumstances: known and predictable.
• Something similar happens with the floods. We always are surprised that the rains leave large puddles in the same places time after time. That is, the governmental authority is privy to thorough knowledge of the sites where drainage does not work or is inexistent even with minor rainfalls, and does nothing.  They do not repair the streets, avoid flooding or attend to points that, commonly, frequently and repeatedly, hinder circulation. All of those points are well known in advance and the authority could clear them up without encountering many hurdles or costs; nonetheless, that does not come to pass.
• It is frequent that in the social networks there are rumors that “there are muggers at such and such a corner.” That information spreads like wildfire; notwithstanding this, the muggings continue, as if they were an economic activity deserving of respect and protection. In the country all types of illegal activities are permitted, such as unregistered taxis which are “tolerated,” food stands, street vendors and all kinds of paraphernalia for sale by purveyors of goods and services. While formally illegal, they form part of the quotidian scenario and, at least, satisfy a need, because were this not so, they would not exist: that is to say, there is a demand for those services, which illustrates, presumably, why the authority lets them be. I would like to believe that the thieves do not enter into that category, but one never knows, given its devotion to political clienteles…
• The pavement in the streets appears to be imported from war-time Vietnam: there they decided to repair the country after decades of war and we surely have imported the stray shards of pavement that they had left over, only in this manner can we decipher the streets of CDMX: the potholes, the larger holes, the ditches. The streets are not fixed or maintained, they are only repaired, patchwork style: all that is left before a sinkhole…

The common denominator is all this is the lack of authority, the absence of a government that complies with its raison d‘être, which is security and supplying services for the population. With local and regional differences (and some notable exceptions), there is no municipality or delegation in the nation that does not display abandonment, disinterest or disregard. All this leads one to question regarding the function of the authority, or rather: What does it do all day? The reality is that yes, it does work, spending long hours devoted to attending people’s demands, but not those of all citizens, only those of their “machines,” their “bases,” their clienteles. Therein lies the heart of our system of government: the coddled groups, the private profits (or rents, as economists call them), the seeking of power and its preservation at all costs.

Fukuyama affirms that in order for a government to be successful it should be capable of fulfilling basic functions such as security, the legal system and economic regulation, but sequence here is key: nations that  democratize prior to having built the capacity to govern effectively always fail because democracy exacerbates the quandaries, the privations and the challenges of the existing order, eating away at the capacity of the government to exercise its authority on its perceiving itself as submitted to too many contradictory demands. In Mexico’s case, the problem is not that the demands confront each other, but instead that they are concentrated on certain clienteles that often are not presentable, but are very powerful.

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Luis Rubio

Spain embarked upon the conformation of an integral strategy of tourism development in the cultural ambit when it identified, as an opportunity for attracting that type of visitor, the development of small counties and towns. That was how the national network of state-owned hotels, known as “paradores,” in many cases installed on the premises of ancient forts, palaces and monasteries, started, but whose objective it was to deliver content and viability to tourist development in places on occasion remotely located. Later would come first-class highways and high-speed trains, followed by an enormous proliferation of shops, cafés, restaurants and an interminable determination of the townspeople to convert tourism into a source of progress. The number of tourists that visit that nation every year far supersedes its total population and a big chunk of the income it provides stems from its cultural side.

The concept –towns with huge potential attraction for tourism- is obvious, thus it should not be surprising that Mexico has attempted to imitate this. In this manner was born the “Magical Villages”, described as “places with symbolism, legends, history, important events, day-to-day life, in other words, “magic” in their social and cultural manifestations, as great opportunities for tourism.” With that criterion, the Mexican Government has denominated 111 localities as “Magical Villages” along the entire length and breadth of the country. A great idea, but constructed Mexican style: pure rhetoric and no content.

The contrast with the Spanish experience could not be greater. There they began with the infrastructure -the hotels, followed by highways- supplying content and fundamentals to an integral strategy. It was a great vision rooted in real investments (not always profitable), which were followed by private investments complete with all of the accoutrements that tourists demand. In Mexico, hand-outs were printed up that read “Magic Village” and with that we attempted to attract a thriving tourism. It reminds me of the way that a few decades ago the urban capacity of Mexico City was expanded: the capacity of the Viaducto freeway surrounding the city’s periphery was increased by 50% with a traffic lane delineated with a bucket of paint. The problem is that doing things on the cheap turns out expensive.

Before anything else, what is mostly heard about the Magical Villages is the lack of infrastructure: they are difficult to get to, there is no parking, there are certainly no hotels and, once there, there are no cafés, shops or other tourist attractions. What’s more, the towns have not been organized to attract tourism, as they could be by preparing old buildings, churches, convents and other constructions for these to be visitor-worthy. The strategy has been limited to emitting decrees (or declarations), not to building the project. No one should be surprised by its poor results.

