La Jornada: Adolfo Sánchez Rebolledo
Translated by Sally Seward
Just a few weeks ago, nature tested the fragility of the structures constructed over risk zones, preyed on as a result of the web of corrupt relationships, dark businesses, and authorities that do not respect the law, feeding the multiplication of voracious developers that swim like sharks among the needs of the people.
The human disaster still has not ended and the most important thing is missing: reconstruction that reduces losses, returning to the destroyed communities the opportunity to survive, since this is what it’s about in many regions. In spite of the waterfall of declarations, things will probably go back to being the same and, apart from some elementary lessons about civil protection, things are still the same. The official help will continue to be an instrument for containing poverty at manageable levels, but they will not have taken advantage of the occasion to rectify the path that has brought us here.
On the other hand, if you observe the discussion about the so-called structural reforms encouraged by the Presidency, except for the aspects most challenged by the right, the same direction that has presided over economic policy in recent decades still persists. The elites not only resist leaving behind the old catechism popularized by the Iron Lady [Margaret Thatcher], but they also compete to appear to be those who most adore the orthodoxy, as the PAN sadly wants to be more classist than the [PRI] leadership itself, which says a lot.
Also, in the highest circles of power they talk about the economy as if it were a toy created to measure the ingenuity of some gurus of the tribe, without ever thinking to establish a cause-effect relationship between the measures that they decide and the needs of the majority of society.
There is no will to rectify. Never mind that the statistics (that say they don't lie) show that today there is more poverty than there was yesterday, and that inequality is being maintained as the great structure over which the modernist ambitions of the elite are being laid out; the dreams of the middle classes masked between "informal" privilege [working in the informal, cash economy] and miserable wages, defined on a whim of the supposed experts with the consumerist passion that gives identity to the phantasmagorical "small bourgeoisie" of other times. The truth is that "ways out" from the standstill are ignored as long as the theory remains that "there is no alternative", a ferocious war cry that has maintained financial stagnation and the country's fall from wellbeing.
Instead of weighing new solutions, based on the interests of the majority, to reduce inequality, create employment and launch a cycle of growth, what you hear in the middle of the recession is an act of faith in the current model with variants in favor of the unconditional freedom of the business sector. Evidence abounds. See, for example, the unanimity for saying that the Bank of Mexico "should keep as their only order that of reducing inflation, without it being their responsibility to put into practice actions to drive the economy and employment".
It doesn't matter at all that "the generation of new employment in the formal sector of the Mexican economy registered an annual decline of 38 percent from January to August of this year" (La Jornada, 10/15/13). Is that an innocuous piece of data? Is it, in spite of the notorious increase in social protests in all of Mexico? If by superior will, the figures of criminal [drug war] horror have faded away, violence does break out here and there, whether it is a warning that something is going badly, or the anticipation of what awaits us if we do not take the signs seriously.
The malaise is palpable. But nothing happens; not in the form and magnitude that could be assumed if reality were to adjust to the visions, norms and ethical principals that we believe to be universal.
The government is not serious in its proposals. It does not talk straight about its intentions with decisive subjects, such as the energy reform, but without a doubt it knows what it wants, even if it prefers the lack of transparency of the supposed negotiations that allow it to create the fiction of unity. They are sure of one thing: the most important thing is the constitutional reform and then everything else will come along as well, even if corruption remains intact. The PAN blackmails because it knows that it agrees with the Presidency on what is fundamental and it wants to take advantage of that.
The left, divided, is against sacrificing the national interest to the project of extreme subordination to globalization or, at least, to the capitalism of the United States, but it has not offered a possible short-term path for creating the missing option either, since it is not a matter that can be reduced to ethics or technical design. All of the pieces need to be united in a genuine shared national project.
From the dominant coalition, without a doubt the minority that decides which path to take, attempts are being made to clear away the limping capitalism ... or legal obstacles from the Mexican Revolution and to overcome the populism of the past as it is understood by these new libertarians of the "private sector". For some of their spokespeople, national security is at play, ... Does anyone really think that Mexico's national security policy is based on the opening of strategic areas [oil] to international capital?
But that ideal, nevertheless, doesn't fit into the frame of the Mexican constitution without compromising its principles and essential coherence. Why don't the supporters of greater liberalism opt for a new Constitution based on the principle that democracy is established on entrepreneurial freedom and give narrow business classism the place that its supporters deserve? Perhaps, like in the case of the oil reform, they could follow the steps of other successful experiences. Or ask to be the fifty-first state of the very powerful country next door. They don't do it because they can't, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to. Spanish Original