Luis Rubio

To dream about achieving Nirvana in record time is always grandiose; to convince voters that this endeavor is possible, within reach, is what politicians do, above all campaigning candidates, all around the globe. If that is seasoned with attractive ideas such as a world without corruption and inequality, the approach would seem to be unbeatable. Politics is precisely that: promote better horizons and bring up the population to procure them.

But decades of great unsatisfied dreams should have convinced Mexicans by now that, without solid strategies and appropriate policies, this grandiosity results is being elusive and, frequently, counterproductive because it alienates voters and radicalizes them. As 2024 approaches, it would be best to start to see things backwards: instead of promising the impossible, future governments should develop the less attractive, the more aberrant, and the more dangerous scenarios, and to then back down from these and initiate a government project likely to transform the country. That is, to understand what it is that one would not wish to happen to make certain that the country will not arrive at that point.

How will Mexico look in 2030, at the end of the next government? Will the inertia have been overcome of a country divided into regions that run (or fall behind) at different velocities, a country that denies opportunities to those most in need and a country that absolves corruption instead of eradicating it? That is, will the foundations have been laid of a sustainable base of concord, peace, certainty and prosperity in which the entire population can participate and count on the conditions that make this possible? Rather than imagining a fantasy world that is often described during electoral campaigns, why not recognize that the current tendencies -nearly all bad- need to be reverted and corrected to end up much better than what exists today?

First, is to recognize the need to break with the dogmas that have paralyzed the country and led it to decades of lost opportunities, as well as to the recent political-economic zig-zag course. All this due to the unwillingness to acknowledge two elemental factors: first, that the country has advanced a great deal in recent decades but, in the same manner, that this advance has not included the entirety of the population nor is it prone to acquiring this in its current state. And second, that it is legitimate for people to be angry, fed up and upset at the lack of opportunities, mostly due to their social, economic and regional origin. Same with poverty, corruption, violence, and inequality, not only on moral grounds, but also in a practical sense: a society that confronts evils such as these is also a nation that knows where it is going and is disposed to get there.

The promises of the reformers (1982-2018) and the transformers (2018-today) -distinct words that are synonymous in practice – have not fulfilled their objective because the country does not have the basic capacities to transform itself nor the commitment of its political leadership to do what’s necessary to attain it. Beyond the vested interests that inhabit the political system and that have been victorious in impeding the success of reforms and transformations, the country does not have a government  likely to lead forward; an adequate educational system to bestow skills, vision and chances for the poorest and least favored populations; a public security system designed from the bottom up (and not the other way around) to consolidate a foundation of peace for the citizenry;  and a network of institutions that guarantee effective counterweights, a legal framework conceived to make possible a modern country that provides certainty and clarity of course. Though there are small examples of favorable results in nearly all these rubrics, the country today lacks the assets necessary to transform itself.

It is more than evident that none of the governments of the last decades ever meditated on the worst-case scenarios that could present, in that practically all the latter ended up yielding appreciably inferior results to those promised and, in some cases, dramatically worse. Their programs, projects and strategies were all conceived in willful fashion: if I will it, it will happen, thus falling into the most elementary of errors, believing that intentions equal results. No government of the last half century is free from that circumstance.

The countries that have truly transformed themselves -in terms of arriving at high income rates per capita,  eliminating (or frankly reducing) poverty and erecting serious, trustworthy and sound institutional scaffolding -that is to say, an environment prone for development and peace- share at least three crucial features: a) the edification of an efficient system of government (almost all following the example of Singapore and its imitators); b) an obsession with economic growth (and their consequent disposition to eliminate obstacles to make this possible); and c) an educational system conceived to transform the population and confer upon it the opportunities that had never before been possible.

It is not the time to dream, but to build that future and 2024 offers an exceptional opportunity to achieve it.

*From the new book ¡En sus marcas! México hacia 2024, Editorial Grijalbo, 2023

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Luis Rubio

In the official version, the only thing left to define the next six years is the name of the Morena candidate (corcholata) awarded the requisite finger tap (dedazo) by the president. If that were so simple, why such intrigue, so many legislative changes, such a barrage of disqualifications and so great an onslaught of verbosity? Were such certainty to figure in the horizon, the rhetoric would be very distinct, above all because many of the myriad cautionary yellow traffic lights along the way are not under presidential control, beginning with the relationship with the United States in all its ambits: the economy (key for Mexico’s exports), the border, security and migration. The official version is logical, but XXI-century Mexico is not that of fifty years ago when the president and his party commandeered nearly complete control of the decisive variables. In this context, is a unitary and competitive opposition candidature possible and viable?

