Democratic Mythology – Process

After a long and unbearable electoral contest, the question arises: do we have democracy? If we reduce time to the moment of the election, we would have to say “yes”: Claudia Sheinbaum and the “Let’s Continue to Make History” party alliance won the elections of June 2. On the other hand, if we consider that this is a form of government that allows citizens to live in justice and harmony, we would have to say “no”. It is impossible to talk about democracy in a country increasingly plagued by organized crime and violence, corruption, fear, extortion, secret graves, missing people, murders and 96% impunity.

There were 62 homicides on election day; a day later, crime claimed the lives of Yolanda Sanchis, the mayor of Cotija, Michoacán, and her bodyguards, but no media outlet bothered to record their names. In the days that followed, the number of homicides increased steadily and horribly.

Claudia Sheinbaum and Let’s Keep Making History may have come to power with the votes of legitimacy (nearly 36 million), but they did not win the government and they did not walk on democratic soil. The reason is that the state, the scaffolding that makes governance possible by guaranteeing peace, justice and security to its citizens, has been captured by organized crime to the point of preventing the possibility of any government. From the Calderón era to the López Obrador era, the words that described it – “failed state”, “narcostate” – described it in a contradictory way.

Without the state, government and democracy are impossible: a fantasy, a dream, a utopia that appears at every election moment and disappears after a few days, months or years.

The only possibility for Claudia Sheinbaum and the country as a whole to escape this scourge that has been growing since the democratic transition is, first, to accept the reality: the Mexican state and the nation are subjugated by organized crime; and later, to unify the country around the sole and absolute priority of policies capable of rebuilding the country and returning it to its fundamental mission.

Unfortunately, Sheinbaum refused to accept reality. She emphasized in the accompanying letter: Commitment to peace Promoted by the Mexican bishops. In it he rejects the document’s diagnosis: he does not accept the fact that the country is surrounded by large criminal networks, that the six years of López Obrador’s presidency have seen an increase in crime, that there is militarization and that the national, state and local security strategies are insufficient to stop the avalanche of criminal activity. For her, there is no justice for the nearly half a million victims that have accumulated from the Calderón government to the López Obrador government. Nor is there a Semeforth filled with corpses, nor the more than three thousand clandestine graves that the search for mothers has found; no roads occupied by criminal gangs, no more than 100,000 missing persons, nor the moral decay of the country.

Unlike most people who have integrated and normalized terror into their daily lives, for Sheinbaum, reality was just a blurry background amid the intoxication of an election victory.

Therefore, their proposals to address the problems that undermine their ability to govern and build democratic soil are both mediocre and worrying: deepening the militarization of the state, developing military BroadCast Unitedligence, improving coordination between police and prosecutors, providing scholarships for young people and strengthening the National Guard. Far from healing social and political life, they will only cause it to suffer even greater damage.

In order for Sheinboom to be able to fulfil his mission to govern the country and save it from violence, he should focus his sights and will on eliminating the criminal state. This means placing the victims – the poorest of the poor – at the centre of political reasoning and starting from them to develop a serious and comprehensive policy of truth, justice and guarantees of non-recurrence in order to seize state power and restore its raison d’être. To guide the country towards peace.

Commitment to peace They are full of recommendations in this sense; the same is true of the documents on transitional justice prepared at the beginning of the six-year term that is about to end, which were betrayed by López Obrador, exacerbating the deterioration of the country and the state. If the Sheinbaum government, political parties, academics, businessmen, students, social organizations, etc. do not see it as a national priority this time and betray it again, hell – and I will not stop repeating it – it will get deeper, deeper and darker.

After the electoral drunkenness, what is at stake is not democracy – we have never known democracy – but the state life that must make it possible. The dictatorship we live in today is not the populism of López Obrador, as the opposition believes, nor the return of the old clerical “soft dictatorship”, but the organized crime state that has never stopped repressing and taking over the country since the democratic transition.

If we don’t stop it this time, if we let it develop in the name of new and costly electoral victories, we will lose this country in the coming decades and our democracy will continue to be what it has always been. A myth, a utopia, a fantasy and nonsense from hell.

Furthermore, I believe that the San Andres Accords must be respected, the war must stop, all political prisoners must be released, justice must be done for the victims of violence, governors and criminal officials must be tried, the murder of Samir Flores must be tried, the Le Baron massacre, the mega-projects must be stopped and governance must be returned to Mexico.