Is there really a State in Mexico? If we rely on political abstractions, one would have to say "yes": we have a democratic, federal nation with a division of powers, supported by institutions. Every day, in addition, the media tell us about its life--its tensions, its laws, its political pacts, its confrontations, its strengths and weaknesses, and analysts lean over it, like a biologist over a specimen, to understand and find its healthy functioning. However, in practice, i.e., in the existence of the every day life of citizens, there isn't.
A State is not measured by its structure and its description in the Constitution, or by the discussions raised in the media or what political scientists say about it from the comfortable universe of their cubicles. It is measured by the good it does for citizens. There the reality is other: fear, insecurity, violence, states of emergency in hundreds of zones of the country taken over by crime, tens of thousands of murdered and disappeared, impunity, lack of justice, violations of rights, devastation of the land on behalf of voracious investment.
When this happens it means that the State is empty; it exists only as a shell and an abstraction of thought. It is also a sign that most of those who administer it have decided to turn it into a kind of company that manages counter-violence as a way to make and circulate money. It lacks real policies to control the flow of arms, regulate drugs, attack money laundering and build a path to peace.
When this happens it means that the State is empty; it exists only as a shell and an abstraction of thought. It is also a sign that most of those who administer it have decided to turn it into a kind of company that manages counter-violence as a way to make and circulate money. It lacks real policies to control the flow of arms, regulate drugs, attack money laundering and build a path to peace.
It seems as if the State had turned into the manager of a large flea market within whose luxurious and comfortable precincts--one would have to spend a day within the legislative or judicial precincts or in Los Pinos [The Pines, the Mexican 'White House'] to know this--they discuss and talk about improving the facilities while the death rattle of the people for whom they say they care, of the bloodstained, dismembered bodies of men and women, arrives from outside like an imperceptible rumor. Nothing in these precincts--where everything is cozy and where tensions and disputes are settled in the halls or at the tables of well-provisioned restaurants--evokes the horror, fear and suffering of ordinary citizens.
My analogy is not exaggerated. Since a long time ago, the life of citizens has turned into the life of animals, a life not protected by the State. Even though it says that it worries about them and seeks to remedy the insecurity and do justice, the true reality of the citizen is his almost total helplessness: Always threatened by the violence of taxes that don't result in their security, by social programs that end in counter-productivity--that is, in the opposite of that for which they were created--by the extortion and kidnapping by criminals, by the inefficiency of the investigative police and prosecutors, by the absence of work, the citizen is increasingly becoming an outcast, a migrant, a patient, a victim, a displaced person or, if one can get into the semi-protected areas of the State, a wage slave who is still threatened by insecurity and injustice.
The State, it must be said clearly--even if it offends the delicate ears of some political scientists who believe that the abstractions of theories are the reality--is empty, broken, disfigured. Because of its corruption, it has abdicated its fundamental role: caring for peace, justice and the equality of life. It has abdicated its reason for being, so that, behind the mask of its Constitution, it serves violence.
This is an excerpt of the analysis published in the current edition of the magazine Proceso, now in circulation. Spanish original