Luis Rubio

 My best reading this year was Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, a history of the origin of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and its differences with its continental counterpart. Daniel Hannan, English politician and historian, addresses face to face an explanation of the origin of Western civilization centered on the concept of individual freedom. In the political and legal world based on Anglo-Saxon law, the freedom of the individual is the most cherished value and from there the entire system of human interaction is constructed. In contrast, affirms Hannan, in the European version, deriving as it does from Roman law and thinkers like Rousseau, freedom is a concession of the State, thus, the heart of human interaction lies in the regulations emanating from this. What’s fascinating about this book resides in the series of implications that these differences entail for international relations, the different positions that exist with respect to themes such as climate change or property rights.

As if it were the flip side of the coin, Stein Ringen devotes himself to analyzing what power is and how it can be successfully exercised in a democracy. In Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience, Ringen declares that power on the side of the governor is what makes others obey commands. What makes them accept persuasion is authority.” A government can have its objectives clear, its structure of legitimacy well constructed and, however, be incapable of modifying the reality when it lacks effective public policies. “Where it stumbles is in making workable policies. Good intentions are not enough. Competence is not enough. When a government has power and can make policy, its next problem is to avoid mistakes. It cannot be done by command, which is only counterproductive, but only by leadership and showing its citizens confidence and professional trust.”

Liberalism: The Life of an Idea is an extraordinarily vivid history of a belief. In contrast with the political use of liberalism as an economic strategy, Edmund Fawcett conceives of it as a belief that evolves but that is sustained on progress, skepticism with regard to authority and  respect for the individual above all else. This manner of understanding the liberal ideal allows him to incorporate not only the Anglo-Saxon classics but also, and prominently, thinkers who do not tend to be associated with liberalism, at least in the way that political debate has distorted it, thinkers like Sartre, Brandt and Kohl. How has liberalism survived? By its enormous capacity of adaptation: in contrast with Conservatives, who fear change, says Fawcett, Liberals welcome it because changing societies are adaptable and stable. At variance with Socialists, who consider that Utopia must be administrated, Liberals seek to create conditions under which each person can develop himself in his own fashion without the weight of a dictatorship. An extremely well-timed book.

Gottland is a book that is extremely strange: an assortment of stories written by a Pole about Czechs. Its success is due to the extraordinary collection of narratives, anecdotes, and tales on how the population, the ordinary man in the street, lived and adapted to the totalitarian system. Beyond these specific stories, what emerges is a photograph, a film really, of day-to-day life under fascism and totalitarianism. Although the book is exceedingly humorous and cunning, what it reveals is a perspective of the human condition when it confronts tyranny and corruption and, despite this, keeps its conscience alive and head held high. On reading this book by Mariusz Szczygiel I thought about how difficult it is to imagine how it is to live under such a weighty shadow and how impossible it is to judge those who lived this way. Its frame of reference is totally alien to Mexicans’ experience.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have written three books that are exceptionally interesting because of the innovative way that they’ve interpreted situations and tendencies ranging from criminality to narcotrafficking, the college tests, real estate transactions and homeschooling. Crunching the numbers, the authors come to unexpected conclusions (such as that legalization of abortion diminished criminality in the U.S.). The most recently published of the three, “Think Like a Freak”, offers a “technique” for interpreting distinct social problems. The book is an invitation to think differently, to free oneself from prejudice and to measure potential impacts instead of presupposing results without information or analyses. This is a book that proposes a new way of thinking, beginning with the need to admit that no one knows everything, thus eradicating preconceptions. For the authors, the world is not how we imagine it to be and there’s always something new to learn, particularly how incentives make people tick. Its proposal is that to solve problems it is necessary to start out by understanding causes, transcending clichés and asking the right questions.

Milan W. Svolik has written a fascinating study, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, on the politics of authoritarian governments. His point of departure is that dictators are up against threats from the masses that they govern (which requires authoritarian control), while simultaneously dealing with the elites with whom they govern (which requires parceling out the power). What’s crucial in this is that in a dictatorship there is no independent authority that exacts compliance with the agreements and this comes to be a permanent source of instability.

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a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.cidac.org

Luis Rubio

Mexican society has never been one to trust its government. At least from the time of the proverb of the Spanish Conquest “Obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not comply”), generation after generation has been skeptical of their governors and have trusted them only on exception. Government after government has attempted to win over their trust and, while things worked, that credibility, with all of its potential (and limitations) worked miracles. However, the aggregate of bad governments, crises, unfulfilled promises and interminable stories of governmental arrogance ended up honing a not only skeptical population, but also an exceedingly chary one. On not procuring this credibility, the present government runs the risk of turning out as one of the worst.

Mao Tse-Tung once said that, to govern, one needs an army, power and the population’s trust, but if only one thing were possible, the key is trust. The government of President Peña Nieto never attempted to cultivate or gain the trust of the population and it’s now paying the price of that kismet.

