Mexico, lessons of one-man power

President López Obrador and his wife, during the New Year's message at the National Palace, Presidency of Mexico (Presidencia de México EFE)

The year split into two several weeks before the calendar marked the middle of 2021. On the night of May 3, Line 12 of the capital's subway creaked like never before.

At the Olivos station, two wagons ended up amid the rubble in an unprecedented collapse.

The tragedy swallowed the future of 26 people, left a hundred injured and showed how willing Andrés Manuel López Obrador is to defend, from everyone and everything, a script where only his Government matters and that contemplates a unique scenario for 2024: that his movement retain the presidency of the Republic.

History will sentence that in the supposed new Mexican times the tragedies are the same: they claim victims below, but because of them no one from above loses sleep, let alone the presidential aspirations.

At the time of the accident, López Obrador was leading the attack against opponents to win the June 6 elections. When the landslide occurred, he strove to reduce the electoral costs of the collapse, as well as to care for his dolphins and allies. It was not easy or immediate, but after weeks of minimizing the events and disdaining the victims, he imposed the script where neither those who built that subway, Marcelo Ebrard and Carlos Slim, nor the governor who had to monitor it, would face further questions. He assumed the sole voice of that issue to do what he does best: stifle what does not suit him.

The media success of this maneuver was not without electoral costs.

How much of the defeat in the mayoralties of the capital and in deputies in the federal Congress is due to the images of the night of May 3 is impossible to determine.

López Obrador resented those defeats, but did not get a message from them that he should change his discourse or method.

On the contrary.

While analysts and opponents believed that the seats are a rigid abacus, in which the president was not given the numbers after June 6 to pass constitutional reforms, the president assumes that the votes in the legislature belong to whoever works for them.

If the derailment of subway cars did not force him to change, why should a few adverse results in the legislative elections.

Just as he took the issue of the Olivos station off the agenda, the same happened with his non-majority in the so-called lower house of Congress. The

announced three constitutional reforms. And weeks later, the one who did not have the votes, forced an attempt in August to legislative approval of a regulatory reform that could have been carried out without fatigue in September. What he wanted, and achieved, was to define what

agenda is, and no other, that is imposed. Win or lose. That will not be cabús. That the helm is not shared. That rules in his party, in the others - because he makes them turn on their issues - and in the entire public opinion.

2021 has been a solar year for AMLO.

He showed that he defines the orbits of the agenda.

Neither the deceased in the subway, nor the children with cancer and without medicines, nor the families of the disappeared, nor those murdered by criminals, nor the pandemic, nor migrants who were kicked or massacred in the drawer of a trailer or burned by criminal laws, nor environmental transparency or mitigation laws, nor horseback inflation or climate change.

Nothing and no one will make you get out of your program.

It will not expand its power.

Because you have what you want, to name things.

Mexico 2021, third year of the great national shock.

The chachalacas have triumphed.

The noise of what is said in the Palace drowns out any dissent, all ideas, undermines not a few resistance.

And despite his demonstration of power, the year that ends he demanded changes and wristbands from the president.

You have modified your equipment to galvanize the execution of your wishes.

The following lines explore a dozen aspects of the third cycle of Andrés Manuel, including issues of actors who orbit the imperial way of the Tabasco to exercise the presidency.

The occupation of Bucareli

It was a year of changes in the people around him.

Julio Scherer from the Legal Department, Olga Sánchez Cordero from the Interior, Arturo Herrera from the Treasury and Irma Eréndira Sandoval from the Civil Service left.

Rogelio Ramírez de la O arrived to take over the finances but, above all, Adán Augusto López Hernández joined the Cabinet in August, who occupies, in every sense of the word, Bucareli.

The incorporation of Adán Augusto is a verification that for the wedge to tighten it must be of the same suit.

The former governor of Tabasco has come to stick his leg for the president in all the things that before he practically solved alone.

Dam and messenger.

Representative and alter ego.

Operator and keeper.

And - an innovation in this Government - public interlocutor with opponents and agents of power.

It helps the image of an Administration designed in a refractory way.

It is a redoubt of dialogue and an embryo of a successor.

An appointment without costs and that in a four-month period has given more than Olga in two and a half years.

It is not a small thing.

Time of betrayals

A Mexican president is ungrateful.

As in other matters, Andrés Manuel fulfills this characteristic of national presidentialism.

For some - Scherer the clearest - he has had deferences at the time of farewell, for others - Herrera the most obvious - just formal phrases of thanks.

And rude to Irma Eréndira.

This president has two times: he promises, but if necessary he forgets his promises.

