Last Sunday, when I was returning from Jiutepec, Morelos, where I am going to spend a few weekends, if my mother invites me, the traffic stopped completely as soon as we passed the famous “Pera.” Such traffic is common in the afternoon, but it was early, before lunch. The phone app indicated a 50-minute traffic jam, until shortly after Tres Marias. It was raining with sun. This is how we move forward, putting a good face on bad weather.
Near the place where the monumental statue of Morelos used to be (unidentified thieves knocked it down in 2012 to melt it down, but for unknown reasons they were unable to do so. The police found the remains of the bronze near the place where it stood. As I read in a note of The universal, the remains await repair in a warehouse since 2013. Where is Morelos?), entering Mexico City, we noticed that the road was almost impassable from so much hail that covered it, and the meadows on the side of the highway seemed snowy. Many people pulled over to their cars to get out of them, jump over the fence, and play in the hail field. Despite the bad mood of the delay, the scene seemed beautiful to me: hundreds of people taking advantage of Sunday noon and the hail storm to play with the ice, like a bucolic painting in the prairies of a country that does not exist. And that’s what I wanted to write about: about any given Sunday in which I saw happy people playing on the side of a highway after a tremendous hailstorm. But the state of Mexican democracy alarms me, I don’t know if it is worse than in 2018, but we are not better, and we are supposed to be governed by a transforming left that would initiate the transition to full democratic life. But none of that.
On April 26, 2023, we learned that Morena legislators and their allies spent the night machining laws, as if the chamber of deputies were a television assembly line and the deputies were robots who vote. They approved eight initiatives without reading them, without discussing them, without weighing them: a shame. It is increasingly clear to me that they are interested in power, not in democratizing decision-making or strengthening public deliberation. And that matter is serious.
Since I can remember, public discussion in Mexico has been poor: citizens are not educated to give and listen to arguments, nor do we have or create spaces to debate and demand accountability from representatives and rulers. To make matters worse, the evolution of the presidential attitude towards the opposition is going from bad to worse, it went from Salinas who neither saw nor listened to her, to López Obrador who insulted her. The morning is not a space for dialogue, information and concord, it is more like Calvin’s pulpit. According to Stefan Zweig, the reformer used his pulpit to accuse his rivals of heretics, with a flaming finger. And I don’t know what was left in words, he committed one of the sins that the reformers most abominated: he ordered a man to be burned alive for his ideas.
Everyone has reasons to judge the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as they want (I don’t know if with good reasons). What distances me the most from him is his disdain for the public word, for democracy as a government by discussion: he says that he repudiates arrangements in the dark but decides everything behind the scenes and without subjecting it to democratic criticism. In a world of poor political dialogue, the legislature, an independent power, should set an example and discuss, analyze, and democratize its decisions. But they are too workers.
Twitter: @munozoliveira