What’s tangible in Mexican society today is dismay, which is the opposite of trust. This dismay springs from many sources, but all, or nearly all, of them derive from what the government has done, or has omitted doing. Due to its action or omission, but above all due to its disdain, the government has generated a multiplicity of victims, conjoined above all with insecurity in its multiple manifestations. Others include victims of governmental decisions in matters of contracts, threats, intimidation or censorship. All discern a critical economic situation with no improvement in sight. Iguala made it possible for the dismay that had already taken hold of the entire society to see the light.

History has taught Mexicans the risks of a government that clings to dogmas with economic consequences for everyone. In addition, a society cloaked in dismay is a society that not only won’t cooperate with the government but also one that perceives the latter as menacing. That’s nothing new, except perhaps for the government, which pretends to ignore learnings from the past.

Although the content of the majority of the reforms of the eighties and nineties was economic, their true transcendence resided in the recognition on the part of the political class that the world had changed. Economic liberalization and all of the consequences of that action in financial, commercial and fiscal matters and for government-owned enterprises was something that the political class did not accept easily, but those reforms betoken acceptance, often through gritted teeth, of that the country could not prosper unless the logic imposed by an authoritarian government were to change. In a word, in the final analysis they accepted the fact of globalization and its implications. To that time, the nation had lived under iron-fisted governmental control in all ambits: from the economic to the media With the liberalization that took place at that moment, and the subsequent steps, the world of control passed on to a better life. From commanding and controlling, the government proceeded to the need to explain and convince. Some governors did this better than others, but all who continued on into the eighties understood that their reality, and their function, had changed.

Not so the government of President Peña, which took office convinced that everything done in the decades immediately past had been wrong and that country should return to its origins. From that premise, the government has joined forces to reconstruct the former world, whether or not in contradictory fashion. One day it liberalizes energy, but the next day it awards Pemex control of the sector; the government negotiates within the framework of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but subsequently reinserts controls on foreign trade and wholesale subsidies for entrepreneurs unable to compete. It’s the same on the political front, where its strategy has been to introduce control mechanisms on the media, entrepreneurs and the society in general.

Now that the reality has caught up with us, the government is facing, but not recognizing, manifold grievances and the aggrieved with no idea of how it should respond. Felipe González alluded to this phenomenon on saying that: “Politics has always interested me more than power and I am concerned that in politics the homo sapiens capable of assuming the burden of the state of the dismay of others is disappearing”. The Spanish ex-President understood to a fault that his function was not that of controlling, but that of convincing and, even, shouldering the status of the citizenry’s dismay as his own. Like Chairman Mao, González understood that without trust, no country is governable.

Dismay has taken hold of Mexico and Mexicans and everything appears to indicate that the government’s errors do nothing but exacerbate it. The government may have grand plans and pretensions but the population only asks for certainty and a clear sense of direction. It is possible that, in 2012, bankers and journalists of other latitudes were willing to believe in unfulfilled promises, but Mexicans have the harsh experience of bad governments. The current government has the opportunity of gaining that trust and all it requires is a reasonable plan, a committed team and a willingness to speak and listen to the population. Instead of censorship, which gives rise to infinite rumors, truthful information is required. This shouldn’t be too much to ask for and less so with four long years ahead.

When dealing with vanquished peoples, the Romans were despised for their strategy of “make a desert and call it peace” approach to counterinsurgency. But even the Romans knew that they had to offer subjected populations “bread and circuses” to win them over to Roman rule rather than just brute-force oppression. Mexicans require certainty and clarity; the government requires their trust. These are two sides of the same coin.

www.cidac.org

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FORBES  – diciembre 2014

Luis Rubio

George Orwell would have understood the contradictory attitudes of Mexicans. In his book 1984 he coined the term “doublethink”, the ability to believe contradictory things. Without doubt, in contrast with developed countries, which tend to be coherent with regard to service provision, we Mexicans are accustomed to permanent contradictions. In the common vernacular, Mexico has a first-world education but the results of tests such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that we’re in the fifth; the country is democratic but there are no checks and balances that hinders taking anti-democratic measures; life is hard but the satisfaction is very great.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes the “Better Life Index”, a comparative scale of indicators of well-being. In terms of what befalls Mexico for 2013, what’s surprising is how poor the country’s performance is in all of the objective indicators, in contrast with how extraordinary some of the perceptions are. In educational matters, Mexico is by far the country exhibiting the worst performance: a score of 0.7 out of 10 on the PISA scale. However, Mexicans are more satisfied with their lives than the average of countries making up this organization of developed countries: 85% of Mexicans say they have more positive experiences in a normal day (peace, joyfulness, achievement-related satisfaction) than negative (pain, worry, sadness, boredom). The OCED mean is 80% and there are many countries below this.

The numbers tell a different and, concurrently, a revealing story: in Mexico people work an average of 2,250 hours per year, more than the majority of OCED nation inhabitants (with an average of 1,776 hours), but their income is much lower. That is, the productivity of work in Mexico is very inferior and is not compensated by a greater number of hours worked. Part of this is explained by lower educative levels (in Mexico 36% of adults aged between 25 and 64 years have a middle-school diploma, a number far inferior to that of the average, 74%). Other factors involved in this are concerned with the quality of the education, as well as diverse absences, above all related with the availability and quality of the infrastructure.