In second place, lack of the most minimal infrastructure is in addition to the fact that many of the so-called “Magical Villages” are found in highly violent regions, if not in frank narcoterritories, the result being a fiasco. A good idea ended up disrupted to the extent that it became a perversion and, probably, the beginning of the end of massive potential. Once a family visits one of these villages and leaves frustrated or, worse yet, after being held up, word gets around and no one wants to hear anything about the place again.

The case of the magical villages is not unusual. It is, in fact, the way we are: as the Russian saying goes, first we break the eggs and then we look for the frying pan. That is how laws are made, how Fronts are organized and how pacts are pieced together. Great announcements are made without a moment’s thought of the consequences and implications. Legislators do not read the content of the legal initiatives that they approve, which leads to their being fought over when the time arrives to implement them. The same thing happened with the Pact that led to the approval of the reforms driven by the present government: unless some of the Pact’s authors had an ulterior Machiavellian strategy in mind, it is clear that at least the PAN and the PRD did not weigh the consequences of themselves being identified with governmental corruption. These examples are the norm, not the exception: it is our way of doing things.

The building of the new Mexico City airport undoubtedly comes under the same logic: the costs have exceeded any budget surely because of corruption, but also because it was not taken into account that the land of that area is muddy and that this requires a much more expensive and complex foundation than budgeted for (that is, those who planned the airport did not know that the Lake Texcoco lakebed was there because this is newly created…). We first break the eggs and then look for the frying pan…

But above all, the failure of the Magical Villages program reveals a total incapacity on the part of the government to understand how important the security of the population is. It is obvious that narcotrafficking has a great deal to do with this matter, but the fact that security has not comprised a priority of the government manifests itself in all that it touches. It is impossible to build a better future with foundations made out of clay.

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Luis Rubio

The poverty of the southern part of the country is an open sore and intolerable and even more so when the widening gap characterizing the Two Mexicos is appreciated: the one growing swiftly, and the one falling behind, ever mor0065 impoverished. The recent earthquakes have done nothing more than evidence, once again, the dimensions of the problem and the urgency of attending to it. There is no way that the country can attain development if it does not “jump-start” the South. However, it is not obvious what can or should be done to achieve this fundamental imperative.

The first thing that should be done is to define the problem because, in the absence of a clear and realistic definition, the imagination tends to take over every new brood of government officials that, with the greatest of frequencies, leads them to actions that are as impulsive as they are counterproductive. The image of the South as a poverty-ridden and a region left behind is real, but incomplete. On being confronted by the first photograph emerging from any observation, the immediate response is to send wagonloads full of money. Some versions of that mechanism take the form of subsidies, others of poverty-fighting programs and yet others, recently, that of “special economic zones.” Each of these schemes has its virtues, but the common denominator, as in so many other national matters, is that of side-stepping the causes and tackling the symptoms.

The crucial question is whether the South has not developed for lack of monies or whether there are other factors that perpetuate that world of poverty and impede its progress. There has been, without doubt, less investment in infrastructure in states such as Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas than in some of the other of the country’s regions, and it is also true that the lack of access to energy for productive purposes (such as gas pipelines) has inhibited the establishment of a modern industrial plant. However, there are many areas of the country (such as the West) that have been the victims of similar privations; notwithstanding this, their hardship indices are radically distinct. Jalisco, for example, only now will become privy to its first gas pipeline, a factor explaining its low incidence in heavy industry, but that has not hindered it from having developed into the nation’s heart of the electronics and computer industry.

Another of the perennial proposals is the concretion of a “Marshall Plan” for the country’s South, an idea evoking the project that the U.S. Government erected to aid in the recovery of the European nations after the Second World War. The idea is not a poor one in itself, but a review of that plan probably throws light on its unviable result. While Germany converted the Marshall Plan (and the Truman Doctrine) into a stepping-stone for its transformation and was able to accomplish becoming an industrial power in a few years, the impact on Greece was perceptibly inferior. The difference has everything to do with the technical and administrative capacities of each of those nations.

