Scapegoats

November 9, 2025

Luis Rubio

Stop looking for scapegoats. That reflex—so convenient to a politics of polarization—has run its course. When violence spreads and murders grow more brazen, the issue stops being about guilt. It becomes about survival—and solutions. Mexico’s crisis is not the result of one bad decision or another, but of decades of accumulated misjudgments that have unraveled the country’s collective life. The time for blame has passed; the time for reconstruction has come.

Mexico’s fundamental problem is structural. It combines an extraordinarily weak state with a poorly designed and dysfunctional political-administrative system. The result: paralysis, corruption, and failure. Some previous presidents were more competent than others, some more popular—but the overall picture is bleak: a country trapped, divided, stagnant, and at real risk of collapse.

Hanlon’s razor offers a harsh truth: don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. And stupidity has been abundant. After decades of stable growth mid-century, Mexico began to stumble. One government after another reached for quick fixes, never for long-term reform. The 1990s offered a brief glimpse of modernization—reforms, NAFTA—but the institutions built to sustain that progress were fragile. They never anchored in society, and thus were easily dismantled by Morena, brick by brick.

As the economy liberalized, the state crumbled. The old semi-authoritarian regime may have been undemocratic, but it worked until it ceased operating. What replaced it was democracy without capacity: no professional bureaucracy, no clear federal balance, no effective judiciary or Congress capable of checking executive power. Mexico democratized but never learned to govern itself. Its security apparatus—federal, state, and local— never developed, thus it collapsed just as organized crime was going global.

Today, the government’s response to the spiral of violence and decay is morning rhetoric—blame, distraction, and slogans. That may play well on television, but it solves nothing. Polarization is not a strategy; it’s a trap. And once inside it, it can become suicidal.

For years, Washington ceased to attempt to help out in building a modern country, content so long as Mexico’s chaos stayed south of the border. Now, with Trump’s decision to treat Mexico’s crisis as a U.S. national security threat, the question in D.C. is no longer if America will act, but how.

The assassination of Uruapan’s mayor should serve as a wake-up call—and an opportunity. Mexico’s president can still choose a different path: to build state capacity, to take security seriously, and to bring the United States in as a partner, to help convey sustenance and staying power to this effort. The task is to construct a modern state almost from scratch, after the remnants of the old one have been torn apart. Instead of the “second floor” President Sheinbaum had imagined, she needs to start from the very foundations.

No one holds the monopoly on virtue; everyone bears some share of responsibility. But the burden of action lies with the current government. Blame was the first reaction—and it failed. Then came a plan, which is more promising. But Mexico needs more than a plan. It needs a vision: a new way of understanding the problem, and from there, a way out of the abyss.