Maybe the most revelatory datum, but perhaps only surprising for the government, is that in matters of security the score is zero out of 10. Zero. In spite of that, 85% of people are satisfied with their lives. The latter can have only one of two explanations: either those surveyed possess no better frame of reference or there is resignation and acritical acceptance of the reality. Or both. The grand total is not commendable: ignorance, resignation, frustration, fear but at the same time comfort and acceptance.

How can Mexicans, within this context, imagine the construction of a developed country? How can conditions be created to establish in the country vibrant and competitive enterprises or, better still, that Mexicans would begin to create them?

The information era has changed the nature of the world economy and of each country in particular. Before, added value was the physical activity of workers in a manufacturing process. Today, that added value increasingly occurs as a result of the technology, the know-how, rather than its being the product of direct contact with machines or assembly lines. It’s not that the machines disappear but that these progressively depend on computers and software whose operators must have the know-how to manage. That is, the greatest wealth has to do with the creative capacity of persons and their aptitude for managing complex processes, and that’s the product above all of education. It’s not by chance that the greatest sources of economic growth in today’s world concern the intelligent use of the technology, frequently applied to traditional manufacturing processes.

The contradiction with which the Mexican lives in permanent fashion does not contribute to creating an environment that drives the transformation of the factors presently limiting economic growth. Insomuch as the population is satisfied with their life, pressure wanes on the governors to act decisively.

What is paradoxical is that the population entertains extravagant expectations in matters of daily satisfiers, above all with regard to consumption but, save for critical moments, it does not demand  essential satisfiers, such as security or education. Alas, on that depends its success in life.

www.cidac.org

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Luis Rubio

The discussion on minimum wages is increasingly less realistic and more electioneering. And ever more risky. Of course, our politicians are fully within their rights to propose ideas and set forth their propositions, but that does not make their proposals viable which, despite sounding attractive, are highly irresponsible.

In one of his many brilliant phrases, those that capture an entire world view, David Konzevik affirms that “today, like yesterday, there are the many poor in income. The great difference is that the poor today are rich in information and millionaires in expectations”. What the promoters of the minimum wage increase are doing is stirring up those expectations. What they don’t recognize is that we live in a globalized world where salary is nothing more than a relative price that, in its current condition, maintains political stability. Raising the salary without solving the structural problems lying behind them is nothing other than fostering unemployment, just at the most dangerous time for the Mexican economy in over two decades.

Let us begin with three indisputable truths: first, Mexico is inserted into the global world and a good part of Mexicans’ incomes derive from exports; as evidenced in the crisis of 2009, when demand for Mexican exports falls, the whole country suffers. It is clear that all of us would benefit from a more vigorous internal market, but it is equally obvious that this is not easy to achieve. The country’s true deficit lies in structures stiff in the joints that tether us to the past instead of helping to take a leap forward, just as exporters and the like have already done.

In second place, the price of technology is undergoing a vertiginous fall throughout the world. By definition, the entrepreneur will always optimize the use of his resources: he will utilize the combination of goods that minimizes his costs. Thus, while in the U.S. (with high salaries) a sole individual is left in charge of a parking lot and will utilize a great deal of technology (automatic gates, cash machines, etc.), in Mexico we park in vacant lots, with legions of cheap laborers. That is what produces the relative price of manpower and capital. Altering the equation by increasing salaries could lead to the disappearance of poor businesses or, for the minority with financial capacity, to a technological transformation that would imply the evaporation of innumerable jobs. No trivial matter.

The third reality is that the country is competing with the rest of the world. Independently of the nationality of a company or of an entrepreneur, what counts for seeing an investment through are the advantages and opportunities (or the opposite). Among these it is obvious that factors such as the market (and access to other markets) and installation and operational costs are all key elements for the businessman’s decision to make and investment.

If under these conditions the minimum wage is raised by political decision, the consequences would be the foreseeable ones, while the minimum wage will inevitably produce a fall in the demand for employees without knowledge or capacities that distinguish them from others (in the world) to be in turn replaced by the inputs that has been made relatively cheaper, that is, the technology. This is not a theoretical phenomenon: it is what has been seriously affecting, on occasion devastatingly, worldwide employment levels. The first line of contention, the first who would lose the job, would be precisely workers who engage in repetitive tasks, i.e. most Mexican workers.

Ignoring the impact on employment would imply supposing that there is no flexibility in the labor market: that is, that the demand for workers is equally independent of the salary. However, the current (implicit) strategy in Mexico in terms of both low nominal and real salaries is in a tie with low productivity and its efficiency tends to decrease. The only way to break this vicious circle is to raise productivity in systematic fashion. The federal government has addressed this in the rhetoric but has not produced much concretely. It would be very risky to raise the minimum wage without having resolved the causes of low productivity.