Without presuming to be an expert on the political and social structures of states like Guerrero, Chiapas and Oaxaca, it appears evident that these factors delineate their underdevelopment to a greater degree than the absence of funds. The stagnation of that zone has endured for centuries and is to a large extent due to the power structures and those of state and local control. A Governor of Zacatecas once enlightened me concerning that the difference between his entity and the state of Aguascalientes is that all of the old power-ingrained structures, adverse to any change, remained in control of Zacatecas, while Aguascalientes benefited from the opportunity to construct a modern state. The explication is similarly valid for the South. It is not by chance that in Oaxaca, its eponymous signature string cheese is a faithful reflection of its manner of deciding and taking action…

The negative emitted by diverse communities in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in terms of accepting the installation of wind-power fields serves as an illustration: projects that would have supplied incomes and some jobs and that would not have affected the daily lives of the inhabitants were rejected because of factors probably ranging from ideological conceptions to firmly rooted political and economic interests most partial to the status quo of advantage to them, rather than to the development that could beget a population released from its yoke. The manner in which the Education Secretariat defeated (more or less) Section 22 of the Teachers Union shows that it is possible to break down these strongholds of control and privilege; it also exemplifies the nature of the problem:  it is plain that the greatest emphasis must be placed on human capital, above all education for development.

It is obvious that money is required, but it has to be oriented toward the type of infrastructure that permits the unfettering of opportunities for productive development, as well as for education that allows the development of a vision and the skills to make it possible. To achieve this, the emphasis will have to be political: dealing with power structures that reject the creation of conditions for progress. An integral development project would require a political strategy dedicated to drive change in the relations of local powers. The case in point is much more one of power than of money, although money would be necessary. The order of the factors does indeed change the result.

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Luis Rubio

When, in the seventies, the country began to adopt democratic reforms, the hope was that this system of government would gradually take on strength, creating conditions for the development of the country in a much more stable and permanent fashion. The successive electoral and political reforms, it was assumed, would be accompanied by an environment of civility that would permit a great leap toward democracy and civilization. From that time on, a profound connoisseur of Mexico, John Womack, warned that this was not natural: “Democracy does not produce, by itself, a decent way of living. It is the decent ways of living that produce democracy”.

Decades after the first wave of reforms was initiated, the country finds itself suffering from problems that are exceedingly serious –such as corruption, impunity and violence- whereas democracy has not achieved creating conditions for a participatory and accountable mechanism of making decisions and, on judging from the most recent electoral processes, nor in the form of electing our elected officials. The old ways of acquiring power and preserving it -clientelism, undue use of the public resources, the buying of votes- remain alive and kicking.

The old refrain says it takes two to tango: the same is true for democracy. While the population feels that it not represented and has no access (indirectly in the republican form of government) to decision-making, its best interest is to always obtain any benefit it can, independently of the consequences and implications. This is what explains popular participation in the siphoning off and distribution of gasoline and the population’s assistance to narcos operating in their communities.  When the government does not serve its purpose or earn its legitimacy, the population exploits any opportunity presented to it, to the degree that the electoral processes end up being a game:  what’s in it for me in exchange for my vote. Another way of expressing this lies in the old maxim: “They pretend to pay me and I pretend to work.” The life of the society becomes a pastime of engaging in exchanges in which no one entertains an incentive for improvement of the whole.

Today it is clear that democracy does not create itself: to progress, it requires conditions that are not common in Mexico and throughout history in general. Two scholars, John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, recently published an analysis of the history of democracy that annihilates any hope of its advancing on its own. Perhaps the best way of summarizing their conclusion is that democracy cannot prosper while those invested with the power can continue exercising it without furnishing anything in exchange. Democracy advances, say the authors, when the rich and powerful perceive themselves as obliged by the circumstances to share the power with the poor. And, state the authors, that only happens when there is a war.

It is the threats from outside that make the powerful recognize that the poor are valuable; historically this occurred because in order to preserve a society’s independence soldiers are required and the rich are never adequate for that. In the authors’ words, “the emergence and consolidation of democracy depends on warfare, and on a particular kind of warfare, at that.” The rich and powerful prefer to stay the way they are and are only willing to share the spoils when they find the status quo imperiled. It is the terrible “alchemy of iron and blood” that produces democracy. “As long as the monarchies could buy armies with money, blood did not buy voting rights, as it had in Athens and Rome.” It was not until the end of the XIX Century that the conditions came about, above all from the time of the French Revolution and later the European wars, for mobilization of the masses to acquire a fundamental political value.

The reading of Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain is not for dreamers because its realism literally derives from the bayonets, but it poses an evident question for Mexico: given the scant probability that our physical integrity as an independent nation will be endangered, how would it be possible to consolidate Mexican democracy? The authors themselves submit the query in a more conceptual sense: “When armies no longer need flesh and blood what can take their place to stabilize democracy?” According to the authors, democracy implies the sharing of power in an orderly manner and that only becomes possible when the circumstances demand it to be so.  That is, it is only when the powerful recognize that they are incapable of safeguarding their interests without the concurrence of the population in general; only then are they are disposed to share the power, and that is what opens the door to representative democracy.

