Luis Rubio

In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, as set forth by Carlos Lozada, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. No one understands this logic better than President López Obrador, who is not only a master of narrative (and mythology), but of another trait that few have noticed: his success does not depend on his concrete actions or on his results, but instead on his personality cult. To date, the formula has been implacable; the question is what that implies for the future of the country.

There are at least four factors that are critical for development and that the presidential narrative reviles day in and day out, but not for that do they stop being key:  investment and economic growth; security; the relationship with the United States; and the rules of the game. In terms of each of these items, the President has been gnawing away at the scaffolds, frail in themselves, which make things work.

Development is, evidently, the sole objective possible, despite the disdain in which the current government holds it. Focused exclusively on power and its perpetuation, it prefers a poor but loyal electorate to a developed and wealthy country with a hale and hearty citizenry. Regardless of who wins the 2024 election, he or she will be obligated to focus on development (and what that implies in terms o health and education) not only due to the obviousness of its being the only possibility for the country’s future, but also because social problems have been piling up. The formula is known: create conditions to attract capital, without which economic growth is impossible, but with a redistributive strategy that allows raising the population’s living standards without affecting the functioning of the economy. All that is required is certainty: clear and predictable rules. Given the conditions, nearshoring is a huge opportunity (not a panacea) that can grow without limits.

Security is a matter that is not only unresolved, but one that becomes more complicated by the day. Whatever the governmental spokespersons say, it is evident that organized crime controls vast territories, where extortion, abduction and violence reign. Nominal popularity can be high, but the reality at ground-floor level is mutilating and is not solved with rhetoric nor with the National Guard that is not a substitute for local police forces (and judicial system) that protects the population and generates an environment of stability and peace. The Army is a requisite, but solely to pacify the country, not to make it function. Bear hugs look great, but security hinges on an everyday life not besmirched by fears or grounds for the latter.

Berating the Americans and inviting their rivals to the Independence Parade is perhaps the most revelatory of Mexico’s mythical rottenness. Rallying for the people to wrap themselves in the flag was viable as a strategy fifty years ago, but not in the era in which it is increasingly rarer to find a family with no direct relatives in the U.S. This in addition to the economic, political and social   transcendence of the exports and remittances for the country’s stability. It would seem suicidal attempting against these manifest sources of viability.

Finally, the rules of the game: what is technically known as the Rule of Law. The great achievement of the original Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was that it engendered a legal and regulatory framework that would confer certainty on the investor and the entrepreneur: general rules, which were clear and that could be enforced through trustworthy, not politicized mechanisms. AMLO has inverted the equation: rather than general and known rules, he has tried to solve every situation in individual fashion, revealing that he does not care for the law, nor does he understand (or cares for) what makes investors tick: the reliability of the general rules.

The question remains of how to confront these maladies. The answer is, in concept, crystal clear. Thirty years ago, a scheme of rules of the game and reliable dispute resolution mechanisms was sought through an international treaty, which in essence implied that Mexico borrowed the rules and judicial system in trade and investment matters from our trading partners. That avenue has not been exhausted, but it has experienced serious deterioration. Consequently, the only way to recreate conditions that make the rules predictable is with enforceable internal political arrangements. In a word: Mexicans have to do today what could not be achieved internally before: a political-legal framework that is reliable.

The great challenge for the next government will lie in building a framework of agreements that reduce the sources of hatred and polarization, which translate into political agreements that entail a source of reliability and certainty for the economic agents. It sounds complex, but it is the only way through which Mexicans can contemplate a way out of the hole in which the current government has placed them and whose legacy will be much more complex and chaotic than apparent.

The country needs an “indigenous” understanding that opens spaces for participation and eliminates sources of disruption and insecurity. This would involve the formal political forces, but also a broad representation of the citizenry, business, and unions. Mexico has become too large and complex to depend on a few actors with special interests. The challenge is enormous, but so is the opportunity.