It is evident that there are enormous differences of productivity within the Mexican economy. Each company and sector will entertain distinct possibilities of raising salaries, which invites a rather different solution: to liberalize the control on minimum wages: were these to be freed, some companies could raise the salary immediately; if all are obliged to do this, the result would be unemployment. On the other hand, the unique definitive solution would reside in creating mechanisms and conditions to transform the productive plant, acquire modern technologies and reduce their costs. Of course, such a strategy could only be successful on rapidly and radically raising the capital of persons, that is, their education and capacity to compete. Without that, the quandary would be better employment with low salaries or higher salaries with less employment.

There are numberless mechanisms that the government could activate in order for companies to have greater information and for them to better prepare for competing in this world. Under the current economic, social and insecurity conditions, artificially raising the salary would imply not only an increase in unemployment but also the creation of additional incentives for the illegal and criminal job market that everybody knows lies in wait just around the corner.

www.cidac.org

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Luis Rubio

“When I visit a country, wrote Montesquieu, I am concerned less with knowing what the laws are than if they are applied”. The Rule of Law is a complex phenomenon not permitting facile definitions. Some presidents affirm that they respect the Rule of Law because they obey the law, never acknowledging that the problem is that a month ago they changed the law at whim. In the famous U.S. Supreme Court case on pornography, Judge Potter Stewart attested that “I know it when I see it”. Something similar could be said of the Rule of Law: when the citizenry lives peacefully because it knows that no one can freely abuse it, the Rule of Law exists.

The Rule of Law has two faces. On the one hand, the power of the authority to manipulate the law at will, which violates the essence of the principle of legality that consists of that the law should be public, known by all and applied fairly. When a governor comes up against effective limitations to his plan of action, the country resides within a Rule of Law.

But there’s another dimension that isn’t small and is that of obeying the law on the part of the citizens: that which makes a citizen obey the law. This is also a key matter, perhaps implicit, in what is related to security, the police and legality.

According to the study of Tom R. Tyler*, people obey the law when they consider it to be legitimate and not because they fear punishment. The conclusion of Tyler, who conducted an extensive, survey-based analysis, is that it’s much more important, and profitable, for a legal system if the population respects it than if the latter feels threatened by the probability of being punished. His principal statement is that the authority’s legitimacy is much more important for people than the instruments employed for trying to make the law obeyed, an argument that stands in dramatic contrast with much of what is utilized in Mexico to combat criminality or tax evasion, to cite two obvious cases. If Tyler’s conclusion is valid, the crucial question is how that legitimacy is achieved.

From the perspective of the authority responsible for making the law obeyed, –and here Tyler supposes a condition of stability not typical of Mexico- what’s decisive is less police surveillance or that by other State bodies, than the behavior of people in their daily lives. One thing is what the letter of the law or regulation says and another is the individuals’ conduct. The theoretical objective comprises there being no difference between both principles: norm and behavior. The question is how to achieve that or what makes it possible.

According to Tyler, much of the legitimacy that inspires and generates a legal system derives from the interaction between the populace and the authority, especially with those directly associated with the legal-judicial process, such as police officers, judges, and public servants. His study shows that people generalize from those experiences to the political system. Were his conclusion equally applicable to Mexico, the implications would be monumental: based on the country’s police officers as the model for evaluating the rest of the government, up to the president himself, the result would be catastrophic, that is to say, like it is.

According to the study, interaction with the authority confers an enormous source of information to the individual. The inferences derived therein frequently become permanent and on that the individual’s perception with respect to the motivations of the functionary is crucial. If the latter is perceived as impartial, devoted to his work and fair in his actions, the citizen perceives him as legitimate authority. Contrariwise, if he/she is perceived as self-interested, incompetent or unjust, it leads the citizen to qualifying the entire political-judicial system as such. Equally important is the perception of how justice is meted out, especially in the case of trials, arrests and decisions in matters of criminal cases.

From this perspective –taking Tyler’s analysis to Mexico-, it’s not by chance that the population condemns decisions such as that of extraditing Florence Cassez to France or that of letting some very visible personage out of jail. Those situations are symptomatic of the conditions to which the author arrives in his study on Chicago: if the population does not believe that justice is being done, it perceives politicians as corrupt and sees the police as committed to their own interests or incompetent in complying with their responsibility, its conclusion with respect to the legitimacy of the judicial system is devastating and is reflected in those paradigmatic cases. It wouldn’t take much to extrapolate that to the whole political system.

The central implication of Tyler’s study is that there is a correlation between the perception of legitimacy people have regarding the authority and obeying the law. If legitimacy is high, people obey; if legitimacy is low, people do not feel obliged by the law and only obey it when the risk of not doing so is too high. Expressed in other terms, legitimacy is crucial for the functioning of a society and constitutes a key strategic factor for a government attempting to advance compliance with the law, in any of its ambits.

Matters such as the energy liberalization and credibility in the government go hand in hand and the point of departure is not commendable…

*Why People Obey the Law, Princeton.

www.cidac.org

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Luis Rubio

In “The Guns of August”, Barbara Tuchman relates how a series of apparently unrelated events and circumstances led inexorably to WWI and the greatest human carnage that the world had witnessed until then. Will the massacre of Iguala have a similar effect?

