Reforma: Genaro Lozano*
Translated by: Amanda Coe
Today, one cannot say one thing to one audience and something different to another. Recently, someone who wants to run for president of Mexico told me this, and it is true. Social networks have helped monitor the positions of those who govern like never before and in real time. They have helped to make public discourse transparent, empowering citizens and the media to question and uncover the truth. However, in Mexico we see scandal after scandal and nothing is done.
We have normalized violence and scandal in a way that perhaps no other country in the world has. Our electoral democracy seems to have built an impenetrable titanium wall around scandals. In countries with more authoritarian political systems, such as those in northern Africa, technology has helped anger to go viral and mobilize thousands of people in the streets, overthrowing governments. The economic crises in Greece and Spain have also brought down governments with voting power and established governments who will “respond” to the crisis.
In Mexico we seem immune. Just in Veracruz there are days that are powder kegs for social discontent and nothing happens. A group of self-confessed junior rapists celebrate a weekend in Las Vegas on YouTube, while more than 160,000 signatures on Change.org demanded that their crime not go unpunished [The self-named "Porkys", (¿Por Qué? Porque. Why? Because.), four young men from wealthy families abducted and raped a seventeen-year old girl and then asked her "forgiveness" in videos, but have not been charged with a crime.].
An American reporter [Andrea Noel] had to leave the most progressive city [Mexico City] in the country because she was harassed in broad daylight and filed a report, which earned her cyber death threats and nothing happens. With the same technological tools, we see in real time a delegation [borough] officer usurping official functions, violating the law for public servants in Mexico City, and the head of the borough covering up that illegality [the "city manager" of the delegation or borough of Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico City has been secretly video recording citizens whom he says are violating city laws and live streaming them on the Internet].
More than a year and six months after the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa normal school students, today the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts is facing a smear campaign for its work that destroyed the historical lie created by former Attorney General Murillo Karam and still nothing happens. In Mexico justice is selective.
In the era of real-time transparency, other nations have consequences for scandals and in Mexico there is only resistance. We need only look south of our border.
In Guatemala, corruption scandals and abuse of power compelled a national conversation and opened the doors to an International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). There, the State said without reservation, “I cannot be alone and I need multilateral support.” The result? President Otto Pérez Molina resigned in September 2015 for corruption scandals and called for new elections. Additionally, tax evasions in its business class are already on the CICIG agenda.
Facing unease in Mexico, a national movement collected more than 130,000 signatures to propel the so-called 3of3 Initiative for officials and candidates seeking election to make their tax statements as well as their declarations of investments and assets public. But, many doubts remain as to whether the initiative will be implemented. Alejandro Murat, the PRI candidate to Governor of Oaxaca, promised to make his 3of3 public. But how can we know for sure that he is not lying, especially facing the information revealed by the New York Times about his alleged properties in New York.
Why does nothing happen in Mexico? If we are one of the most connected countries in the world? If we have a civil society that mass marches in the streets when a new scandal occurs? Why does our political class not react to scandal in the same way as the Chilean president did a few months ago when he changed his entire cabinet following a conflict of interest scandal? What will happen now with the revelations in the Panama Papers exposing a network of global tax evasion and mentioning Mexican businessmen, including President Peña’s favorite contractor [Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú, Head of the Higa Group, who build and financed the "white house" of Peña Nieto's wife, Angélica Rivera]? We’ve hit rock bottom and nothing happens.
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Genaro Lozano is a political scientist with a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research and undergraduate degree from the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico. He is a professor at ITAM and the Iberoamerican University. He is deputy director of Foreign Affairs Magazine-Latin America. He is a CNNSpanish political analyst and contributor to the Mexican Institute of Radio. @genarolozano