The 2024 election should be understood where the three contrasting realities intersect. One is the universe which the President has been bent on recreating, imitating the old PRI system with its omnipresent presidency and mechanisms of control over and for all. The second reality is the environment where the country is located: an integrated world in which there is a proliferation of information (and disinformation) to which everyone has access and in which commercial, financial and personal exchanges are crucial and permanent for the performance of the economy. And then there is the citizenry, which has for decades demanded access, participation and opportunities and that, despite this, continues to be characterized by an obvious separation between those assuming themselves to be citizens and those living from the government and expecting that their well-being will derive from it.

Each element of the context in which the election takes place entertains its own importance and will impact its evolution, but perhaps the most relevant of these at this moment is the historical one due to that many of the decisions made decades ago created the complex maze in which Mexicans currently find themselves, as well as because the President has his sights firmly trained on the rearview mirror.

Today’s political structure embodies two origins: one is that of the old PRI system erected nearly a century ago, and the other is what resulted from the 1996 Electoral Reform. The former has undergone affectations, the most consequential being the disappearance of the binomial PRI-presidency with the defeat of the PRI in 2000, which dismantled the hyper presidency of yesteryear, but which did not alter the enormous sources of the power of the presidency, those that the President has reconstituted and taken advantage of with tremendous dexterity.

The 1996 Electoral Reform engendered equitable conditions of competition and a structure that guarantees cleanness, neutral and flawless organization of the elections. But the other side of that electoral reform was that it preserved the old system, extending the privileges that one party had enjoyed (then the PRI) to the three most electorally successful parties. It also generated conditions to impede to the maximal extent the creation of new political parties. That is to say, it expanded the monopoly that was formerly exclusive to the PRI but this did not modify the fact that it was still in essence a monopoly. In other words, it changed the way power was acceded to, but the management of power remained without substantive changes.

Those elements of the context are key for the election in the offing in Mexico in that they explain many of the difficulties facing the opposition in terms of assembling alliances, attracting workable candidates and staging an operation likely to triumph in the 2024 presidential election. Party leaderships enjoy the benefits of the monopoly, do not encounter any competition, manipulate the candidacies at will and have a sure source of income that underwrites full impunity for them. No one should be surprised that “citizen” candidacies arise in the sense that they are not assume themselves to be partisan.

The constitution of a solid opposition candidacy ends up rowing against the current and being up against innumerable impediments, which to date have benefitted the party of the government. The requisite question is whether this closes off all possibilities.

The answer is obvious: doors close or open depending on the capacity of procuring alternatives. Mexico is not the first country with authoritarian elements and a government determined to conduct the succession in its own way and without the least heedfulness in matters of (in)compliance with the respective laws. Additionally, there are three novel factors: the opposition won in 2021; now the party of the establishment is Morena (the voters have cast their ballots against incumbents in the government in nearly all elections since 1997); and, more importantly, however much he wishes to avoid it, the President is losing control by the minute. The pertinent question in the end is the following: how an alternative candidacy can be organized and what is necessary for this to be possible.

Although there are the means for building a candidacy, the obvious ones are not always conducive to success: the dedazo entails huge costs and within the opposition no one is there to confer it, and primaries in Mexico tend to subtract more than they add. The opposition must find some mechanism that allows the presentation of aspirants so that, in natural fashion, a candidacy can emerge that will, in the last analysis, attracts the majority of voters, thus becoming unstoppable.

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Luis Rubio

A virtue of the President that merits recognition is transparency: in contrast with his recent predecessors, there is full congruence between his discourse and his vision of the country and of the function of politics and its relationship with the economy. He tells it as he sees it. Different from his forerunners, he entertains not the least concern for claiming to be what he is not, nor the least intention of governing for everyone. Nor does he claim to resolve the country’s problems nor much less to create a platform for the future. His agenda waxes nostalgic as does his congruous vision. The question is whether it is sustainable.

In the eighties Mexico abruptly changed direction in its strategy of development. Therein lies the President’s great bone of contention: his vendetta regarding it derives from that moment in Mexico’s history believing that the post-Revolutionary development project was betrayed. Behind this notion lies a nodal fallacy: that the change was voluntary promoted by contrived technocrats who did not know the country’s history and who, consequently, imposed a world view contrary to the interests of the nation.

