The precarious life is, according to the definition coined by Judith Butler, a double condition in which life is deprived both of its essentials and of recognition of the damages produced by the deprivation. Butler developed this notion from her reflections on the U.S. intervention in Iraq. In 2006, not only had there been a decade and a half of continuous bombardment of the civilian population, but the transmission of images of that devastation had been banned by the military. Today removing an action from television screens equates with a blurring of reality. The Americans knew about that war, of course, but they were never confronted with the pain and instability that it caused for the Iraqi people. The framing of the war, the view of the war, was always in the hands of the army, who from the beginning wanted to prevent anti-war protests.
Something similar is happening with hunger in Mexico. Its numbers were never a mystery. National censuses can diminish them at times, but they were never hidden. What is unique is that twelve years of PAN [National Action Party] administrations [Presidents Calderón and Fox] were not enough to place them [hunger statistics] at the center of the nation's problems. At present there is no need to hide a problem in order to deny its existence as a genuine "problem"; in reality, it's enough to blur it in our visual field.
Either way, hunger is a serious dilemma in Mexico, affecting significant portions of the population. The Crusade Against Hunger led by Rosario Robles, current head of SEDESOL [Secretariat of Social Development], has been proposed to combat this serious and dark dimension of Mexican society. A condition that defines the first limit of the precarious life.
In her appearance before the Standing Committee of Congress, Rosario Robles was not able to answer virtually any of the questions put to her by the opposition parties.
Even on paper, the Crusade feels like a strictly rhetorical turn of phrase. It is a coordinated program of several government agencies, but it lacks its own budget. In the event that such coordination is possible, what is striking are the (approximately) four hundred municipalities that have been chosen to implement it. Food will not be brought to the group of municipalities, only to the most affected populations in them.
A review of the list of populations chosen for the Crusade brings the first surprise. A good portion of them are located in urban areas! Many are precisely where the PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution] lost in the last elections. It's the old formula of patronage [clientelismo]: votes in exchange for gifts. Only in this case, what is in play is hunger.
There is something obvious and very sinister in this economics, we might say, politics. It is the very fact of making a precarious life into an object of electoral wheeling and dealing. Finally, if the electoral logic results in the redistribution of concessions, good for those who may obtain them. What is ominous is that the fight against hunger may fail to become an objective taken on as a State responsibility, but as one more front for exchanging something in return for electoral manipulation.
There is something obvious and very sinister in this economics, we might say, politics. It is the very fact of making a precarious life into an object of electoral wheeling and dealing. Finally, if the electoral logic results in the redistribution of concessions, good for those who may obtain them. What is ominous is that the fight against hunger may fail to become an objective taken on as a State responsibility, but as one more front for exchanging something in return for electoral manipulation.
The question lies perhaps in how the fight against poverty might be converted into an attribute of the policies of the State, how it might be removed from electoral business.
The Crusade program is described in pages and pages of empty phrases: "Support subsistence economies", "Classify those without education", "Grant productive lending at low interest rates", "Get good jobs" ...
The problem is that in order to study, maintain a subsistence economy, go looking for jobs or go to the bank for credit! -- all these activities require ingesting a minimum number of daily calories.
There are very simple and proven answers. Mexico City is one of the entities that grants support for seniors and single mothers. These are the first paths of what in the future would be an authentic State with social responsibility, a Keynesian State.
There are very simple and proven answers. Mexico City is one of the entities that grants support for seniors and single mothers. These are the first paths of what in the future would be an authentic State with social responsibility, a Keynesian State.
The National Campaign Against Hunger, like the current Oportunidades program and its antecedent program Progresa are merely repeating the most rancid populism of our dark twentieth century, and they block, of course, the perspectives of what might someday be an effective State of well-being. Spanish original