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Luis Rubio

Polarization alters everything: from the way things are worded to the inclination to listen to them. Polarization destroys language, with widely accepted terms morphing into polemical conspiracies prone to the extermination of adversaries. Bent by the obsession for confronting the good with the bad, it is in the end nearly impossible to recognize common ground, spaces where there are no significant differences, where what is common is greater and more substantive than distance and difference.

The concept of civil society has fallen into that ambit: presented as exclusive of the elite, -the conservatives in the new vernacular- thousands of base organizations are excluded that do not have the time to dispute designations but that represent citizens demanding respect for their rights. Mexico’s civil society is much more than what it appears to be. Defaming these organizations means attacking legitimate citizens who do nothing but fight for rights enshrined in the constitution.

What differentiates the members of the civil society -a concept coined by Aristotle- is not the income level of its members, but instead the willingness to make their rights be heard and complied with, insisting on the satisfaction of their claims and participating actively in the political and social processes. From that perspective, there are many more organizations that, frequently without title or registration, represent the citizenry than those that exist formally.

There we find the women of Cherán in the Mexican state of Michoacán, fed up with the loggers wresting away their source of employment, abducting and killing their children and spouses, who organize themselves to confront and eradicate them. In the town of Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, there has not been a single abduction in years thanks to the citizenry organizing itself. In Monterrey, the religious sisters of Citizens in Support of Human Rights (CADHAC) designed a new model for the office of the prosecutors. In the states of Veracruz and Morelos (Tetelcingo) the families of the “disappeared” have organized themselves into groups, have trained themselves in forensic science (women converted into experts in DNA samples) and in the search for graves.

Examples proliferate throughout the country, with distinct degrees of success, but that as a whole evidence the presence of an active, participatory and demanding society. Communities organize events and contests in sports, culture, festivities and traditions: everything comprises volunteers, the essence of citizenry and the natural evidence of a civil society. Not even the most seasoned of governmental operators can co-opt a community that organizes itself.

The current government has procured the exacerbation of not only differences, but also above all perceptions, the core objective of the daily early-morning presidential narrative. The good ones are the people, the bad ones are the citizens. The object of the morning press conferences is the “good people” who receive benefits from the government, who are passive and who only understand the logic of “what will you give me” and “in exchange for what.” The old political system developed an all-encompassing culture of exchanging benefits for votes, but the present government has raised this to new height where economic development is no longer necessary because with the “support” (i.e., contributions or cash transfers that the government provides directly to its base) lasting loyalties are purchased. In this dimension, organized crime is more than functional to the government in that it inhibits political participation, generating fear, thus annulling the propensity, or at least the possibility, for those who were once members of the “people” coming to assume themselves as citizens.

Citizens are subjects because they do not keep their arms crossed: whether these are the orphaned children in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, who obligated the municipal authorities to focus on the feminicide that had left them in that condition, or legally constituted entities combatting the impunity and corruption based on data, the hard sources of information. Two sides of the same coin. Some call themselves civil society, others simply are: they defend the rights and needs of their children in the schools, insist on security problems being attended to, and, in general, respond to the agenda that reality has obliged them to come to grips with.

In the interaction between the good ones and the bad ones that the President promotes, a novel phenomenon has come to light: many individuals have begun to discover that they have rights that they had not identified or had not known previously. In his eagerness to extol some at the cost of others, the President perhaps may have provoked the emboldening of increasing numbers of Mexicans who might renege against and criticize the so-called “organizations of the civil society”, but who day by day are coming to form part of this, at least regarding their manner of demanding their rights.

The promotion of informality as a political strategy contributes to the strengthening of the population as the object of governmental favors, in detriment to the growth of the economy in general. The express, even conscious, objective may not be that of promoting informality (because this does not afford tax benefits), but the effect is precisely that: an informal worker owes favors to the corner police officer, to the municipal inspector and, therefore, to the structure that with enormously hard work Morena has been building. The express expectation is that this protection and “support” will translate into permanent loyalty and votes, but nothing guarantees that this will happen.

