Government Failure

The almost twelve years that have passed under the incompetent governments of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, from 2000 to 2012, can be summed up in a single word: failure.

Both governments have failed the country and its people. In terms of the economy, which has shrunk rather than grown and which has been provided with no real opportunities for progress. In terms of the strictly political, because our unstable democracy has become the sum of the interests of an elite which can hardly be said to cover the full range of social forces that exist in Mexico. In terms of social affairs, because poverty and the unfair distribution of wealth have become drastically worse, couple with the application of laws which have hit working and popular classes, widened the jobs gap and left large sectors of the population to seek refuge in the hostile and uncertain informal economy. In terms of employment, where Calderón has continued to irresponsibly apply the anti-trade union politics of his predecessor Fox to attack independent and democratic unions, both presidents having employed contemptible characters like Francisco Javier Salazar and Javier Lozano Alarcón to do this. In terms of education, which has seen nothing but attempts to privatise public education at elementary, middle and higher levels, opening up the possibility that future generations will not be protected by education and will be forced to enter the dangerous world of violence and delinquency. In terms of international relations, where previously the figure and prestige of Mexico commanded respect but today that has been replaced by the degraded image of a government that doesn’t know what its objectives are, much less its goals, and which lacks a vision to steer the country towards sovereignty, justice and wellbeing.

Unfortunately, there has been a huge and perverse complicity in this process of decomposition in the last 12 years. The loss of value of the Mexican economy over the last decade, which went from 9^th to 14^th in the world, compared to Brazil, which went from 15^th to 6^th in the same period – just as Carlos Fernández Vega has signalled – clearly shows the collapse of this government and of the National Action Party.

Macroeconomic indices and widely circulated international studies on Mexico’s national performance leave no room for doubt about this terrible frustration and decline. This is because these two governments have acted in favour of a single sector of society, namely businesspeople, and inside this sector, a small group whose members have monopolised economic power and have illegally taken control of the country and the weak minds of politicians. A government that only acts in favour of one sector and never listens to the majority voices in society in order to move in the correct direction or straighten out crooked paths cannot call itself a government, much less a successful one. It has instead acted as a simple administrator or manager of private interests that have manipulated and used it as a puppet.

The more than 60 thousand deaths in the war on organised crime during the last presidential term indicate the failure of this campaign, and more precisely the failure of a police regime as opposed to a democratic one, with the aggravating circumstance that the basic human rights of Mexicans are not respected. Many outspoken voices have pointed out that this huge military and police operation has the unwritten but clearly identifiable aim of intimidating and restraining popular protests against high living costs, social injustice and widespread corruption.

And there is no way to escape this reality. The government’s latest gesture in its shameful subjugation to large private interests is the swift approval, between December 2011 and January 2012, of the Public-Private Associations Law, with which the government not only irresponsibly prevents the State acting as a State, but also hands over to big businesses the vital task of building infrastructure for national development, with conditions that are more than abusive for public resources. The same has happened with the indiscriminate handing over of the country’s non-renewable natural resources such as minerals, oil and gas to Mexican and foreign private companies.

There is no national problem in which the government’s wholesale failure cannot be observed. The fact cannot be ignored that responsible, authoritative voices have signalled this collapse day in day out, and the people who have fallen victim to it have protested. This means that the entire nation must respond by adopting new policies that imply a radical change from the government’s neoliberal economic model which both Fox and Calderón, and before them Salinas and Zedillo, have imposed on the country.

Social and economic forces must immediately abandon their indifference in the face of this misplaced government strategy and begin to develop a politics that fully reflects our true national interests, to the exclusion of no one. This will be the only way for Mexico to return to the path it never should have left, that of efficiency, fairness, shared social responsibility and nationalist politics, which with all its defects was an efficient and authentic guide for Mexico’s progress.