La Jornada: Rolando Cordera Campos*
As I wrote in my article last Thursday, Mario Luis Fuentes postulates in this month's Mexico Social that Mexico presents itself as inappropriate not only for the children that embody the future, but for vast spaces and human contingents of the national society where democracy simmers or even burns.
Without a legitimate public order, capable of using force and coercion along with civic and political deterrence, there is no democracy. There may be mobilization and then consultation as the result of one or another negotiation, but not a regime based on discussion and deliberation that gives meaning and solidity by invoking the "rule of law" that does not simply fall on us as a gift from heaven. And in this we are--or at least the people of Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca are--and we are with them, so we are left with conjectures, if you will, but given the profusion of messages and images, summary judgments and hysterical vocations that form the context of our disappointments and misfortunes as we head toward the summer, the situation is no less real.
The violence is neither the result of the immaturity of the democratic order, nor does it reflect the superficial nature of our civic and legal culture. It also collects long-established knots of discontent and bad government, government indifference to its basic obligations as public authority and, make no mistake, the usual dirty hands, for whom the emergence of democratic pluralism has been nothing but drivel in their daily effort to keep the lucrative mechanism of buying and selling protection inside the State at its various levels.
The trouble is with this practice of bilateral understandings and in the shadows it casts on several grassroots movements. [Regrettably,] the social roots [of these grassroots movements] could not be translated into lasting institutional forms which, in turn, would bring about a sustained and sustainable understanding of democratic formal politics. Hence the political dualism that drives so many to despair. Perhaps this is why the Congress, instead of being the quintessential deliberative forum, is the choir of complaint and lament, of impropriety in the deals among its own components and, ultimately, the arena of opaque deals, treatment and mistreatment between the mobilized forces and those who are able to serve or who dream of serving as transmission channels between the actual, real powers.
Our democratic transition has had broad and limited mobilizations; however, they did not lead to the constitutional changes imagined to give them means and goals. It is not as if nothing had happened, as if our journey to democracy had not faced traumatic and dangerous moments, like the PRI schism and its bloody sequel of 1988, or the Zapatista uprising with its similar sequel, or the political assassinations of 1994 with their bloody trails of criminality and opacity, and so on.
In 2000 everything was forgotten or buried. It was imagined that power was constituted not only by the ballot box and the parties, but also by the parties themselves and the remaining [social] movements. But this did not minimize the importance of occupying positions and enjoying the perks attributed to a democratic order. However, given the exceptional nature of the transition, they preferred to ignore its immediate origins or to deposit them in the dead file of a nonexistent democracy.
Many events bring increasing awareness of a fragile, unfinished regime that needs the Pact [for Mexico] and the grand agreement. For example, the audacity with which the masked, supposed teachers are acting as well as that of the political leaders when they convene to negotiate; the aggressiveness and violence that accompany these nefarious ceremonies; the continuity of the sinister game of roosters and hens imposed as usual by the remains of political post-revolutionary corporatism; the disposition to simulation by those who, from the sidelines, give instructions to the fighters or decree the end of democracy, which they always hoped would come from above, thanks to the government of decent people inaugurated by [first PAN President, 2000-2006, Vicente] Fox and his board ...of business.
Let's not speak of progress, but of surviving and supporting new forms of government that respect democratic principles but at the same time take charge of the profound difficulties facing its implementation.
Mexico lived for decades under the PRI regime that never resigned itself to being an exception, but that dared, sometimes successfully, to imagine new structural and institutional contexts, directed to configure novel political and economic arrangements that would enable the country, which emerged weak and in pain from the civil war [Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920], to occupy a worthy place in the world. Today democratic rites bump into elemental adversity embodied in a culture of simulation that flows fatally into the cult of corruption, regardless of party. This and more is done based on agreements and understandings, meetings and disagreements that pay little attention to the democratic code and public law.
To insist on continuing supposedly pragmatic route can only pave the road to hell with never-ending violence, while our greatness is futilely tabulated on Wall Street. The reform that is needed must come now is that of the State, because it is there that a meeting must be arranged with all our current and inherited baseness of authoritarianism and its presumption of eternity, achieved through change always directed from the top, but a meeting also of our hopes and potentials for a different course of democracy and fairness.
The quality and universal reach of education has recovered its form in these sad days of the battle for the highway or the sacking of civic buildings and political offices. If what they wanted was to crown this erroneous search with the grotesque occupation of the Rectory Tower [UNAM], then arguably, "everything has burned down". Meanwhile, we must find the time and means for the real and symbolic rescue of public education that--given the inevitable demand of demographics--must be extended to its higher levels as soon as possible.
It bears repeating that this [universal education] is about one of the few provisions of the old liberal, Mexican dream that wanted the Mexican Revolution to become a public treasure always to be renewed, but which the teachers now want to reject under the guise of defending it. The fragility of the State can be overcome by trying to emulate Sierra or Vasconcelos [influential post-Revolution educators]. Here, certainly, there is no room for violence. Spanish original
*Rolando Cordera Campos graduated in Economics from the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], with postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics. Named Professor Emeritus by the UNAM and Doctor Honoris Causa by the UAM [Metropolitan Autonomous University], Cordero has since 2002 been a researcher at the National System of Researchers. A weekly contributor to La Jornada, he is also a member of the Institute for the Study of Democratic Transition and the Mexican Academy of Economics.