Mexico has been split between those who pull and those who wait to be pulled.  There is perhaps no more transcendental dispute than the latter because on its outcome will depend the future of the country.

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Luis Rubio
In memory of Luis Alberto Vargas

Governments come and governments go, but one thing always stays: corruption. The actors change, but the phenomenon is perennial. And Mexico is not the exception to this: in his 1976 book on Russia, Hedrick Smith* writes “I think”, Ivan says to Volodya, “that we have the richest country in the world.” “Why” asks Volodya. “Because for years everyone has been stealing from the State and there is still something left to steal.” In his work on the Soviet collapse, Stephen Kotkin** explains how corruption was consuming everything, but that it was impossible to live without it. The phenomenon is as Russian as it is Mexican and no government is safe from it, including that of the “other” data.

Corruption, first cousin of impunity, has formed part of Mexican national life for centuries, but not necessarily because of that must it persist. The great question here is what makes corruption part of the national being instead of its being a blight that should be wiped out. Part of the explanation derives from the nature of the political system that emerged at the end of the revolutionary era (1910-1917): the system rewarded loyalty with access to power and/or corruption; corruption was (and is) a central component, inherent in fact, to the exercise of power. The old system rewarded with access to corruption, the “new” system purifies it: same song, different tune.

What has changed is the context within which corruption is generated today. In these times of instant communication and social networks, corruption is not only obvious, but also visible, thus ubiquitous. While for the average Mexican corruption is an inevitable tool of daily life (individuals offering places to park in the street as if it were theirs, official procedures and red tape, inspectors, the police) that involves exchanges with public functionaries as well as with  private actors, one the greatest achievements of recent decades being the consecration of a set of reliable rules for the functioning of large enterprises, especially for that related with foreign trade. But the most visible and relevant species of corruption in political terms and in the legitimacy of governments, is the highway robbery taking place in and around the government, much of which is linked with private actors, though not always.

There are two factors that make corruption possible in Mexico and that differentiates it from countries such as Denmark and the like: one is that the Mexican government was built to control the population and not for, well, to govern, and that difference entails fundamental consequences. When the objective function is to render development and well-being possible, the government becomes a problem-solving factor; when its objective is that of control, what is relevant is that no one flies the coop. The promoter government procures high growth rates and devotes itself to skirting obstacles to achieve its mission; the controller government submits the population and creates spaces of privilege, opening interminable opportunities for corruption. Concurrently, in a control-oriented government, impunity becomes a categorical imperative: if corruption were punished it would disappear, wiping out impunity.

The other factor that makes corruption possible derives from the latter: Mexican legislation is distinguished from that of countries dedicated to development in that they procure general rules, known by all and applied in systematic fashion. While governments always maintain discretionary margins, in Mexico the laws nearly always border on arbitrariness because they confer such broad-ranging faculties on the authorities -from the most modest inspector to the president- all of which end up making the rules irrelevant. The present government, that which was to put an end to corruption, has widened that margin in irrepressible fashion, to the degree that everything that before involved general rules is now negotiated directly with the president, morphing these into favors that are granted and that, therefore, can be taken away. Suffice to observe the way that cases such as those of the gas pipelines, the airport and the electricity generators were “resolved” to appreciate the dimensions of the change that has occurred, thus the potential for corruption that opened, in areas where the latter practically had been wiped out.

Could corruption be eliminated? The arbitrariness with which the current government has conducted itself implies the very grave possibility that the country could return to its most fateful moments. Suffice it is to see Russia to appreciate this:  Misha Friedman, of the NYT, says that “Corruption is so pervasive that the whole society accepts the unacceptable as normal, as the only way of survival, as the way things ‘just areʻ.” Mexico is not very different.