The project is first.

The project is him and only him.

he knows that the project has no debts with anyone.

His last name is that someone's last name, whether they have been there for decades or years.

A Mexican president is ungrateful.

This year it was suffered by several.

Attacks 2.0

Against the UNAM, against the CIDE, against the press, researchers and academics, the INE, the INAI ... the common denominator of the presidential denunciations is that those who resent them have the capacity to undermine the credibility of their project.

It is not personal, it is strictly a business to weaken all criticism, to make the exercise of independence, the right of autonomy more expensive.

If this year the range of those attacked was expanded - even Carmen Aristegui suffered rude presidential anger - it is because it is opportune for the second half: it serves to remind whoever needs that it will not be a lame duck, that it has fuel for three years or more, and does not depend on anyone.

Waiter, serve me another duck please

But it is true that from time to time a scandal manages to set the fuse on this Executive, allergic like the one most to react to the howls of public opinion.

The Lozoya case is one of those few episodes.

His stellar witness in the plot that seeks to imprison a former presidential candidate - pure revenge for those who swear that revenge does not move him - is in jail because the images of the former director of Pemex in a posh restaurant were incompatible with the speech fighting impunity.

Emilio is in the boat not because he deserves it –Rosario Robles does not deserve it either in this procedural stage that has lasted almost two and a half years– but because weddings and feasts are choking the president who so austere he went to live in the National Palace.

The transparency blackout

Public life is less public than ever.

The decree with which AMLO closed the year will not be a coup, but it is a blow to the rules and to the promise of the opening campaign.

In 2021, what was the custom of this Administration and its party has become a government agreement published in the official gazette: opacity and disdain for compliance with transparency regulations.

It is not necessary to exaggerate the meaning of the agreement: at a stroke it suspends procedures and laws, disdaining institutions and organizations.

At a stroke it leaves citizens in the dark in terms of accountability.

FF AA: his greatest irresponsibility

Andrés Manuel resigned very early to improve the imperfect bureaucratic layman that he inherited. That was already irresponsible on his part. But ordering the Armed Forces to occupy so many aspects of public administration will ultimately be their greatest irresponsibility. Very soon the Mexicans will discover that just as in the recent past the uniformed men proved to be incapable of police action and public security, their very training of obedience and closedness will prove their incompatibility with the public function, where it is not a matter of complying but of serving. to citizens, not to obey instructions but to create solutions. The frustration will be such that it will even prevent the AAF from recognizing their failures, which - paradoxically - will make it difficult to take away tasks for which soldiers and sailors are not prepared.And all of the above without mentioning the risk that positions “where there are”, as the old Reyes Heroles used to say, become corrupted. The balance of these decisions by López Obrador is barely cooking, but it will be a bitter legacy.

Entrepreneurs are from the regime

Our president is so classic that he closes the year without fulfilling the promise to the old man from San Quintín that the Tabasco always refers to.

Nothing to separate political power from economic power.

As before, and more than before, the businessmen belong to the regime.

Who knows who among the business community or the president is more satisfied in this six-year term with such a classic PRI formula.

If before he passed them the tray for the plane raffle, now eat with them to celebrate a year of poor economy but fat private cows.

The favourite

From cork to soft drink name there is only one step. There is a long way to go until 2024 but today all of Mexico knows who the president prefers. Claudia Sheinbaum, the favorite, undoubtedly deserves to be among the presidential candidates. Its anticovid vaccination campaign, for example, is an unparalleled success in the states. He took advantage of having access to the president and ordering his own immunization schedules, to be sure, but that doesn't detract from his merit. And after the scolding for the defeats on June 6, he has undertaken a metamorphosis.

She said: yes to everything the president says, popular translation.

So far in advance, the risks of a city fragile in services and structures, and some of her party colleagues separate her from the presidency.

But above all that just as one day you were the favorite, the next day if the Tabasco wants you will not be any more.

Monreal and Marcelo, democratic current?

What will Morena's heretics do if the National Palace imposes a non-poll poll for a non-selection presidential candidate. The Senate leader has already said that he will not accept that method. If the chancellor also rebels, the legitimacy of the process could suffer a disaster. Ebrard has the floor. Will this pair be a force that forces Morena to establish itself as a party rather than as a mobilized lopezobradorista will? Will a new exodus led by these expriistas be born? Even if it was because this year they consolidated as the internal candidates to win, the toast to dismiss 2021 will have been worth it. Who will know what they will do with their autonomy in 2022.