The veering off course that the country underwent during those years responded to two inescapable circumstances:  one was the virtual bankruptcy of the Mexican government at the beginning of the eighties. The immediate cause of the crash was the fiscal excesses of the governments of Echeveria and López Portillo, which precipitated the economic collapse of 1982, the debt crisis, a recession nearly a decade long and extraordinary levels of inflation. The indirect cause was that those governments resorted to the concentration of power and functions in the presidency with the objective of restoring the capacity of economic growth, which resulted in being impossible, provoking the collapse. The pretense that by pursuing today the failed objectives of that time could end otherwise simply by avoiding fiscal excesses is unsustainable.

The other cause of the crash was that the world had changed. What the technocrats, despised by the president, observed was that the so-called model of “stabilizing development” that had yielded such good results in prior decades was no longer sustainable. If the objective was to advance and accelerate the development, the country would have to change its growth model, in congruence with the growing diminution of barriers to industrial, commercial, financial and informational exchanges that the technology had begun to drive. In a word: Mexico had to immerse itself in the world or be immersed in the crisis.

The great challenge in attaining those grandiose objectives lay in the incompatibility of the old political system with a modern economy, one integrated with the rest of the world. That is, to be successful, the country had not only to change its economy, but also all its internal structures. However, the “secret” behind the abrupt swerve in direction in the economic project that started in the eighties was that the “real” objective was that of reinitiating the accelerated growth of the economy to avoid modifying the political system. The incompatibility here was understood, but it was claimed to be manageable.

In that contradiction, in that original sin, resides the true difference between the current government and its precursors. The governments of the eighties forward carried out multiple institutional reforms, all of those conceived to protect the economic reforms and confer effective content on the regulations that were required because of both the reforms themselves and of the commercial agreements that had been negotiated.  Thus, were born the regulatory entities in matters of competition, communications, energy, etcetera. In parallel fashion, the Supreme Court of Justice was reformed and, in ministering to the growing post-electoral conflict, the electoral institutions were built.

The paradigm was one of limiting the vast presidential powers, which the presidents that came thereafter observed, at least by keeping appearances. Along the way, incongruencies presented themselves that produced the clash between the demands of a modern economy and the tangible reality at ground zero: beginning with the vast regional disparities in growth, but also the rise pf organized crime, the violence and the insecurity of the population, the dysfunctionality in the Federation–States relationship, and the perverse incentives of the local authorities in fiscal, security and judicial matters.

Those incoherencies and contradictions are the essence of the break brought about by AMLO. In contrast with former presidents, he has acted under a distinct paradigm: he does not profess to construct a modern country. Rather, his project consists of exactly the opposite, in cancelling the modern part of the country to restore the congruence between the economic and the political.

From that perspective, there is no need for him to provide explanations on the espionage engaged in by the government, on the fate of the public expenditure or on the links between his government and the other nations to which he devotes time and resources. In a closed system, one that is introverted (and inevitably authoritarian), the government does not have to explain anything.

The incongruencies are real and within sight of all. The new incongruency lies in pretending that what does function can be cancelled instead of resolving what stands in its way.

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Luis Rubio

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?  Fentanyl in the United States is not only an electoral issue, but one of survival for its society. Although it is clear that the key to the enigma lies in the circumstances that lead to its consumption (of this and other drugs that came before), it is absurd to claim that Mexico is an irrelevant actor in this matter. In fact, the fentanyl crisis in our neighboring country is not different, in concept, from the security crisis that Mexico is experiencing and, more importantly, neither of the two nations can solve their own crisis without the concurrence of the other. It is the story of two crises that feed on each other.

In his novel about the era of terror before the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens scoffs at revolutionaries who aspire to make liberty and death compatible: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” Fentanyl is no different for Americans than extortion, the narcos, and death that stalk countless Mexican cities and communities. The export of this drug, as occurred with its predecessors, feeds the power (and weapons) of the mafias that harass Mexicans.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the president rejects both components of the equation: fentanyl is not produced in Mexico, nor is there a security crisis in the country. What the citizens of both nations suffer from is the product of their imagination. But both crises are real and have inexorable effects. Each society reacts to its circumstances differently due to the nature of their respective political systems, but that in no way changes the very fact that both societies are beset by factors that are irresolvable exclusively through internal action.

Drug use is not a product of their availability, but of the social factors that lead to the existence of demand. That is the challenge of American society. In the same way, the insecurity suffered by the Mexican population is not the result exclusively of the availability of weapons, but of the non-existence of police and judicial forces in Mexico to protect it. As the saying goes, it’s easy to see the speck in someone else’s eye and not the beam in your own.