Not the least doubt exists that corruption can be eliminated, but that would require going through the elimination of the discretionary faculties enjoyed by those in charge of “governing.” Without that, impunity will continue to reign…

There are no bargains in this world: progress requires a trustworthy footing of certainty in terms of security for families as well as for their patrimony and that, paradoxically, is much more transcendent for the least favored population. International treaties help, but the solutions must be internal. There are no bargains: a government is required that indeed does understand what its nodal function is.

*The Russians **Armageddon Averted

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Luis Rubio

While the candidacies advance the political risks increase. There are three factors that drive the possibility of the country having to confront critical situations during next year. The first is the most obvious of these: the presidential cycle, everywhere in the world, follows a natural logic that initiates its ascendent phase during which the president accumulates power, it reaches its zenith and then begins its descent.  The second factor derives from the erosion and eventual disarticulation of the mechanisms of political control the system could count on. The third, and the one entertaining the greatest risk during this period, is that issuing from the inexistence of game rules for politics, in conjunction with the growing incapacity to enforce the few rules that remain in force. Each of these elements will play its part in the upcoming months.

The great success of the old political system lay in the existence of precise rules for the functioning of public life. Some of these rules, starting with the first -the president is in command-, were constant while others varied from administration to administration. The cycle of investment and economic activity typically got underway toward the end of the first year, when the government’s own tonic and its specific rules became clear. With respect to succession, the rules were permanent: no one could dispute the legitimacy of the president, but contending for the succession was valid. This and other peculiarities of the system came to be denominated “metaconstitutional” faculties because they were “unwritten rules”, but ones enforced at all costs.

Many of the worst of the current vices derive from that way of conducting public affairs because Mexico never erected a legal system that was compatible with economic development and personal freedom (as indeed does occur in nearly all Latin-American nations). Mexico achieved stability and growth for many decades along the XX century because it had in place an exceptional political system in which the law was irrelevant and what mattered were the unwritten rules. That worked in a country that was small, provincial and relatively isolated from the rest of the planet, but it has now turned into a hindrance to development for a nation that is big, diverse, disperse and extraordinarily interconnected with the exterior world. The old system, which in many senses persists, is a formidable obstacle for the construction of a different future.  What previously were virtues, are now sources of risk and potential instability.

Going back to the factors mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the political cycle takes place in all nations since it is, in a certain fashion, the cycle of life.  Notwithstanding this, what makes things different in Mexico is that while in most nations the president loses power in their descending phase, in Mexico what they lose is control, but not the power bestowed to the presidency because in normal countries power is limited by the by laws and institutions, which explains extreme situations such as  expropriation of the banks,  expropriation of the lands in the Yaqui Valley and other anomalies (and crises), which have almost always occurred at the end of the six-year presidential term of office.

The second element that the political system was able to rely on throughout the past century was the assemblage of institutions, above all the unions, which granted the presidency enormous capacity of control. The structure of the unions, federations and confederations, such as those of workers and peasants of the so-called popular sector, each with its characteristics and vicissitudes, constituted a formidable mechanism of regulation and authority that gave the country decades of stability, all this at the price of the exercise of individual as well as collective rights extant in other latitudes. Trade liberalization altered the scheme by undermining or eliminating the entire control structure exercised by the government on the workers and businesses (except for unions linked to the government, not subject to competition).

The third element is key. In truly democratic and institutionalized countries, the rules of the game are those established by the legal framework: the laws guide the process and determine the faculties and limits for the diverse actors. In a country where the laws comprise no more than a moral guide and what matters are the formidable discretionary (and arbitrary) powers that the authority rests on at every all level, the law is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is power. And a powerful president such as the current one makes and changes the rules according to the time of day and his corresponding moods.

The challenge for Mexicans is expressly that: how to build a system of rules and laws that cannot be modified or defined by a sole person, but instead through an institutional system such as that established by the Constitution. Mexico’s main problem lies in the fact that the president (the present one and his predecessors) can change the rules (and the laws), literally at will. The issue thus is one of power, not one of laws nor, strictly speaking, one of institutions: How to delimit the true powers of the presidency? The day Mexicans achieve that, Mexico will have entered the world of development and civilization.