This is not an idle question. Over the past weeks, the country has been advancing in an increasingly accelerated manner toward a great political conflagration. Or worse: apparently unconnected events have been aligning to produce a large-scale crisis. What is significant is that all of this has been taking shape in good measure thanks to a presence and an absence. The presence is that of a political project oriented toward putting pressure to bear on forcing the resignation of a president before he concluded his second year in office, leaving no option but a new election.

The absence is that of the government, a bizarre situation given the vast array of instruments of control and the resources, of all kinds, at its disposal. Some parts of the government have continued to function, perhaps out of inertia (such as the stringent grip on the media), but others have been conspicuously absent. The most that the government has achieved is articulating its theory of destabilization, positioning itself not as the leader of domestic political life but as the victim of a plot. Its announcements this week do not change the pattern.

It would be easy to assemble an argument such as that of Tuchman. First, in chronological order, the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) movement, probably organized by Morena, the National Regeneration Movement, and imperfectly understood by the Department of the Interior, unleashing forces that its promoters never imagined possible. Second, Iguala, the heart of the country’s heroin production; organized crime in the control of the municipal presidency and its strategy to preserve it with the wife of the president in turn; Ayotzinapa controlled by a rival organization, putting teachers-college students in harm’s way. Third, the matter of the presidential residence, which couldn’t have come to light at a more auspicious moment and that elevated relatively frequent events in the country to stratospheric heights. Whoever devised the IPN stand never dreamed of a conjunction of circumstances like those that emerged in the following weeks.

But none of the latter would have come together had the government functioned with normality. It was its absence that produced the immoderate growth of the snowball effect. This is somewhat reminiscent of how Porfirio Díaz responded –or, rather, didn’t respond- at the time. The rebellion appearing in 1910 and leading to his overthrow was the result of Díaz’s incapacity to contain the uprisings taking place in distinct parts of the country. Although the catalyst of the discontent was voter fraud in the elections of that year, each insurrection had its own local cause (abusive jefes politicos, expansionist landlords, shady land deals, cronyism in local government etc.). It is possible that the atrocity in Iguala has exerted a like effect: it became the catalyzer that allowed people to vent their dissatisfaction out into the open, a distinct discontent for each group and individual involve, all of which failed to be understood by the Peña administration, just as it had in Diaz’s time. There were many reasons for the anger, some nearby in origin, others more distant, but Iguala supplied a common element for channeling it.

Alexis de Tocqueville affirmed that the most dangerous time in an authoritarian or dictatorial government “normally occurs when it begins to be reformed”. While the reforms promoted by President Peña have the potential to affect innumerable interests, their impact to date has materialized essentially on three fronts: first, in the modification of the terms of the Constitutional Pact of 1910; second, in tax matters; and, third, in the security ambit. While amending the Constitution has been a national sport, no one had dared to modify some of the sacrosanct articles: 3 (education), 27 (energy) and 123 (unions). The energy reform attacked the heart of a sector of profound believers in the original writ. The fiscal matter is not less significant in that it returns the country to the era of governmental dominance in the economy by withdrawing resources from the population as well as from investors  and businesses, and using them badly, resulting in a very weak economy. Not comprehending the satiation and pain that organized crime brought forth in every family in the country was a monumental blunder.

Instead of building a broad support base that would sustain its projects while simultaneously privileging its court favorites, the government provoked a strange alliance of bedfellows among key actors of the society, including those that support as well as those who oppose the reforms as well as all those that have suffered from the insecurity. The protests of recent weeks are notable for the diversity of those participating in them: anarchists with a variety of face coverings alongside families with strollers and their dogs. The government alienated –and united against itself- its potential natural support base as well as its enemies.

After the fateful date of December 1 (in this respect eliminating the immediate objective of the unruly), the government must begin to reconstruct its project. In an ideal world, it would come together to raise again its objectives, starting with attending to the obvious: the absence of trustworthy institutions, beginning with that of the Rule of Law.

The past weeks reveal that anger that builds up can snowball, like that which Díaz didn’t know how to contain. President Peña could revert the crisis by convoking the entire society to adhere to the Rule of Law, starting with himself.

www.cidac.org

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Luis Rubio

As anyone who has sat through a Shakespearean play will attest, the second act can be long and painful, and the hero often faces setbacks. Something like that appears to be happening to the Mexican economy.

The vision emerging from the Finance Ministry is that the country is poised at the threshold of an era of unprecedented growth because it is reorganizing structure of tax collection and is focusing the budget on the promotion of growth. That is, Mexico´s economy is going to grow considerably and tax collection will increase abundantly, arriving at a virtuous circle that will be strengthened with new legal reforms oriented toward achieving the accelerated growth of productivity. Sustained on assumptions and estimates that are nothing if not optimistic, the government is incurring in a growing fiscal deficit (that actually began to grow in the previous sexenio), ignoring both the experience of the decades of crises that the country underwent as well as the international panorama that is deteriorating day to day: oil prices in a downturn, interest rate increases and a slump in the growth of the world economy. In the face of this panorama, prudence might be advisable, above all because once spending takes off it is very difficult to break the ascending spiral: once the base is set, negotiations with state governments start at an always higher levels and projects are always more costly than their budgets. The question is why the government is willing to expose itself to such great risks, given a long history of crises.