Two of the most contentious issues in current American politics, especially considering the upcoming electoral contest (2024), are illegal migration and fentanyl. In both, Mexico is a leading actor. That is the irresistible force that is approaching and that is going to impact, whether Mexicans like it or not. In analytical terms, it is possible to discuss the wisdom of blaming third parties for the fact that there is demand, respectively, for drugs and labor, without which neither of these factors would be relevant. But that in no way changes the very fact that it is an onslaught that is already there and that no one can stop it. The big question is whether the Mexican government will continue to behave like an immovable object and, if so, what would be the consequences.

Insecurity in Mexico began markedly with the gradual weakening of the federal government’s security structures in the 1990s. It was the time when robberies and kidnappings suddenly increased. Until then, since the era of pacification that took place after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), the federal government had had such power and presence throughout the territory that this allowed for relative calm and harmonious coexistence. Due to its centralizing nature, the political system never favored the development of local capacities, in this case of security and justice. In this context, it is no coincidence that the gradual, and then accelerated, weakening of the federal government was accompanied by a collapse of security throughout the country. It was this vacuum that organized crime filled, undoubtedly assisted by the weapons that their profits from both criminal activities in Mexico and from drug exports allowed them. But the underlying problem is not weapons or drugs, but the lack of an effective government in Mexico.

It is useless to pontificate against the Americans when Mexico’s problems are so deep and indistinguishable, or at least not addressable, without the concurrence of the other. Therein lies the fallacy of the Mexican political discourse that, in turn, feeds the American rhetoric and makes it credible, as the recent criminal trials of Mexican characters in the US have illustrated. Instead of acting as an immovable object, Mexico could be looking for ways of mutual cooperation aimed at two inexorably linked objects: drugs in the US and violence in Mexico.

“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself” Dickens concludes in the aforementioned novel. The story of two crises that can only be resolved to the extent that both nations cooperate together with their own action internally. Both live in denial, one blaming the other for their ills when their problems are internal, but they require the assistance of the other to attack them.

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Luis Rubio

The purpose is evident. The question is whether it dovetails with the needs of the citizenry, which, clearly, are not the needs of those who redacted the new bill of law. The “initiative in administrative matters of the federal executive branch” is the dream of any bureaucrat: the government decides what is done, how it is paid for, who benefits from it and, if they do not like what is about to come down the pike, they can suspend their acquisition or contract without indemnification. Never, during the decades during which I have observed the manner of proceeding of Mexican politicians have I seen anything as perverse and biased as this.

The bill in question has as its manifest purpose the removal of all latitude and freedom of action from the next government: to persevere in the paradise that today characterizes Mexico, ensuring the permanence of the economy in a recession, that the income does not increase and that the country continues responding to the obsessions of a sole individual.

The bill’s avowed objectives that, in rhetorical terms, appear to be sensible, in reality masquerade his megalomania: its nominal aim is to strengthen the rectorship of the State in the economy. The changes it proposes refer to the faculties and attributions of the government in matters of        concessions, permits, authorizations and licenses; modification (diminution) of potential indemnifications in the case of expropriation; elimination of compensation for damages or harm when a contract is revoked; and it includes a clause of early termination (exorbitant clause) to be added to all contracts with the government. Along the pathway, the preeminence is repealed that at present is granted to international treaties and arbitral agreements. In a word, full governmental faculties are conferred for conducting public affairs without any limitation.

This is about a sudden change in all rules of the game, like the news on electricity right in the middle of Holy Week, all geared toward altering the normative framework in radical fashion.  Were this legislation to be approved, all private investment would disappear, because legal protection would no longer exist. Unless the proposed law were declared unconstitutional eventually by the Supreme Court, the new legislation would usher in the end of the only source of investment that has flourished during the last four years:  the one that enters under the protection of the commercial agreements in force, including the most important, already approved by the current government, that is, the Mexico-United States-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The express objective of this is not to terminate private investment, but instead to subject it to the preferences of the government-in-turn. Very much in the style of the Fourth Transformation (4T), the objective is for whosoever invests to be in debt to the government, which retains the legal faculty of wresting away authorization when it thus decides. That is exactly the opposite of what has been being built during the past decades, when the objective was to consolidate, and to render credibility to, the general rules that were applied neutrally and impartially. As we have seen in these years during which the government has been negotiating (or attempting to negotiate) special deals with each company, especially in the electrical ambit, the objective lies in extending this practice to the aggregate of the economy, bestowing upon it a halo of judicial legitimacy. The case of the Spanish clean-energy company   Iberdrola is illustrative: given that the company was not willing to negotiate in governmental terms, it ended up selling its assets. It appears obvious that the government acquired a political victory, while Mexico and Mexicans got impoverished along the way.