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Luis Rubio

India advances uncontainable, but in an exceedingly peculiar manner, deftly skirting the obstacles imposed upon it inexorably by its extraordinary linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity.  An extremely complex and stratified society coming up against enormous barriers to progress, it has found innovative ways to break through fiefdoms, dogmas and ancestral practices. There is much that Mexicans could learn from its experience.

“India lives in all centuries at once” says ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. That characteristic, with which Mexicans can clearly identify, has not impeded India from undertaking one of the most impacting transformation processes in the world. The obvious contrast is China, countries with similar population levels, but with radically opposed politico-social natures. While in China the government controls all the processes and has shown the capacity to impose its vision of development on the totality of its population, India is a democratic nation and, at the same time a remarkably diverse, disperse and disorganized one.  For these reasons, the challenge for India has been that much greater.

How, under those circumstances, can change be implemented for the sake of achieving development? Such has been the quandary of that monumental nation throughout the past three decades. How to crack the ancestral mental, social and religious barriers? How to attract new, productive and promising investments, in an environment plagued by bureaucracy, corruption and interminable regulatory decision-making processes? How, in a word, to break through those obstacles, tenaciously deep rooted as they are, as an indispensable condition for raising the growth levels of the economy and to be able to aspire, from that point, to development?

The solution found by the most recent governments, and more so with the drive of the present one, headed by Narendra Modi, has been to leapfrog, to leave out stages, that is, not to copy the experiences of other nations, but instead to strive for quantum leaps. Perhaps there is no more illustrative example, albeit an obvious one, than that undergone in the ambit of communications: rather than investing in wire telephony in a nation where 80% of the population has never had a land-line home phone, the decision was to develop cellular telephony in accelerated fashion. Fewer than two decades after launching this initiative, the country rose from having twenty million land lines to 1,150 million cell phones. The next step was to break with the monopoly of financial services, creating a payment system sustained by mobile phones, through which the entire population is now in the possession of an ID card, thus the possibility of paying and receiving limitless funds at no cost.

To appreciate the size of the obstacles that the reformers have come up against, an example is sufficient: until up to five years ago, each of the 28 states making up that Asian nation levied a different sales and value-added tax (VAT) and demanded payment in cash on crossing each state border. The consequences of this requirement were interminable queues of trucks lining up to make their payment to unhurried bureaucrats. After more than ten years of negotiations, a system of federal taxes was finally agreed upon that respects the different rates, but that permits electronic payments, eliminating the customs barriers between each of the states. Something like that would have been resolved in one month in China, but in India it dragged on arduously for years and now it has transformed the logistics of all of the companies, which previously had to conform to a bureaucratic rationale for their distribution systems and warehouses. Some goods, above all foods, dropped suddenly in price. The point is that conditions have been being created for solving problems, often without changing what exists (such as the bureaucracy or the banking regulations) rendering it irrelevant. The result has been two decades of high rates of economic growth, the birth of an enormous middle class and generalized and contagious optimism.

The great difference between India and Mexico in terms of their transformation process lies in that the government of India   is crystal-clear in terms of its need to incorporate itself swiftly into the XXI century and has been willing to face (sometimes going around) powerful business, political and union interests and, no less important, the traditionalistic dogmas that for centuries have perpetuated the oppressive economic and social system in force.

At a conference that I attended in India of late, the words most frequently articulated by governmental, social and business speakers were: middle class, Internet, development, education, technology, productivity, interconnected world, health. None of these words is found in the daily presidential morning press conferences in Mexico these days.

Although at times reluctantly, Mexico has been advancing along a similar course, but now the dogma that the poverty of the past was always better has been officialized. A total of 1.3 billion citizens of India demonstrate that that is not the pathway to success.