But apparently at the end of the year, before deciding whether to defecate or give the internal battle they will do everything to stand out in "the dance of the bottle caps", that in addition to ambition is the only thing that unites Monreal, Ebrard and Sheinbaum.

If Andrés Manuel attacks the INE, these supporters will know no limit when trying to reinterpret, for the worse, the president's designs.

The puppeteer does not even have to strain to make them dance to their own tune.

The (absent) opposition

A PAN without ambition, a calculating PRI, a promising MC but still far from weighing.

How many years will it take the opposition to find its way to relevance?

Or is it that the current PAN and PRI members are not interested in that?

The PRIAN is the most functional thing the president could have imagined.

Almost more than the soldiers themselves as builders or administrators.

And the latest proof of this is the way in which the president has ended up disrupting the resistance of the governors.

The Tabasco is taken in December, and in his land Villahermosa, the photo with everyone, including the persecuted from Tamaulipas and the contemptuous from Coahuila.

After the election, nobody resists him, nobody opposes him.

Insecurity: the king, and his armed forces, go naked

The march of the six-year term is not triumphant, it is known.

Because one thing is the speech and another the facts.

And one of the realities that most evidences it is that homicides continue where they are: in heaven.

The president was given what he asked for.

It has its militarized National Guard.

And the difference is practically nil.

The power of criminals cannot be hidden from day to day and on election days.

The supreme commander gets up early every morning to hear the same thing: they kill each other in identical volumes, we make no difference.

After how many months of hearing the same thing from your subordinates, you stop understanding that you can't handle the package?

Has that date already passed or are tens of thousands of murders still missing?

Your carnal prosecutor

The weakest cabinet government has a separate problem in the Attorney General's Office.

Its owner Alejandro Gertz Manero has become not only a prosecutor of his own affairs but also one who does not help the president to defeat impunity.

Is the head of Ricardo Anaya and some other PAN members worth as much as to pawn the image of the lopezobradorista administration as one in which the law enforcement did not work either?

The shortage epidemic

Mexico has paid a very high cost in deaths of more by covid-19.

And yet, it is time to establish that even though the end of the emergency due to the coronavirus is far away, the tragedy of Mexicans in terms of health is increased by an incapable and indolent government: the shortage of medicines that was caused from the start of the Administration does not have when to culminate, with the dire consequences that this implies.

A six-year term of new axes

The president is in a hurry to secure his affairs.

Everything else is of little or no interest to him.

That is why it undercapitalizes the government like no one else before.

López Obrador's legacy will be made up of a handful of works and new coordinates of public policy translated into social programs or a discourse to combat corruption.

Thus he intends to enter history by having written a new chapter of Mexican nationalism.

Next spring he will inaugurate the first of his four emblematic works.

The Santa Lucía airport will serve to emphasize that it will fulfill what it promised: not only a refinery, a train, an interoceanic canal and an air terminal, but to impose the notion that works are finished because it is no longer stolen, because its Government is honest and also effective.

AMLO wants the future to review his Administration under the premise that a model that changed the axes triumphed.

In the one with X the logic that "down those above, and up those below" prevailed, in that of Y it will be noted that the past was corrupt and wasteful while today is austere and honest.

For the first, he will inherit the universalization of pensions for older adults;

for the second is that it encourages some trials of the questioned prosecutor Gertz Manero.

The November decree has no excuse, but in AMLO's logic it has an explanation.

He has said it: it is to speed up the progress of the works, what does it matter if on the way we burst - he has not said that but it is understood - the ecology, the rights of communities and the obligation to laws and regulations.

At the level of symbols, the above is powerful, new social programs, new works, execution capacity, yes, but in reality it is very little to activate the economic potential of a country like Mexico. López Obrador wanted to do it all by himself. And indeed, the economy that survives is despite him, and with this it is not enough for everyone's progress. That is why, according to Coneval, there are more millions of poor people and there are more millions of poor without health services. Not only because of the pandemic, but because of a model of deciding where nothing more than a will, the presidential, counts: the head of state neither listens nor allows himself to be helped. "First the poor" because I say so even if what I do hurts them.

That is the Mexican 2021.

Country and time where the leader invested his energy in fulfilling the half of the period without losing power or control of it.

One more year in which it failed to provide Mexicans with adequate health care, less impunity or more security;

where opportunities or facilities to undertake were not generated.

One more year where the president's speech marks life from seven in the morning, as if Mexico had renounced plurality and diversity, as if nostalgia for the country of a single man was a longing for all and all, one where neither the voices of the victims, the violence or the Metro, it doesn't matter, had a place.

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