Javier Sicilia on Mexico Elections: Face of Ignominy Advertised

Proceso: The electoral drunkenness has passed and the country is faced with a horrendous hangover, which the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity has not stopped announcing: the ignominy of the election with its trail of betrayal, corruption, fragmentation, polarization, violence, death and impunity. No one, neither the corrupt, the traitors, the criminals, the idiots nor the logic of violence, won. The responsibility is not only that of the party-ocracias, who refused to make, as we asked in our demands of May 8, 2011, a profound political reform, democratization of the media--that the movement #YoSoy132 belatedly took up--a cleansing of party members and an agenda of national unity. It is also the responsibility of the citizens who reduced, as the party-ocracias wanted, the national emergency and democratic life to an electoral process that--because of the war, impunity and corruption of the institutions and parties--was rotten from the beginning.

Such rot, as Jean Robert says, is not so much in people--even though we must not dismiss them, because the betrayals of Calderon and many public officials and party members, who have not stopped using politics for their own interests and their blindness, have done us so much damage. The rot is in the reduction of democracy to an election issue, a reduction that many citizens have made.

Under the weight of the propaganda, every citizen marked his ballot in five or 10 minutes in order, in reality, to actually limit his power and give it to certain minorities who will exercise it on behalf of all. Peña Nieto, for example, if his ignominious election is validated, will rule with 30% of the electorate, and it would not be different if anyone else had won with the ballots.

This absurdity results in elected minorities denying the right of losing minorities to protest, which generates a polarization as atrocious as it is useless and democracy is emptied of content. "The majorities", wrote Gilles Deleuze--pointing out the way democracies have corrupted themselves--"aren't nobody; minorities are nobody."

A true democracy cannot ignore either the proximity or the "closeness" which is recognized by indigenous and non-partisan social movements. Neither can it ignore proportion, that is, the sizes suitable for the exercise of proximity. When this is ignored--what we call the social fabric--democracy is reduced to the vote and its consequences: government by minority interests.

Democracy becomes a fiction, a smokescreen, a simulation in which the only thing that exists is the experience of the intolerable. In Mexico, the face of the intolerable are the victims both of the war and in the communities that, every day, under the power of these minorities and their interests, are losing their culture, their social fabric, their capacity for self-management and their strength to limit the power, whether it is that of crime or of governments.

This form of democracy that destroys any proximity and "closeness" really is, as Jean Robert says, a "tele-democracy", an illusion of democracy, a corrupted democracy that is already in crisis around the world, with its face of ignominy advertised, and the only thing it generates is frustration, animosity and resentment.

What remains for us, faced with this reality, isn't the struggle for power--a way to validate the corrupt and ignominious game of "tele-democracy"--but the ethical  resistance that requires putting the electoral game completely aside. Not because that is wanted, but because the resistance against the intolerable demands keeping alive, as far as possible, the purity of heart, thought, speech and dignity with which, democratically speaking, you can confront and limit the power of the "tele-democracy" and its abuses.

"A position," as noted by Jean Robert, that is "difficult to sustain because the only ones who can assume it are those who have experienced in their own flesh the absolutely intolerable."

That is those who have experienced the corruption, the violence, the impunity, the death, the persecution, the destruction of social fabrics and cultures, to which the party-ocracias, the state and the media have reduced the country's life. This intolerable, which many are beginning to get used to, are called "the victims"--a word originating in pagan sacrifices--who continue to increase. They are those whom the people in power scorn and who express, as absolute witnesses, the horror and the brokenness that, with the ignominy of the elections, those in power want to erase.

This is the intolerable reality that the "democracy" of minorities has continued to allow spreading throughout the country. A large part of the population has succumbed to accepting that the solution is reduced to the ignominy of an election, an ignominy that only validated what was already there under a democratic disguise. There will be no return to politics as long as this intolerable reality is not taken on and faced in ways that are truly ethical and democratic, that is, with proximity, with "closeness", with proportion, dialogue and a sense of citizenship.  Spanish original