In India, I ran into the following dialog: Charlie Brown: “There are many smart people in the world.” Snoopy “Yes, but the majority is asymptomatic.” In India those who are moving forward are those who see through to the future.

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Luis Rubio

In the early nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Enrique Krauze explored the implications of those events on Latin-American countries, arriving at the conclusion that the last Stalinist would not die in the USSR, but rather in a university cubicle in Latin America. His sole error concerned the venue: the last Stalinists are to be found in the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City and in its equivalents in other nations in the continent’s South. The messianism characterizing this wave of governments and their retinues is late, aberrant and nostalgic, but not for that less powerful. And destructive.

Victor Sebestyen, the Hungarian historian, writes, in his history of the Russian Revolution that “The men and women who made the Russian Revolution wanted to change the world… The intention at first may have been to overthrow the Tzar and a dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries as an autocracy… But it went way beyond that… their faith was no less than to perfect mankind and put an end to exploitation by one group of people -one class- by another… The appeal of Communism was religious, spiritual and the Party was t Church. Trotsky wrote:  ‘Let future generations of people cleanse life of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.ˊ The messianic scale of the Bolsheviks’ ambition made the scale of their failure so vast and shocking.”

The Soviet Union did not collapse because it was a good idea but poorly implemented, as many Socialists argue, but instead because it was a bad idea that clashes(ed) with human nature. Worse yet, in order to put it into practice, the Bolsheviks resorted to a regime of terror that consisted of, in the words of Robert Conquest, another historian of the USSR, more of a nightmare than a dream. Although (fortunately) the plan of the Mexican messianic is less violent than that of those who inspired it, the obstinacy of denying human nature is always present in their manner of acting, as exemplified by their science policy, the new textbooks and, in general, their vision of excluding the citizenry from the diverse tasks and activities of the nation’s development.

Now that the twilight of this administration is under way, it is unavoidable to evaluate the costs of a project that did not come together (fortunately) because it did not fit with the reality of the XXI century, because it did not count on the natural creativity of the Mexican (our famous jacks of all trades), because the economy is infinitely more complex, deep and successful that the government considered and, above all, because it was a really bad idea. Additionally, as demonstrated by the way they assembled the new textbooks -by people driven by an attempt to preserve a vision that clashes with the world in which today’s children will have to live when they reach adulthood, as well as its vindictive nature-  the project did not even entertain an objective of development, but rather a messianism whose only purpose is electoral: that everyone, today’s adults and, through the indoctrination of the children -the adults of the future- would vote for Morena.

The messianism of the project is evidenced in the expectation of a complete transformation without there being any groundwork to achieve it, except, perhaps, to polarize, disqualify and attack. The flip side of that coin is the triviality of the objective: staying in power. The contrast between the maximalist rhetoric and the baseness of its purpose speaks for itself.

But none of that lessens the damage or the consequences. Before anything else, there’s the opportunity cost: all the time and resources that were wasted instead of employing them in the construction of a better future. Then comes the destruction -literally- of assets, such as the new international airport, appropriate for the needs of a country that aspires to grow and enjoy life and, first and foremost, that their children would enjoy the prosperity for which increasingly more Mexicans scan the horizon and that which too many governments have ignored in terms of the imperative of smoothing the way in that direction (such as dealing intelligently, but effectively, with organized crime, the extortion and the local political bosses -caciques- opposed to progress that proliferate chiefly in the country’s South). Finally, maybe the greatest of the damages is the absurdity of attempting to go against the proven formulas for development that characterize nations as diverse as Canada, Vietnam, China and Spain.

Mexico finds itself at a unique moment in the history of humanity: technology has favored economic integration among nations, geography has gifted Mexicans with access to the largest world market and geopolitics have created the opportunity to come by hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, with the consequent potential for the creation of wealth, jobs and, in a word, future. All that is lacking is to focus on creating the conditions for this to materialize, so that the drip-by-drip of nearshoring turns into a cascade of investments.

