These have not been the best of days for the President. Difficulties
\naccumulate, the economy doesn\u2019t improve and now there are protest
\nmarches everywhere. The issue is not the horror of the killings,
\nalthough that\u2019s what\u2019s caused the current impasse, but rather the fact
\nthat the government has been taken by surprise: as if it didn\u2019t (and
\ndoesn\u00b4t) understand what\u2019s at stake.<\/p>\n
The world is falling all
\naround it but the government has acted under a short-term, tactical
\nlogic: to score points at the expense of the PRD; in his speeches, the
\nPresident does not assume responsibility for security: instead, he
\nsolidarizes himself with the victims (taking five weeks to meet the
\nparents) not as the authority in charge but as if he were an NGO, a
\nnon-government organization. He reminds one more of Fox with his \u201cand
\nwhy me\u201d than the calculating politician and expert political operator of
\nthe recent reforms.<\/p>\n
Days go by and the government doesn\u2019t
\nrespond or heed other voices. In contrast with the time of his
\npresidential campaign when he bent over backward to anticipate future
\ncriticisms with an ambitious proposal in political matters (at least in
\nterms of making a strong media splash), today the government seems to be
\nclueless. This is the moment to set forth a distinct paradigm because
\nthe true problem derives from that the two most important assets that he
\npossessed have been lost: the appearance of efficacy and the
\ninitiative.<\/p>\n
For a year and a half, the government followed a
\nperfectly articulated script, with competent operators in all key
\nplaces, an effective communication strategy and an infinite capacity \u2013by
\nwhatever means available- for engaging the opposition and clasping
\nneutralizing interests to its bosom. Its impacting capacity of execution
\nmet with applause even in the most cautious quarters of society. That\u2019s
\nwhy its paralysis or incapacity of response today is so astounding,
\nwhich could lead to the protests proliferating, inside and outside of
\nMexico. Not a very inviting scenario.<\/p>\n
Iguala didn\u2019t inaugurate
\nthe problems. For months, diverse, ominous signs have been clear, which
\nwere overshadowed by the process of passing reforms. Long prior to the
\nrecent slaughters the economy showed signs of paralysis that the
\naggressive fiscal stimulus hasn\u00b4t corrected but the debt is nonetheless
\non the rise. Oil prices are in a downward spiral, threatening already
\ndeteriorated governmental legers, and Europe warns of going into a
\nrecession, if not deflation.<\/p>\n
Although the security conundrum had
\nbeen suppressed from the media, the reality continues exactly the same:
\nextortion has become an everyday occurrence for small businesses (and
\nmany bigger companies as well), abductions grow and theft does not
\ndesist, even (above all) in the entity that the President until recently
\ngoverned. Impossible to turn a blind eye to this massive, albeit slow,
\ndestruction of social capital. The killings reflect the disorder holding
\nsway in the country, the connivance between elected authorities and
\norganized crime and the total absence of a strategy for combating
\ncriminality. Iguala is crucial because it wasn\u2019t carnage among narcos:
\nthere the State was revealed as a henchman at the service of organized
\ncrime. Denying the reality is not a strategy. The President has to take
\ncharge.<\/p>\n
The reforms project was ambitious in itself. But up until
\nnow, there\u2019s been no more than a change in paper. Independently of the
\nnew circumstances, the complexity entailed in implementation of the
\nreforms is enormous and, above all, calls for skills very distinct from
\nthose that the government has deployed to date. It\u2019s not the same to
\nnegotiate with representatives or to buy votes in the Senate as to
\nconfront mafias devoted to stealing combustibles or biasing contracts
\ninside government-owned enterprises. The former is political operation,
\nthe latter, what\u2019s called governing.<\/p>\n
Impossible to minimize the
\nchallenge that confronts the government and the country but that doesn\u2019t
\nimply that there are no ways out. Perhaps the greatest of the
\nchallenges resides less in the situation in the streets than in the
\nvision of the government. The current governmental thrust reflects a
\nvision that rejects the reality of the external world.\u00a0 Although, for
\nexample, the government actively promotes foreign investment, it doesn\u2019t
\ngive the impression of accepting the reality of a globalized world in
\nwhich communication is instantaneous and decision-making criteria are on
\ndisplay for the entire world to see. The connection between protests in
\nMexico City and in Rome is real and the impact on investors inevitable.
\nThe government cannot pretend to be innovative and modern on the
\noutside while inside there are millions of Igualas a hair trigger away
\nfrom exploding. In a word, it\u2019s impossible, in addition to futile, to
\nattempt to recreate the old paradigm founded on outsiders not seeing
\nwhat\u2019s happening inside and insiders not communicating with those
\noutside. It\u2019s urgent for the government to recognize the need of a new
\nparadigm of political development. As simple and as complex as that.<\/p>\n
No
\none expects the President to solve the problem of Guerrero in fifteen
\nminutes. What the population expects from the President is certainty and
\na sense of direction, that is, institutions which allow Guerrero, and
\nthe entire country, to enter into a dynamic of stability and
\npolitical-legal development that, little by little, would render
\nimpossible, or at least exceptional, the existence of mass killings such
\nas those of Ayotzinapa. Such a vision would compel the dedication of
\nall of that extraordinary capacity of political operation to construct a
\nnew institutional scaffolding and to oblige the key actors \u2013starting
\nwith the governors- to construct government capacity instead of simply
\n\u201cgetting by\u201d in order to get rich, without any benefit for the
\ncitizenry. This is the moment to act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These have not been the best of days for the President. Difficulties accumulate, the economy doesn\u2019t improve and now there are protest marches everywhere. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-3627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publications","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4014,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3627\/revisions\/4014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}