What the redactors of the initiative do not grasp, or do not recognize, is that entrepreneurs and investors, of any nationality, have at their feet the entire world regarding their opportunities to grow and develop. Certainly, the neighborhood with the United States offers an exceptional inducement that has served as protection in the face of the brunt of the battle that government has undertaken; however, that has worked (well below its potential) under the existing legal framework. Were the legal context to be modified as this bill proposes, the situation would be another, very distinct.

An old axiom says that “When a governmental entity cannot, or would rather not, adequately perform its primary function,  or when it feels like its function is insufficiently grand, the agency will expand its mission, thereby distracting attention from its core inadequacy. Sooner or later, everyone sits down at the banquet of consequences.” That is what this bill proposes to achieve: advance the mediocrity of the current reality in order to freeze it in time and render impossible the country’s development and prosperity.

Each person will judge the desirability of this initiative, but the consequences would be inexorable because, in addition to damaging the general credibility of the government and of the legal system, it would constitute a straitjacket for the upcoming administration, even if it came from AMLO’s party Morena.

As the great novelist Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “sooner or later everyone it seated at the banquet of the consequences.” We are now breaking into a run toward that.

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Luis Rubio

At the beginning of the year 2000 Mexico was facing a crossroads. The electoral contest was taking shape, the electoral institutions had been duly installed, and the expectation, overly justified, was that the electoral jousts  would be clean, competitive and pacific. However, no one knew what the result of the election would be. That is, Mexico was entering what later was known as “democratic normalcy” where there is certainty with respect to process but not to the result, precisely contrary to the history of the XX century, in which the result was known by all from the moment a candidate was nominated. Mexico has now returned to the world of the uncertainty of the process as well as of the result, which opens an infinity of possibilities, most of these auguring ill.

When that notable year was beginning for Mexican politics, 2000, I wrote the following: “Perhaps the greatest of the sources of risk resides in the recollection of the political violence registered the last time   we witnessed an electoral process to elect a federal executive [1994], a highly destructive moment.  It is in this context that it remains to be elucidated whether the coming months will take us nearer to the Shakespearian or theChekhovian model. In his tragedies Shakespeare’s personages ended up achieving the revindication of a sense of justice, but all were dead in the end; in Chekhov’s tragedies, everyone ended up sad, disillusioned, angry, disenchanted, embattled, bitter, but alive. The conflicts inherent in Mexican society are not going to disappear overnight; but what we Mexicans require is that the management of politics brings us closer to Chekhov, because the alternative is simply unacceptable.”

Twenty-three years later, and fourteen months from the next election, the country has advanced in certain aspects, but has retrogressed in many others and, thanks to the bills advanced by the government in electoral matters (the famous “Plan B”), the probability of greater deterioration both in political as well as in security matters can no longer be discounted. To start with, the great accomplishments in electoral matters -certainty in terms of the process, but not the result- could well be reverting for the sake of attempting to impose a result independent of the will of the electorate. A grand citizen triumph -perhaps the grandest in Mexican history- could be seeing its last days.

And that is so much more important in the light of the little that Mexican democracy has advanced in all the remaining areas. Although it advanced in electoral matters from 1997 on, the country could only with difficulty call itself democratic when no more than   58% of the electorate calls itself citizens (versus the 42% that assumes itself to be “the people”), a bare majority willing (and able) to defend their rights.  More to the point, no one could seriously argue that the country is basking in peace, that it enjoys an effective system of government, justice “swift and expeditious” and transparency and accountability on the part of responsible authorities, Clearly, things have changed, in many cases for the better, with respect to the era of the “hard” PRI, but Mexico does not qualify as democratic under  conventional international gauges.

Backward or forward? That is the predicament. Backward, the road marked by the new electoral setup advanced by the Executive branch would imply grave deterioration in democratic matters, but above all a growing risk of violence. Not even the shrewdest supporters of the regime could argue that the country has improved in economic, political, justice or security matters. The governmental narrative is verbose, but advances in the real world are nonexistent, and all of that accumulates over time to create an expanding and uncertain milieu that is more prone to hardly desirable scenarios.

