Mexico’s
current political situation can be summed up in a few words. The outgoing PAN
(National Action Party) government has planted a series of unresolved issues
that it means to pass onto the next government. Felipe Calderón has been doing
this at the last minute, among many other things with the prominent project for
labour reform that he has presented to the Chamber of Representatives, and
which from the outset attempts to achieve a new labour statute. This leaves no
room for doubt about his unfair and arbitrary attitude towards workers and
unions, who through his whole six-year term he has devoted himself to beating,
minimising or subjecting to an antisocial policy with unquestionably corporate
undertones.
This
intention could not be any clearer. It consists of, by way of this reform,
bringing unions and workers to their knees before the most negative interests
of businesspeople, which moreover cannot easily be approved in what remains of
this years legislative work. Improvisations have never given positive results,
above all in areas as important as that of labour relations, which so
profoundly affects the country’s future and its development and should have
been the motivation for a respectful and deeply democratic consultation with
all the sectors involved. As things stand we are faced with the legislative
equivalent of a dawn raid.
With this
initiative, Calderón makes a fine show of his boundless hate of the working
class, and he will also, if his proposal is approved, harm the pro-government
corporate unions that have unquestioningly obeyed his commands. No reward for
them either.
But in
terms of many other issues, which the outgoing government was unable to resolve
in its time in office due to its evident incompetence, because it had not
prepared adequate strategies and because it launched blindly into supposed
solutions, it is now trying to hand down problems that the new government
should not have to take on. As the old saying goes: let the dead bury their own
dead. Which does not apply solely to the tens of thousands of people who have
lost their lives in the misguided war on drugs trafficking and organised crime,
to which there seems to be no end and which the current dying government means
to pass on as a central responsibility of those who will succeed them on the 1st
of December this year. Those tens of thousands of fatalities are Felipe
Calderón’s responsibility. That means that, quite simply, Calderón wants to
wash his hands with the President who will replace him, an attitude that is
totally irresponsible and lacking in republican responsibility, characteristics
associated with the worst authoritarian leaders in history.
This is
only in the aspect of public security, but in social matters, as well as in the
fight against poverty, social security, financing for rural areas and industry,
education, economics or finance, fair economic redistribution and support for
small and medium job-creating industries, there are so many unresolved matters
that who knows what the government has been doing for the last six years. It
did not have the talent or the maturity to do anything more important that
simply trying to remain in power using superficial media techniques, merely to
project an image. This, however, could not cover up the reality, which is not
that of their optimistic, fabricated declarations.
In fact,
what they are doing is leaving landmines everywhere, the same mines that take
so many lives after a conflict has come to an end. They are bequeathing to the
Mexican people and to the new government a Mexico that resembles a minefield.
The bombs that are left in a country’s political and social arena are at least
as deadly as those planted in battlefields.
It depends
on the new authorities to work out what their commitment will be in the face of
this great failure and irresponsibility. The administration entering office on
the 1st of December cannot and should not take this on as its own if
it acts according to the law and a strict political and moral logic, as we hope
the new government will do throughout the coming years. Nothing would be more
harmful for the Republic than if from one day to the next they took on the
issues left hanging by the previous government as if they were their own: such
issues must not and should not be passed on, as dictated by administrative
decency and, above all, political ethics.
The
manifestations of dissatisfaction and anger that are currently visible in large
swathes of the population will be magnified to unimaginable levels if the new
administration takes on those issues as their own instead of leaving them to
the previous government. If they assume these social debts, we will surely see
increasing impoverishment among Mexicans and further collective depression
which will drag the country towards greater failure.
The new
government must become aware that Mexicans are frustrated and indignant, and
that this will translate into dissatisfaction and anger in the face of such
abuse and exploitation. Let there be no doubt. The new authorities are
politically obliged tread cautiously in the minefield that they are inheriting
from previous administrations.