The messianism of this government has led to the cancelling out the opportunity with its political strategy and its criminal weakening of the health and educational sectors, its attack on the judiciary and the destruction of the infrastructure. What it has not destroyed is the aspiration for a better Mexico and therein lies the true opportunity because that, in contrast with the other elements, does not depend on the government.

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Luis Rubio

“The stability of a democracy depends very much on the people making a careful distinction between what a government can do and cannot do,” stated the academician, diplomat and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Seeking what it cannot achieve implies “creating the conditions for frustration and ruin.” All societies procure finding an equilibrium between what is possible and what is desirable, what leads to progress and what entails excessive risks. Conditions of equilibrium are crucial, but there is congruence only if the objectives pursued match the provision of elemental services.

In Mexico there is great confusion with respect to what corresponds to the government and what concerns the society.  Mexicans tend to mix social philosophy with the practice of government, which has produced enormous swerves back and forth over time, but at the same time it has impeded the consolidation of functional government at the service of the development and the progress of the people.

One thing is the management of public affairs, another very distinct is the criteria for the allocation of resources. What is basic for any society, in any country and under any circumstance, is for the existence of conditions for life to function, which implies, for example, infrastructure of potable water, sewers, streets, security, education, health and everything that make it possible for daily life to work in normal fashion.

On the other hand, there’s the philosophy of who presides over the government and that, as a point of departure, entails the allocation of resources in the broadest sense.  Will it privilege the development of an individualist society or of a more corporativist? Will it invest in streets for the circulation of vehicles or in public transportation? Centralized education will be favored, or a multiplicity of service providers will be promoted? The market will be emphasized as a mechanism of decision-making in matters of investment and production, or industrial policy? and What will the balance between these two models be?

There is no single philosophy of government and the voters, on electing a governor, endorse distinct ways of facing the challenges of development with discrete visions and models as long-term objectives. In contrast, in the most elemental, there is only one way of creating conditions under which daily life can be possible. That is not to say that providing a certain service (e.g., water) should necessarily be public or private, but that there should be sufficient water at a competitive cost so that the entire population would be satisfied.  The same with all the other indispensable factors for quotidian life.

On a more elevated level, one of the key elements of the governmental function in the process of engendering conditions for progress and prosperity is the creation of what economists call “public goods,” that is, services that benefit the whole of society and that are necessary for its development, such as security, education, knowledge, infrastructure, rule of law and health. No country can prosper in the absence of these factors.

In this context, one cannot do other than ask what the rationale is in suspending the provision of statistical information on justice or education, two obvious public goods, on the part of the governmental entity dedicated to that purpose, Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The only explanation possible is that for the government the less information afforded the greater control of the population. If one were to extend this logic to the budget cuts that the health sector, scientific development, and the infrastructure in general have undergone, one can only conclude that the change spearheaded by AMLO’s Fourth Transformation (4T) does not include the development of the country, but instead the submission of the population.  If one then adds the systematic attacks on the judiciary, especially on the Supreme Court of Justice, on the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data (INAI) and on institutions such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the project becomes transparent in the end.

The spirit that drives the bill on administrative reform promoted by the federal Executive branch is revealing.  It involves recreating, in one fell swoop, the discretionary component enjoyed by the Mexican government in the seventies: the era of arbitrariness in which a public servant could decide on the life or death of an investment, the viability of an educational project or the possibility of consolidating a scientific investigation liable to transforming vast regions of the country.  The rationality of the bill is evident, but its costs and consequences are unmistakable, not due to the philosophy that stands behind it, but instead because it fails to separate those two pivotal components of the governmental function: the philosophical and the administrative.

The world’s most successful governments, the majority of these in Asia, divide those two elements, contracting professional functionaries for the administrative part for there to be continuity in the provision of services, while political decisions orient the long-term investment projects. On blending together, or confusing, both functions, Mexico sacrifices its development on the altar of personal and short-term obsessions.