One answer is, simply and straightforwardly, that there has been a generational change in the government and a good deal of the human capital –experienced technicians- that there was in the Finance Ministry has been replaced by young people with ambitious political aspirations but, above all, novices who did not live through the crises of the seventies, eighties and nineties. Their willingness to take risks is very superior to that which existed in past decades.

A second answer, not contradictory to the latter, is much more interesting because it illustrates the contrasts characterizing the country. The exceptional analyst and observer Oliver Azuara conducted an exercise that permits understanding much of the economic situation that the country is experiencing, as well as the risks that it is incurring. Were it not for this being the reality through which a population anxious to get ahead is living, the scenario would be akin to a drama penned by Shakespeare.

Azuara analyzed the tendencies of State of Mexico public finances during the last 20 years: “Something interesting that the data suggest is what took place when today’s President Peña was governor of that state. In that period there was a tremendous increase in state revenues without a substantive increase in the debt. That is, they imposed a certain order in public finances and collected taxes, which provided them with a financial margin for infrastructure projects and thus constructing Peña’s presidential candidacy”. The expenditure –above all in public works- was the emblem of the state government at that time but, as Azuara observes, did not imply raising the state debt, which created a virtuous circle. It would appear logical that the same team would extrapolate to adopt that strategy in the federal government.

However, “at the federal level things are not coming out right for them with that formula. The tax-levying capacity –without including the value-added tax, IVA‑ was at its limit and the fiscal reform, although it did increase tax collection, depressed decisions to invest by the private sector”. That is, the federal finance ministry is nothing like that of the states: years of successive fiscal reforms and the elimination of tax loopholes at the federal level has left a much smaller margin for raising the collection of taxes than would be possible at the state level.  The result is within sight: the expenditure grows but growth does not, which implies that a mushrooming debt is accumulating but without benefit in matters of economic well-being. “They assigned the resources before having the tax monies in the coffers… something they didn’t do in the State of Mexico. The amount of resources needed to cover the new expenses will be growing and that is of great concern”.

The two explanations seem plausible: there’s lesser understanding of the risk to which the government is laying itself open and a prior experience for the policy makers that is not translatable into the present reality. The result is an economy that continues to be paralyzed, but now in an increasingly more complex and negative environment both because of the economic situation in the rest of the world as well due to the internal imbalances in which it might be falling.

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Luis Rubio

“Perfect storm” is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. That’s what Mexico seems like these days. The total absence of governmental response to the events of Iguala exposed the cesspool, affording the opportunity for all of the resentments, fears, angers and opportunists to come to light. Like the proverbial Pandora’s Box.

Hypotheses abound on what led to the actual moment and the government’s lockjaw, but none explain the reaction of the population. It seems to me that there are two ways to interpret the current moment.

The first brings to mind the beginning lines of Zapata, where Womack says that Zapata’s was the story of peasants who didn’t want to change, and that’s why they ended up in a revolution. Clearly, there are many Mexicans who refuse to change, who want to safeguard their lifestyles, some ancestral and others not so much so. Some want to bring about a revolution. There is also a deep thirst for justice on all planes and it is ironic that it has been the poor who have placed the government in checkmate.

At the same time, the sudden growth of urban violence is an indication of the capacity of manipulation and opportunism of some politicians, but also of the profound discontent in which the country nestles. Burnings of municipal palaces, highway barricades and the attempt to destroy (and perhaps enter) the National Palace suggest a great backlog of anger but, more important, an acute political strategy. These are plainly not spontaneous events.

Another possible interpretation, not exclusive from the first, is that there has been a brutal reaction on the part of Mexican society to the illusory veering back to the past that the present administration has undertaken. It’s not only the population that refuses to change but above all the one that aspires to exactly the opposite: construct a solid platform of development, advance towards a better future and carry out the transformation that so many administrations over the decades have pledged but never delivered. Some prefer to keep the past alive (or recreate their own), some yearn for a better future.

What’s peculiar about the moment is that both groups are incensed, while for distinct reasons. With its actions, the government triggered the current crisis; its inaction has made it explosive. The perfect storm was produced because the government achieved bringing together against it the totality of Mexican society: opposing and dissimilar groups and interests whose sole point of confluence, at least to date, is its rejection of the forms, excesses and abuses of the administration.

Evidently, there is no unique factor that has caused the prevailing situation. For some it was taxes; for others media censorship; for all it has been the unwillingness of the government to face up to the security situation: above all abduction and extortion. In its eagerness to control everything, the government bolstered immoderate expectations that have not been (nor could they be) satisfied. The combination of outrage, resentment and the sensation of having been deceived has generated drastic reactions -some very visible but others no less transcendent- which can’t lead to anything good. The point is that this has given rise to a confluence of circumstances that threatens not only to affect the government, but that entails the seeds of a process of a rapid-fire deterioration.

