Enrique Krauze receives the III Spanish Orders History Award, in Madrid in July.Ballesteros / EFE
I celebrate the attitude of the Government of the so-called Fourth Transformation to designate Brenda Lozano as a new cultural attaché in Spain, who has been questioned from the workers' ranks for her criticism of the current president. An act of tolerance that would seem commendable, considering the many suspicions left by the dismissal of the previous head, Jorge F. Hernández, immediately after publishing a critical article against a regime official, to the extent that it ultimately triggered his resignation. of the person in charge of that dismissal, Enrique Márquez, director of cultural diplomacy in Foreign Relations.
I do not know if this resignation and the appointment of Brenda Lozano is a kind of reparative or compensatory act, carried out expressly with the idea of rejecting the accusation that the government operates with criteria of intellectual or ideological intolerance; just the perception that caused the cessation of his predecessor.
What seems less commendable to me are the reasons specified by the president himself to justify this appointment. Faced with an express question, in the morning conference this Wednesday (Márquez had not yet resigned), López Obrador's response was disappointing, to say the least. “I have nothing to comment on. It is very difficult to find in the administrative apparatus people who are not related to academics, with intellectuals who dominated for a long time…. There were only two groups that dominated the world of letters, we have said it here: that of Krauze and that of Aguilar Camín, and in the end they are the same politically. It's like two parties, which I don't want to mention, they seemed to be different, right? Or it's like the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola ... Unfortunately, they were predominant throughout the Treasury, Agriculture,Economy, Foreign Relations ”. A domain, he said, that has been exercised without restriction for more than three decades.
In summary, López Obrador assumed that his Administration was forced to hire a critic of his government due to the absolute monopoly exercised by the chapels of Enrique Krauze and Héctor Aguilar Camín, heads of the
Letras Libres
and
Nexos
magazines
, respectively.
There are two troubling elements in this response. On the one hand, an absurd reductionism that does not do justice to the intellectual and artistic communities that exist and have existed outside the two aforementioned cultural projects, both in the capital and throughout the territory. The president obliterates the enormous universe of magazines, academic circles, conferences, study groups, publishers, cultural supplements, regional book fairs. As important as the two monthly magazines to which it refers are, their influence pales in the face of the enormous intellectual and cultural weight that UNAM, El Colegio de México or regional universities have had in the country's thinking throughout the entire territory. . Publications such as
Revista de la Universidad
,
Artes de México
,
the Gaceta del FCE
,
Lee
de librerías Gandhi,
FEM
,
Gato
Pardo
,
Etcétera
,
Revista Mexicana de Comunicación
and 277 other periodicals mentioned by the Ministry of Culture itself; or current or missing cultural supplements such as
Saturday
,
Confabulario
,
Día seven
,
La Jornada Semanal
and the cultural sections of national and local newspapers and magazines such as
Proceso
or
Zeta
in Tijuana, to name a few. I do not think that Carlos Monsiváis at the time or now Paco Ignacio Taibo and Juan Villoro, intellectual references for many other writers and thinkers, could agree that in this country there are not nor have there been in three decades other intellectuals beyond those related with Krauze or Aguilar Camín, to the extent that the Government is now forced to recruit them, according to AMLO's response.
In addition to the disdain that such reductionism represents for this heterogeneous, vast and complex community, the president's statements pose another problem. In this suffocating oversize of the influence that he attributes to Krauze or Aguilar Camín there is something worrisome because it ends up hindering the reading of reality. Undoubtedly these are two intellectuals who lead groups that systematically question the Government of AMLO and even his person. It is also true that their publications and cultural projects were pampered by previous governments. But that does not mean that this criticism necessarily obeys, as the president usually affirms, the exclusive interest of recovering his privileges. Personally, I do not agree with many of the questions that are held against Q4,But for this reason we cannot ignore that there are legitimate reasons for there to be ideological discrepancies between AMLO's policies and the vision of the world that they hold.
Krauze and Aguilar Camín became Mandarins in their own right thanks to a political system that, like the French, pays tribute to intellectuals and seeks a kind of cultural legitimacy through them. Something that does not happen in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, for example. The two produced seminal books with enormous influence; Héctor Aguilar in history and literature (
Nomadic Frontier
,
Dying in the Gulf
,
La Guerra de Galio
, etc.), Krauze in cultural and political history (
Caudillos Culturales en la Revolución Mexicana
,
Por una democracy sin adjectives
,
Biography of power
, among many others). From their respective chapels, both have explicitly or implicitly exerted a relative influence on the design of cultural policies in our country.
On the other hand, regardless of group heads, the two publications have trajectories that are not limited to Aguilar Camín or Krauze. Nexos was founded by a score of intellectuals, including Alejandra Moreno Toscano, Pablo González Casanova, Arturo Warman, Carlos Monsiváis, Carlos Pereyra and Enrique Florescano; They collaborated for years on its pages and contributed critical thinking in the formation of several generations of Mexicans. In recent cultural history
Nexos is
not reduced to Aguilar Camín, nor
Letras Libres
to Krauze; and much less the culture of this country is limited to these two publications.
But by believing so, the president condemns himself to think through reductionisms that can be useful to communicate but very harmful to govern.
Journalism in Mexico does not begin and end at the
Reforma
or
El Universal
;
intellectual thought is not reduced to the group related to two writers;
nor is the opposition made up only of corrupt people who want to regain lost privileges.
With such remarks, the president embraces, paradoxically, the thinking of his "adversaries" who reduce the existing clamor for poverty and injustice in a demagogic crusade built by López Obrador.
@jorgezepedap
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