One can approve or reject this or that policy, but no one should be against the existence of better public services that make prosperity possible. Lest the true objective is another.

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Luis Rubio

The “liar’s paradox” is one of the most amusing logic puzzles: If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the truth, which means the liar just lied. In today’s Mexico, lies become truths, corruption is purified and impunity flourishes, confusing both those who narrate daily life as well as those who live it: endless contradictions.

The daily presidential rhetoric, with all the falsehoods that pass through there, is nothing more than a permanent construction of myths, with a strong component of hate oriented to creating prejudices and loyalties. That covers the immediate issues but, in the world of the concrete, myths are pernicious creatures that obscure more than what they illuminate. Denying the existence of factors of reality –such as insecurity, extortion, few economic opportunities and poverty- acquires mythical dimensions. Except that this clashes with what Mexicans observe and live in their daily life and, more importantly, neither square with what then-candidate López Obrador denounced as the great evils that afflicted the country. The contradictions cannot but become more acute during the coming period of succession.

The great paradox that has been showing up in these years is that the president has been able to destroy innumerable institutional structures that hindered concentration of power in his person, but he has had much less impact upon the economy or in the factors on which he built his presidential bid and that are an inherent component of his narrative, such as poverty, corruption and inequality. However, the post-pandemic economic performance has been much better than expected not only by the government itself, but also by the main banks and national and foreign analysts.

There may be no better evidence of the contradictions that characterize the country than the exchange rate: the peso has not only strengthened, but it keeps less and less relationship with what happens in the economy at large and, certainly, with the deteriorating politico-institutional sphere. Violence affects exports such as those of avocados, corruption remains embedded at customs, extortion alters the lives of both the population and of companies, public finances are weaker than it appears (now aggravated by the insatiable appetite of public funds by PEMEX) and the President keeps attacking the Supreme Court of Justice. And yet, none of this seems to impact the peso. The obvious conclusion is that the factors that affect the exchange rate have changed. JP Morgan has just published a study that argues exactly this: that factors such as exports, remittances and commercial exchanges that Mexico keeps with the outside have become structural and, therefore, less susceptible to the ups and downs that characterized the past.

An alert and sensible government would conclude from this fact that what is required is to strengthen the factors that contribute to multiplying investment and stabilizing the economy to tackle phenomena such as poverty and corruption. However, what the government has produced are obstacles to trade and investment, unnecessary conflicts in energy, and a total absence of mechanisms to attract and secure the new manna that is falling from the sky in the form of the so-called nearshoring, as if economic success were pernicious. Regrettably, the perception within the government is precisely this last one, as revealed by the new textbooks aimed at impoverishing the population because they do not contribute to the development of skills among children, so that they can make it in life. Rather, they aim at saturating children with ideological prejudices. The same could be said of the institutions, starting with those dedicated to justice, where there has been a systematic attempt to degrade and subordinate them to the President.

Contradictions are present everywhere and reveal both the government’s objectives and the economic and political reality of the country. The economy has proven to be more complex, mature, and resilient than the government supposed, less susceptible to the President’s attacks. Its structural connection via exports with the US economy has given it enormous dynamism and thirty years of trade liberalization have translated into rising real incomes. In a word, the government is benefiting from the very actions and policies undertaken over the past three decades that it derides so much.

Contrarywise, the past five years have shown that the country faces a political challenge of enormous dimensions. The ease with which the President attacks and dismantles institutions proves that Mexican democracy is far too fragile, and that the citizenry still has not managed to impose itself to exercise its rights. What remains to be determined is whether the political frailty will end up undermining the economic strength.

A few months ago, the authoritarian Polish government approved a law aimed at purging the country of all Russian influence.  The use of Stalinist methods to eliminate Russian influence does not cease to be ironic. Not much different from what is happening in Mexico today.

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