One feature of the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto in relation to that of [former President Felipe] Calderón is that it changed the official line regarding justice and security: the State acknowledged its debt to victims, it published the General Victims Law, initiated a program of reconstruction of the social fabric and a program of care for human rights. But at the level of reality, everything continues as it was during the Calderón administration. For example, the war goes on:
- More than 8,000 have been killed in the first six months of Peña Nieto's administration;
- We have no clear data on the number of disappearances, abductions and the extortion that happen every day; and the
- Citizenry remains in a state of defenselessness.
- Few criminals have been arrested and charged in connection with 60,000 [total] dead and more than 8,000 [dead] of this administration;
- We have no clear memorial of the victims; and
- Most of the disappeared reported by the SEGOB [Secretariat of Government Affairs] remain unaccounted for because the SEGOB's list is imprecise.
Far from it and in a way similar to what the Calderón government did, [that is,] criminalizing victims and burying them in a common grave of statistics, the Peña Nieto administration has tried to change the perception by erasing, in the media discourse, the dimension of this tragedy.
Such a strategy is as dangerous and criminal as that of Calderón himself. It leaves the citizenry in a serious psychological and physical helplessness, without the defense reactions necessary faced with the danger, and [hence] it becomes complicit in the crime. For other reasons, Nazi Germany also did it. As Ian Kershaw says,
"It managed to transform the perceptions of reality, but not the reality itself."
Behind the perception, the reality, as is happening in Mexico, was the helplessness of many, the complicity of others due to indifference, impunity, injustice and horror.
Covering up the tragedy under rhetorical humanist forms has its counterpart in the criminal messages that the government launches and that, as I once said, are a continuation of crime by other, political means. The government and the political class continue an old practice that over time has destroyed the moral and political framework of the nation: the concealment of criminals in the center of State institutions. Recently, and only as a fragment of the tip of the iceberg that we are all familiar with, the government covered up and then exonerated officials who used a humanitarian program, the National Crusade Against Hunger, to buy votes.
It has not held Romero Deschamps accountable for his inexplicable, new-found prosperity. It waived the debt of three billion pesos [roughly 2.3 million USD] to Televisa. Mexicana Airlines continues because of corrupt politics, devastated, and behind it, hundreds of families ruined. With these deeds, the message that the government and the political class actually sends, is similar to that gem of State crime and linguistic barbarism with which Felipe Calderón began his administration--"it may have been as it may have been" [MV Note: haiga sido como haiga sido; this saying of Calderón is commonly taken to mean that "although it may be illegal, the ends justify the means"]. For Peña Nieto's administration it is:
When governments, parties and politicians are convinced that the grave problems of a nation can be resolved by feigning rational thought and media-wise pretending to be resolved, the State, as I said in my previous article, is empty, it is pure potential in the service of criminality.
The tragedy that we are experiencing does not need the pretense of rational thought, but the embodiment of justice in genuine, concrete acts at the scale of the humanitarian tragedy and the national emergency that we are living. Only then will the government be a government and the wound that is becoming deeper and more painful find its relief. ... Spanish orginal
*Javier Sicilia Zardain (Mexico City, 1956) is a well-known activist, poet, essayist, novelist and Mexican journalist. Following the murder of his son, Juan Francisco on March 28, 2011, by drug gang members, Javier Sicilia founded the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity, which has organized Caravans to the North and South of Mexico and to the United States (2012) in order to give voice to victims’ stories.
Covering up the tragedy under rhetorical humanist forms has its counterpart in the criminal messages that the government launches and that, as I once said, are a continuation of crime by other, political means. The government and the political class continue an old practice that over time has destroyed the moral and political framework of the nation: the concealment of criminals in the center of State institutions. Recently, and only as a fragment of the tip of the iceberg that we are all familiar with, the government covered up and then exonerated officials who used a humanitarian program, the National Crusade Against Hunger, to buy votes.
It has not held Romero Deschamps accountable for his inexplicable, new-found prosperity. It waived the debt of three billion pesos [roughly 2.3 million USD] to Televisa. Mexicana Airlines continues because of corrupt politics, devastated, and behind it, hundreds of families ruined. With these deeds, the message that the government and the political class actually sends, is similar to that gem of State crime and linguistic barbarism with which Felipe Calderón began his administration--"it may have been as it may have been" [MV Note: haiga sido como haiga sido; this saying of Calderón is commonly taken to mean that "although it may be illegal, the ends justify the means"]. For Peña Nieto's administration it is:
"A crime is committed, but make sure to have enough power on your side to escape justice and its [legal] reasoning."Unfortunately, this is the reality of Mexico: A territory where the majority of citizens have ceased being persons and have become "life forms", [that is,] animal life that can be taken from their social, political and cultural contexts and treated like a disposable project, tool or resource that can be neglected, abandoned, submitted to useless administrative and bureaucratic actions, and annihilated without their suffering ever entering into the realm of the punishable, a material without human form in the service of criminal work, whether legal or illegal.
When governments, parties and politicians are convinced that the grave problems of a nation can be resolved by feigning rational thought and media-wise pretending to be resolved, the State, as I said in my previous article, is empty, it is pure potential in the service of criminality.
The tragedy that we are experiencing does not need the pretense of rational thought, but the embodiment of justice in genuine, concrete acts at the scale of the humanitarian tragedy and the national emergency that we are living. Only then will the government be a government and the wound that is becoming deeper and more painful find its relief. ... Spanish orginal