Fourteen months to the next elections are many months of high politics and low passions.  Time for the candidates to take form, both the one of the government’s party as well as that of the opposition, time for the society to express itself in all its semblances and characteristics, a circumstance of a pluralistic society that does not accept the imposition of labels or fallacious skewing and disqualifiers. Time for the citizenry to shoulder their role and responsibility as corresponds to a free and sovereign society.

The National Electoral Institute (INE) -that weighty and complex entity- came into being thus due to the enormous uncertainty that existed, due to the potential for conflict that each   electoral contest generated and because, in the last instance, the citizenry had not been able or would not have wanted to take on the responsibility of limiting the abuse of the political parties or of the government. Almost three decades later, the citizenry must assume that role to guarantee that the process will be clean, competitive and pacific and that the result, whatever that may be, will be respected by all of the participants. That is the citizenry’s moment: with its majority vote it should guarantee the results being overwhelming and indisputable.

Shakespeare or Chekhov: therein lies the dilemma. As in any democracy that is respected, some will not be content with the result, but all should emerge alive, respected and duly recognized. With or without the INE, it would be best for the citizenry itself to guarantee it.

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Luis Rubio

What is the moment at which the social order breaks down?  When is it most probable for a society to enter processes of confrontation outside of the established institutional channels? Questions like these are the material of permanent discussion and analysis in academic as well as in governmental instances around the world. Some seek to explain the potential flareups, others attempt to prevent them.  What is interesting is that there is an increasingly greater coincidence in the criteria that these two so contrasting groups of professionals employ, and that coincidence intimates higher risks for Mexico.

The issue is not particularly new: the concern arose in the fifties, at a stage when coups d’ état, dictatorships, civil wars and other similar phenomena began in diverse nations worldwide. The moment when all this took place was not the product of chance: when WWII ended (1945), the United Nations as well as the winning powers devoted themselves to promote the development of nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some of those countries had recently become independent, others had been defeated during the war and many more simply attempted to raise the growth rates of their economies. It soon resulted that these changes exerted destabilizing effects.

First the academic, and later the international and intelligence instances of the most powerful nations (of both sides of the barrier of the Cold War) dedicated themselves to try to understand and interpret the phenomenon. Thus was born the theory of modernization, whose initial objective was to comprehend the process of social and political change that ushered in industrialization.  Some argued that there were stages in the process of development, others observed the way the societies and their political systems evolved.

The focus changed when situations of conflict started to emerge, breaking social conflict and State coups d’état. Certain governments, especially those of United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, reacted in radical fashion, seeking to impose their law by means of force, frequently without success, or at least not without entailing long-term negative consequences. For their part, the scholars and analysts began to look for explanations for the phenomenon. The new era of interpretation, throughout the seventies, concluded that the problem was not one of underdevelopment nor of modernity (nor of development in itself) but instead one of a passageway between one and the other: on inducing economic processes of accelerated change the social order lost its natural equilibrium,  provoking conflict and, often, instability.

Fifty years later the matter has returned to the arena of discussion due to a new wave of situations of instability, but above all to a novel phenomenon. The characteristic of this period has been democratization in more and more nations. Some of these achieved a complete transition, accomplishing unusual stability (illustrated by cases such as Spain or South Korea). But, increasingly, the processes of democratization have undergone significant setbacks, which has led to the coining of terms such as “illiberal democracy,” “anocracy,” “ochlocracy” or, simply, autocracy. A Norwegian institution, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), has committed itself to codifying events of that nature around the world to categoriz+e the conflicts.

The main conclusion of all these studies* is that the lack of consolidation of the democratic institutions is what leads to instability in this era. The nations more prone to conflict are those that remained in the stage of electoral democracy and/or that did not get as far as constituting themselves into true liberal democracies. The most delicate moment for those democracies is that at which the promises of democratization do not dovetail with the capacity of their governments and economies to satisfy them.  Which leads to the risk of instability or, more persistently in this era, to extremist leaders who arrive at power via the democratic route only to later consecrate themselves to dismantling the institutions that allowed them to ride the coattails to power.

Mexico is now at a crucial moment in these matters. The country was able to take a great leap forward during the nineties on creating exceptionally strong electoral institutions that facilitated equitable competition between the political parties and candidates, initiating a new political era. However, that enormous advance did not translate into improved well-being for the entirety of the population, in good measure because the governments that resulted from the democratic electoral processes did not always display the capacity to advance their projects or legislations   principally because the democratization was not accompanied by strong institutions that were effectively turned into effective counterweights.

