Reforma: Denise Dresser*
Nov. 11, 2019
Greedy, insatiable, like an invading army in pursuit of conquest, Andrés Manuel López Obrador [aka AMLO] and his party [Morena, Movement for National Regeneration] seek to take over everything. In the regulatory bodies, they have placed inept and unconditional supporters. For the Supreme Court, they want to cut the terms of the ministers [justices] to six years [equal to a president's term; currently they are for fifteen tears] and have them ratified by the Senate. For the CNDH [National Commission for Human Rights], they have imposed - and by twisting the rules - a president who is a Morena militant who praises the President uncritically. They seek to remove the head of the National Electoral Institute [INE], Lorenzo Córdova, via constitutional reform.
The objective is clear, the intention is obvious. López Obrador and Morena want to redo the institutional scaffolding to make it available to the President's control. They want to dismantle what the democratic transition built incompletely and imperfectly, to build a new world that is López Obrador's hometown [of which he would be the cacique, i.e., chief, political boss].
They argue that those institutions, which they mutilate with bites, were built by corrupt elites, insisting that they were captured by morally inferior Mexicans who never watched over the good of the people. Now they will finally represent the popular will. Now they will function when they never did before. Thus, with a deceptive narrative and a misused majority, the Lopéz Obrador government erases decades of deliberation, debate and reforms -- ones backed by the left -- that sought to change Mexico.
We wanted to limit the discretionary power of the President, promote a robust regulatory framework to encourage economic growth, highlight human rights violations committed by the government itself in the hope of sanctioning them, inoculate the Supreme Court ministers against political pressures, create an impartial arbitrator for elections so that the PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution that was the sole political power in Mexico from the 1930s to the late 1980s] had to compete and the opposition could win [the PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 2000]. Along the way, there were advances and also setbacks; there were some victories and also many obstacles that the party itself placed in the way.
Yes, times arose in which the INE was silent when it should have ruled on the electoral violations of the PRI and the Green Party. When regulatory bodies allowed de facto powers to impose their own rules and perpetuate the predominant position of privileged oligarchs. When the Supreme Court voted to protect those politically and administratively responsible for the fire in the [government-run] ABC Nursery [which killed dozens of infants and children]. When the CNDH had irresponsible presidents who kept execrable silences. Multiple presidents and all parties succeeded - in one measure or another - to place the institutions at their service. Because autonomy bothered them or criticism bothered them or electoral fines were very high or they detested the imposition of limits to their own power.
But instead of correcting the failed institutions, AMLO wants to colonize them. Instead of fixing all that the parties spoiled when they systematically sabotaged the consolidation of the counterweights, AMLO prefers to end them. This government is not about remodeling, but about owning. It is not seeking to correct, but to submit. It is not about democratizing power, but concentrating it. Fill the government with loyal regulators, disgraceful heads of the Human Rights Commission, submissive Supreme Court ministers, silent cabinet secretaries, obedient electoral authorities, domesticated journalists.
And anyone who tries to point out the undemocratic foundation of these measures will be stigmatized as a fake member of the people, an employee of the elites, a lackey of neoliberalism. But measure after measure, initiative after initiative, reveals a pattern that is alarming: López Obrador is carrying out a purge in the name of the people. He is promoting the removal of democracy in the name of transformation.
Therefore, the task for every democrat - regardless of party affiliation, phobias and ideologies - is to denounce and curb what is happening: the usurpation of the government by a political force as exclusive as the one it replaced. It is the partisan occupation of institutions created to prevent the resurgence of all hegemony, one which today says it governs for the people, but only does so for the devotees of the so-called Fourth Transformation [López Obrador's name for his administration, equating it in importance with the War for Independence from Spain (1810-1821), the Reform Period of President Benito Juárez (1857-72) and the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)].
It is a coup d'etat carried out by a man who believes he incarnates the transformation. Andrés Manuel's actions are underhanded, but he acts with a clear conscience because he is not worried about building more democracy. And it does not concern him that the institutions are defective. All he wants is for them to be his.
Reforma only allows subscribers to access its articles online.