At the forefront of all this, the government is perceived as lost, in the dark and incapable of responding. If anything is crucial in algid moments like this it is the presence of a government in charge that avoids exacerbation of the crisis. But it hasn’t been like that: in its manner of conducting itself during these two years, the government has been distant and arrogant, an attitude reminiscent of the manner in which the Americans went to Iraq to save that country.  Now that it has engendered crisis, it’s time to act.

The way that the government reacts will have fundamental implications. In concept, the government can respond in two ways: one, recognizing that it has a problem and asking itself, “How can I solve it?” The alternative would consist of responding with “Who did this to me”? The first could lead to the successful confrontation of the challenge, with luck achieving the objectives that the government proposed, even if in different fashion. The second alternative would be to track down the “guilty”, which would lead to the identification of scapegoats, intensifying the crisis, deepening it and risking the government’s own viability. We Mexicans have seen this movie many times before and the last few days have not been encouraging.

The moment is excruciatingly delicate and tends to be inflamed for two reasons: first because the government is MIA. There aren’t responses, there’s not even an attempt at leadership. The other reason is that even in the instances in which the government has responded, its response has been evasive. No government worthy of self-respect can tolerate the National Palace being set afire: however, the present government not only didn’t react to the conflagration attempt of the front gate of the National Palace, but the few individuals who were arrested were freed in a few hours. Sensitivity toward potential police abuse is good, but the distance between evasion of responsibility and anarchy is not great.

As the saying goes, when one is in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. What’s important today is not who did what but how to get out of the hole Mexico is in. The country and government are faced with ground zero problems and those are the ones that should be seen to.

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Luis Rubio

What happened in the past weeks that changed the whole panorama?  From a government perceived as exceptionally skillful it now conducts itself as if under siege. Is it possible for a single incident, horrific as it was, to transform so many things in so little time? It seems clear that the occurrences in Iguala were not the source of the new reality, but rather its trigger. The question is, why?

In its first year, the government exhibited singular skills for advancing its legislative agenda. Today no one can harbor the least doubt of its capacity for interaction and negotiation within the partisan and legislative context. Where it has foundered is on the plane of the everyday functioning of governing. The paradox, and perhaps this explains a good part of what suddenly changed, is that the promise of the PRIist government was that it knew how to govern.

The first signs of problems manifested themselves in the economic weakness throughout 2013. The difficulties piled up as various bids for public works were declared forsaken, benefiting some groups more than others. Total disdain ensued concerning the consequences of arbitrary decisions such as the card change for payment of highway tolls. Then the annulment of reforms such as the educative presented: all education workers’ contingents that threatened to protest achieved a governmental commitment to suspend the application of the law in their state. The last straw was the matter that most lacerated the population and on which the government had made the most generous promise: that of security.

The government set out from the principle that time was on its side and that its sole presence would solve the country’s problems. Its vision of the economy is that spending is what marks the direction and compels the private sector to act; in the daily operation of the government what’s important are the results and not the ways or the means to reach them; in terms of security, a government with presence creates a balance between the authority and organized crime, thus reestablishing peace and putting an end to the violence. That is, the formulas of the fifties and sixties.

The problem is that the circumstances of those times have nothing to do with those of the present. In the sixties the economy was closed and protected; the government controlled the information and there was explicit collusion among the elite: entrepreneurs didn’t have to compete and nor did they have to satisfy the consumer, union leaders got rich, politicians stole and criminals were regulated. A happy little world. All was not perfection but impunity protected the system’s beneficiaries.

The change took place when the economy was liberalized in the 1980s without modernizing the system of government. In an open economy it is no longer possible to unload defective, high-priced goods on the consumer or to sign leonine labor contracts. With the technological change no one controls the information and each fraud or abuse, of every ilk, is susceptible to appearing in the today’s multiplicity of media and network outlets. Corruption shows.

Even more important, in this era the government is no longer in command. The governor of yore was in control of all of the processes; today’s governor is required to explain and convince. The population has access to the same information as the government and key actors possess infinite options and compare some with others. That world plays under global rules that do not admit the opacity, threats, corruption and complicities typical of Mexican politics at the local level. That violent and corrupt Mexico, inured to remote governors living in impunity, was laid bare in Iguala for the entire world to see: the XX versus the XXI Century. The government will only be successful inasmuch as it creates conditions that make it attractive to invest in Mexico, the same ones for the corner variety store as for the biggest oil company in the world.

The great problem is that the Mexican government has not modernized itself: it’s the same one as fifty years ago; it’s not effective, it’s not institutional and it doesn’t solve problems, starting with the most elementary one, security. This is not the current government’s fault, but it is an unavoidable fact. The government has to be effective: convincing and functioning. Ours neither convinces nor functions.

The government’s great initial success resides in that it changed the terms of the debate over Mexico outside of the country. Its reforms, above all of communications and of energy, galvanized worldwide attention because they opened a new chapter of potential opportunities. The tragedy of Iguala demonstrated that nothing had changed, that it was, in the last analysis, a Potemkin-style montage. Violence doesn’t frighten off investors accustomed to working in Siberia, Angola or Nigeria; what scares investment off is the absence of a government capable of making the contracts complied with. The energy reform is inadequate in this, but what Iguala illustrated, in living color, is that the government doesn’t even have the capacity to make its own rules complied with.