That was the context in which there came into power in Mexico, via democratic means, a president who, from day zero, has applied himself to building a growing autocracy, without this representing a better conduit for the solution of the problems of the country. The risk of this evolution lies in the country’s mushrooming radicalization. The citizenry must respond to it in the face of so transcendental a challenge because the alternative is unacceptable and much more costly for all.

*A good summary is found in   Walter, Barbara F, How Civil Wars Start, Crown, 2022

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a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx

Luis Rubio

The neighborhood is not only complicated but also extraordinarily contrasting. Although the border region between Mexico and the United States constitutes an exceptional space, distant from Mexico City as well as from Washington, the reality is that it is the most critical flash point in view of the year 2024, a moment at which the presidential elections of Mexico and the United States will coincide. It is there that the fears of the Americans will converge with the failures of Obradorism and the result is anything but certain.

Octavio Paz wrote that the border marks a greater cultural than geographical difference, an encounter of contrasting civilizations. Nothing illustrates this better than the way the Mexican government has responded to the growing U.S. clamor for Mexico to face its security, border control and migration problems. There is no doubt that the outcries of the U.S. legislators and governors entertain an evident political and electoral connotation trained on attracting their own voters, but that does not alter the fact that what impacts Mexicans are not the diatribes of prominent U.S. figures, but instead the extortion and violence that affect practically the whole population.   Wrapping oneself in the flag is very emotive, but that does not in any way change the reign of impunity and fear under which nearly all Mexicans live.

Similarly evident is the bias that the current Mexican government has imprinted on the strategy toward the U.S. Recognizing, however implicitly, that geography is unalterable, the government has maintained a somewhat schizophrenic policy  toward the Northern neighbor: fear concerning Trump, disdain for Biden; disinterest in the rules of the game inherent in the Mexico, United States and Canada Treaty (USMCA) vs. individual actions for specific companies to allay the risk that the U.S. might undertake punitive actions; control of Central-American migration, but paralysis on being confronted with the migratory crisis percolating along the entire border. Were it possible, the government would have distanced Mexico from the United States; since that is not an option, the government does whatever possible to provoke it. The risk lies in that, when the goings get complicated, it opts for setting off the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. This is not a small nor a minor risk.

The solution to the problems of Mexico does not reside in the presence of U.S. troops (or advisors) in its territory, but it is likewise obvious that many of the central problems characterizing Mexico cannot be attended to without the participation of the American government, nor can they be divorced from the reality of that country.  The easy way out would be to envelop oneself in the flag and hurl oneself (metaphorically) over the wall of Chapultepec Castle, but that would not change the circumstances of a region in which the one depends on the other.

The situation recalls Marx’s often quoted phrase in the sense that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce and we are now in the farce phase. Much the same disquisitions took place in the eighties and the final decision then was that it was impossible to resolve Mexico’s key problems without the concurrence of the U.S. government.

The notion that is possible to divorce the two countries is not only nostalgic, but also fallacious, merely ideological. Mexico’s real problem, exacerbated by the fact of the neighborhood, is found in the existence of a government that does not have the capacity (nor the disposition) to address such basic problems as security, justice and economic growth, all critical for getting ahead.

The visceral response is always to attack when confronted by the actions (almost consistently discursive) of the U.S. side, but that does not solve the problem facing Mexico, which is not drug addiction or fentanyl, but rather that the most rudimentary security has been denied to the population. I have not the least doubt that the arms turning up from the United States contribute, even decisively, to consolidating the power of the Narcos, but the Mexican problem is not that. As in so many other things that characterize the bilateral   relationship, whether that be directly or indirectly, the arms are pure and simply an incidental factor.

The President is beguiled by pipedreams of restoring the old political system and has dedicated his government, in its totality, to that purpose.  However, in terms of the matter of the bilateral relationship and security, the old system is unreproducible. In the middle of the past century the federal government was hyper-powerful, which conferred upon it the possibility of imposing conditions and limits on the Narcos of that epoch, all those Colombian. Today the Narcos are Mexican, they have entire regions under their control and the federal government is weak. Worse yet when that weakness is emphasized on limiting the capacity of action of the Army and the Navy. And much worse, because that is the underlying issue, when there is no investment in the building of a security system from the bottom up, the only one susceptible to modifying the reality of impunity and violence in the long term.

The neighborhood is an inalterable reality. The question is whether Mexico will see this as an opportunity or as a curse. As with Marx, Mexico has returned to the era where it is seen as a curse. The only one of the two that will function is opportunity.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

 Americas Quarterly
by Luis Rubio
March 22.2023

The president’s vision for the country is erasing years of institution-building efforts—and endangering its economic and political stability, says the chairman of Mexico Evalúa.