*Denise Dresser is a political scientist, writer, columnist and activist. She holds a Phl.D. in political science from Princeton. She is a professor at the National Autonomous Institute of Technology. She recently coordinated the book "Screams and Whispers: Intempestive Experiences of Women". She won the National Journalism Award in 2010 and has received the French Legion of Honor. Her latest book is "El País de Uno (One Country): Reflections to Understand and Change to Mexico". @DeniseDresserG
Nov. 11, 2019
Greedy, insatiable, like an invading army in pursuit of conquest, Andrés Manuel López Obrador [aka AMLO] and his party [Morena, Movement for National Regeneration] seek to take over everything. In the regulatory bodies, they have placed inept and unconditional supporters. For the Supreme Court, they want to cut the terms of the ministers [justices] to six years [equal to a president's term; currently they are for fifteen tears] and have them ratified by the Senate. For the CNDH [National Commission for Human Rights], they have imposed - and by twisting the rules - a president who is a Morena militant who praises the President uncritically. They seek to remove the head of the National Electoral Institute [INE], Lorenzo Córdova, via constitutional reform.
The objective is clear, the intention is obvious. López Obrador and Morena want to redo the institutional scaffolding to make it available to the President's control. They want to dismantle what the democratic transition built incompletely and imperfectly, to build a new world that is López Obrador's hometown [of which he would be the cacique, i.e., chief, political boss].
They argue that those institutions, which they mutilate with bites, were built by corrupt elites, insisting that they were captured by morally inferior Mexicans who never watched over the good of the people. Now they will finally represent the popular will. Now they will function when they never did before. Thus, with a deceptive narrative and a misused majority, the Lopéz Obrador government erases decades of deliberation, debate and reforms -- ones backed by the left -- that sought to change Mexico.
We wanted to limit the discretionary power of the President, promote a robust regulatory framework to encourage economic growth, highlight human rights violations committed by the government itself in the hope of sanctioning them, inoculate the Supreme Court ministers against political pressures, create an impartial arbitrator for elections so that the PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution that was the sole political power in Mexico from the 1930s to the late 1980s] had to compete and the opposition could win [the PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 2000]. Along the way, there were advances and also setbacks; there were some victories and also many obstacles that the party itself placed in the way.
Yes, times arose in which the INE was silent when it should have ruled on the electoral violations of the PRI and the Green Party. When regulatory bodies allowed de facto powers to impose their own rules and perpetuate the predominant position of privileged oligarchs. When the Supreme Court voted to protect those politically and administratively responsible for the fire in the [government-run] ABC Nursery [which killed dozens of infants and children]. When the CNDH had irresponsible presidents who kept execrable silences. Multiple presidents and all parties succeeded - in one measure or another - to place the institutions at their service. Because autonomy bothered them or criticism bothered them or electoral fines were very high or they detested the imposition of limits to their own power.
But instead of correcting the failed institutions, AMLO wants to colonize them. Instead of fixing all that the parties spoiled when they systematically sabotaged the consolidation of the counterweights, AMLO prefers to end them. This government is not about remodeling, but about owning. It is not seeking to correct, but to submit. It is not about democratizing power, but concentrating it. Fill the government with loyal regulators, disgraceful heads of the Human Rights Commission, submissive Supreme Court ministers, silent cabinet secretaries, obedient electoral authorities, domesticated journalists.
And anyone who tries to point out the undemocratic foundation of these measures will be stigmatized as a fake member of the people, an employee of the elites, a lackey of neoliberalism. But measure after measure, initiative after initiative, reveals a pattern that is alarming: López Obrador is carrying out a purge in the name of the people. He is promoting the removal of democracy in the name of transformation.
Therefore, the task for every democrat - regardless of party affiliation, phobias and ideologies - is to denounce and curb what is happening: the usurpation of the government by a political force as exclusive as the one it replaced. It is the partisan occupation of institutions created to prevent the resurgence of all hegemony, one which today says it governs for the people, but only does so for the devotees of the so-called Fourth Transformation [López Obrador's name for his administration, equating it in importance with the War for Independence from Spain (1810-1821), the Reform Period of President Benito Juárez (1857-72) and the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)].
It is a coup d'etat carried out by a man who believes he incarnates the transformation. Andrés Manuel's actions are underhanded, but he acts with a clear conscience because he is not worried about building more democracy. And it does not concern him that the institutions are defective. All he wants is for them to be his.
Reforma only allows subscribers to access its articles online.
*Denise Dresser is a political scientist, writer, columnist and activist. She holds a Phl.D. in political science from Princeton. She is a professor at the National Autonomous Institute of Technology. She recently coordinated the book "Screams and Whispers: Intempestive Experiences of Women". She won the National Journalism Award in 2010 and has received the French Legion of Honor. Her latest book is "El País de Uno (One Country): Reflections to Understand and Change to Mexico". @DeniseDresserG