To suppose that the insecurity is going to disappear without police, prosecutors and a judiciary, all of these competent (that is, an effective government), is the equivalent of defying gravity. The result of the lack of congruence between the proposal and the facts was disastrous, above all because of the enormous expectations that had been generated. It’s not by chance that the worst criticism comes from the most panegyric of before, above all in the international media.

Mexico has huge potential, but it requires the government to create the conditions that make it possible.

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Luis Rubio

“To lose one parent, wrote Oscar Wilde, can be considered a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”. Careless or not, one of the laws of life is that the moment will come sooner or later. The loss of a parent, or of an intellectual parent, constitutes one of the greatest moments, and one of the most difficult, in the life of every human being. Some of the deceased’s relatives, of the new orphans, pen profound reflections on the meaning of life, the loss, the transcendence, or the lessons. The majority of those who publish their meditations do it simply to understand.

Philip Roth wrote Patrimony: A True Story about the death of his father and the rapprochement that the final process intimated for both. In an impassioned narrative, Roth allowed his emotions to flow: love, fear, passion, anxiety. On telling the story of his father and his life and context, Roth ruminates on the known and the unknown, the certain and the uncertain, his own experience and what he knew of his father’s. I don’t know whether Roth pioneered a genre, but he surely has permitted millions of readers to be exposed to the disconsolateness that the loss of a parent means, from the miniscule details to the great edifications.

As a religious frequently obliged to offer consolation for his congregation’s pain, Rabbi Marcelo Rittner wrote Aprendiendo a decir adiós (Learning to Say Goodbye), a book devoted to bereavement due to loss of a loved one, not necessarily a father or mother, and his focus is that of the spirit: How should death be confronted? How should the sense of loss be overcome to turn it into a path to liberation? Why me? Perhaps the most profound and simultaneously the least malleable phrase of the book, but also the most transcending one, is that “a life is lost but not a relationship”. The father/mother-son/daughter relationship does not disappear because a life has come to an end, although it does pass on to a new stage.

Héctor Aguilar-Camín has just published his own farewell. In Adiós a los padres (Goodbye to the Parents), Aguilar-Camín repairs to the best of the Roth tradition but goes a step further, turning his own story into a biography of his parents in an attempt to explain to himself why his life has played out in one way and not in another. How can an absent parent be understood? How can the emotions deriving from that absence be reconciled with the parent’s return at the twilight of his days? How can the complexity of the relationships left by that absence and its consequent vacuums be dealt with? With pronounced maturity and emotional integrity, he bores into the grim life of his father, attempting to reconstruct his life and personality, all this in order to explain it to himself and what it implied, and left its mark on, in his own life. In the end, Héctor assumes the care of his father, not because he owes him something but because he is his father and that without diminishing along the way his relationship with his mother, she who cared for the children through thick and thin.

In a somewhat distinct tenor, Joseph Hodara wrote Victor L. Urquidi. Trayectoria intelectual. Although I would not venture to say that that this is about the author’s intellectual parent, the biography, while critical, is a clear attempt to establish a legacy, to give due credit and recognition to the person who had an enormous not only intellectual but also practical impact on the public life of Mexico but whose memory risks being lost in the mists of time, but above all of the low passions and high vendettas of academia. Hodara does more than recount the life of Urquidi: he positions him in the place that he merits as the intellectual father of innumerable personages of Mexican national political life but whose personality left him shelved in the archives of the Colegio de México. The book reads as a “mission accomplished”.

Kierkegaard wrote that “Life can only be understood backward, but should be lived forward”. That is the challenge that the loss of a parent entails. Some meditate on or write down their thoughts and introspections for their own use, others do it publically for all of us to have access to and the opportunity to understand one of life’s greatest pains and the transcendence of the step that signifies the death of a parent. In the end, following Kierkegaard, what this is about is trying to understand in order to live. That’s what Roth, Aguilar-Camín, Hodara and Rittner, each in his own way, achieves in integral fashion. Contrary to what Wilde said, here there are examples of persons who are not careless but who do care for their parents, the biological and the intellectual parents.

In his remembrance on the loss of his parents (Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir), Christopher Buckley tells a much more political and less emotive or personal story about his parents than the others I mention here, but he composes two reflections that are invaluable: first, he cites the comment of U.S. journalist Mary McGrory to Patrick Moynihan, a U.S. politician. Right after Kennedy was shot, McGrory said to Moynihan “we’ll never laugh again”, to which Moynihan responded “Mary, we’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again”. At the end of the day, youth is not gauged by laughter but by the attitude toward life, which leads Buckley to his second reflection: that the death of one’s parents inevitably entails the understanding that one has moved a step up.

The passage through the death of the parents is analogous to Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, doing all but the impossible not to be devoured by the one or crucified by the other: the history and explanations on one side, life on the other. These books are truly an outstretched hand.

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