MEXICO CITY — Mexicans seem to enjoy economic and political crossroads; the country is often faced with one because it seldom addresses its underlying challenges. Now, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has chosen to avoid economic crossroads altogether by simply killing the goose that lays the golden eggs—and even the USMCA is at risk.

For the last four decades, Mexico has lived through a contradiction that lies at the heart of its inability to cope with the ever more complex management of a modern economy. Other nations were willing to undertake broad reforms since the 1980s—including to their political systems—to stabilize and create conditions for long-term economic development. In contrast, Mexico undertook economic reforms largely in order to avoid reforming its politics. Therein lies the huge difference in results between Mexico and Chile, or between Mexico and its Asian peers.

Domestically, the persistent incoherence between the economic requirements of an ever more complex economy and the political capacity to deliver conditions for prosperity is what largely explains the vast differences between states. On one hand, Aguascalientes or Querétaro grow at Asian rates. On the other are the poverty-stricken southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, which continue to be dominated by local fiefdoms and special interests.

Moreover, these incompatibilities explain much of the other ills that affect Mexico: violence, organized crime, dysfunctional relationships between the federal government and state governors and, especially, the democratic deficit that continues to widen.

Through all these years, one administration after another subscribed to the paradigm that institutional build-up would strengthen the economy and lower the impact of the political incapacities that resulted from an old, stagnant and special interest-ridden political system. That explains the creation of regulatory agencies like the Competition Commission, the Telecommunications Commission, the Energy Regulatory Commission and so on. Same with the reform of the Supreme Court in 1994 and the creation of the independent electoral authority in 1996. Institutions were created to make up for the lack of a political system capable of addressing urgent needs like a functioning security system.

In retrospect, much of this has proven to be mere quick fixes that failed to address underlying issues, which, at their core, lead to the excessive powers of the Mexican presidency. Previous presidents opted not to challenge these institutions but, in retrospect, it’s clear that they had the power to change them, as AMLO has proven.

What matters is that, despite the failures in results, most Mexicans supported the process because they could see how the modern part of the economy—the one tied to NAFTA and, today, USMCA—worked. Unfortunately, the hope to join the winners became ever less likely to materialize as violence and the lack of a proper judicial and police system eroded not only hopes but also the daily livelihoods of most Mexicans, which led to the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

AMLO follows a very different paradigm. For him what’s wrong is not the old political institutions that hamstring the economy, but the fact that the country is pursuing modernity when it should be sticking to its traditions. In a revealing visit to a small town in Mexico two years ago, he spent an inordinate amount of time visiting and praising an old, donkey-driven sugar mill. His message was clear: Mexico would prosper only to the extent that it went back in time. Therefore, his thrust has been to undermine the modern side of the economy while seeking to strengthen the presidency and the old national oil company. He’s aiming to solve the conundrum created by the disparity in economic and political reforms by backtracking on the economic reforms.

The last time Mexico took a similar route, back in the 1970s, the government went virtually bankrupt in 1982. The reforms that followed sought to break away from the vicious cycle of a government-led economy. But the lesson that AMLO derived from that era, when he was the PRI leader of his home state of Tabasco, was that fiscal excesses produced the collapse. Had those presidents been thriftier, goes his line of thinking, Mexico would have thrived.

None of what the president has done addresses the issues the average Mexican faces today, nor those that he himself identified, rightly, as the country’s core problems—like poverty, corruption and inequality. This augurs badly for the end of his term. Of course, if the election were held today, AMLO’s nominee would win outright. But 15 months from today, things may very well be radically different; the costs and liabilities he has piled up and the lack of results will likely take their toll. No less important is the fact that his party is now the incumbent and Mexicans have voted systematically against incumbents since 1997, the first election managed by the independent electoral authority IFE (now INE).

But now the INE itself risks being weakened and could be seriously undermined before the election. Meanwhile, the administration continues to challenge its partners in the USMCA, first with the energy reform and now effectively changing the rules on corn imports.

One can only wish that Mexico were facing a crossroads with at least one attractive alternative. But this will happen only if there is a truly competitive election in 2024, not the most likely scenario as institutions are being systematically curtailed. All of this bodes ill for both Mexicans and our neighbor to the north.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rubio is chairman of the think tank México Evalúa. He writes a weekly column in newspaper Reforma, and is the author and editor of dozens of books, including Unmasked: López Obrador and The End of Make-Believe, published by the Wilson Center.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/mexico-is-killing-its-golden-goose/