Reforma, Mexico City, December 5, 2022
By Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez*
This past July, the New York Times opened a space on its pages for its commentators to point out a significant error that they had made in their criticism...The Times exercise seemed exemplary to me and it invites me to think precisely about my central mistake about the Lopez Obrador regime.
Four years into the government, it is worth looking for the central error of my criticism. The most serious and grievous error that I can identify in my portrait of Andrés Manuel López Obrador [aka AMLO] is having seen in him a pragmatic fiber that was, in reality, a simulation. I was wrong to see in the decisions of the candidate in his third attempt at the presidency and as President at the beginning of his term, a plumb line of realism. I believed that the enormous historical ambitions of the new President would lead him to transcend his sermons and seek concrete realization. I was wrong.
There can be no pragmatism in a man who lacks elementary curiosity about the world, who does not feel the slightest respect for the knowledge of others, who is not looking for reliable information but for acquiescence. There can be no pragmatism in a leader who is not capable of reconsidering the course if things do not go as planned.
More than his speeches, always composed of effective simplifications, the team he chose for his cabinet gave the impression of reasonably pragmatic leadership. I believed that his invitation to moderates and people with administrative experience was an expression of a desire for dialogue and results that could channel a revolutionary ambition. I imagined that the invitation implied respect. It was the opposite. I believed that the opinions of his cabinet members would be taken into account so that public policy would be based on the evidence, so that decisions would conform to the law. Instead, they were decorations for his capriciousness. Some were ignored, others left as soon as possible.
Manichaeism has prevailed over realism. The fantasy of the historical break has prevented us from appreciating a reality that is much more stubborn than ideology. It is impossible to maintain a pragmatic balance when the world evades it. The "fourth transformation" [López Óbrador's vision of his administration] was reduced to the story of the "transformation".
By demonizing neoliberalism, the possibility of forming an accurate diagnosis of reality was canceled. Given the ideological dictate, it has not been possible to notice [political] strengths or successes in the recent past. Everything, in bulk, has been sent to the dump. The entire inheritance was cursed.
Politics, more than reform, thus became exorcism. And removing the neoliberal demon from Mexico became not a matter that requires practical judgment, a timely evaluation of alternatives, a constant examination of results, but rather a few formulas repeated each time with greater vehemence.
I will have been wrong in many other things. The mistake that is most obvious to me is that I saw in AMLO a pragmatist who would temper the radical in him. If that man ever existed, he disappeared very quickly.
*Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez studied Law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Political Science at Columbia University. He is a professor at the School of Government of the Monterrey Technological Institute. He has published "The Old Regime and the Transition in Mexico" and La idiotez de lo perfecto (The Idiocy of the Perfect). From his columns in the cultural section of Reforma, he has published two books of his essays.