Mexico is experiencing a stage that is exceedingly contentious and violent. Corruption has become one of the central factors in public discussion and organized crime constitutes a menace to those who hold the economic and political power. The latter is certainly true at the regional level, but could also become a national threat. Maybe therein, or from Trump, lies the opportunity to transform the country once and for all.

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Luis Rubio

The so-called “Front” is a strange entity: it is not an alliance nor a common candidacy. It was born as a great idea: to achieve, all at once, the survival of the PRD and to block the candidacy of López Obrador. Its original rationale was simple: in the logic of the preservation of the tri-partisan monopoly, both the PAN and the PRI would be in favor of the PRD preserving its registration as a political party (which is probably only possible should it win Mexico City) and, at the same time, to prevent AMLO from winning the presidency. Although difficult to operate because it implied requesting a split vote from the parties’ voters, the objective made sense for each of the three major parties.

From the perspective of these three encumbered entities, nothing is more important than the preservation of their monopoly. Under that logic, they have done all kinds of prestidigitation acts to protect themselves; two of these are particularly despicable: they made the re-election of legislators inoperative (because they severed the link between citizens and those who intend to get re-elected), and imposed apparently insurmountable conditions for the inclusion of independent candidates in the presidential race. More recently, as could be observed in the state of Mexico, the monopoly preservation strategy acquired new forms (everything is worth doing in order to win, regardless of the consequences), which have been exacerbated by the management of the FEPADE (the removal of the head of the dispute-settlement mechanism for electoral conflicts) and the indisposition to appoint a new Attorney General. Après moi, le deluge. After me, the flood.

The tri-partisan monopoly has cracked with the (largely inexplicable) conflict between Ricardo Anaya (the PAN’s president and pre-candidate) and the PRI: what began as a strategy of weakening the potential rival (common practice), it has acquired a dynamic of hatred so profound that it threatens not only the monopoly of the three, but even the future stability of the country. The outgoing government has clearly decided that the only important thing is to win, which obviously does not guarantee that their candidate can achieve it.

All this created especially favorable conditions for the PAN and the PRD, through the Front, to join forces an offer an alternative based on the citizenship that would truly contest, and put in check, both the PRI and Morena. Unfortunately, the Front has ended up as usual: the feud of two characters who only aim their personal self-promotion, one for Mexico City, the other for the presidency. What began as a laudable idea has become an individual crusade, but a crusade that has no meaning or possibility for a very simple reason: unless there is a broader project with an extraordinary sense of opportunity, the members PAN will not vote for a PRD candidate and the PRD members will not vote for one of the PAN. As simple as that. In fact, it might not be too much to say that, at one extreme, the Front could bring about the loss of the registration of the two political parties.

Given the weakness of the PRD (the product of its break with Morena) and of the PAN (due to its interminable internal conflicts and its inability to accept its failures when they were in government), the Front had little viability from the beginning; its only chance lay in the potential circumstance that AMLO collapsed or that the PRI nominated a candidate unable to grow during the campaign. That is to say, the opportunity of the Front resides in that one of the other two goes badly and, suddenly, it is faced with the possibility of being one of the two finalists. However, this cannot be achieved with the two respective candidates leading the Front.

For the PRI, the only chance of success lies in that its candidate attract 100% of the PRI vote and then adds some additional points (plus those of its allied parties). The likelihood of the anointed having that capacity seems relatively remote, a circumstance that creates a real opportunity for a candidate of the Front, provided it nominates a character likely to attract the uncommitted citizenship and thus add votes that would otherwise end up fragmented among the multiple voting options. If those of the Front really want to make a difference, they would have to abandon their personalist pretensions and start looking for two candidates (Mexico City and the presidency) likely to win far beyond the two large (but now dwarfed) political parties that make it up. To date, nothing suggests that Anaya and Barrales are willing to get off their horse.

All elections involving multiple candidates without a second round (or runoff) end up being races of two. This responds to the natural propensity of voters to choose the least bad of the two leading candidates when their initial preference does not reach that place, which has come to be called the “useful vote.” The strategy of the PRI has been consistent in lowering the threshold of voting and destroying candidates precisely to end up being one of the two leaders of the pack, thus achieving that even those who hate the PRI would prefer it over the alternative. But one thing is the experienced PRI operators who concoct these strategies and another the rationale of the man who will decide the name of the candidate.

The Front has the enormous opportunity to destroy the rationale of the former and impose itself on that of the latter, but that will only work if they grow in vision and understand the enormous opportunity -and responsibility- that they have in their hands.

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