Mexico is a Minefield

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 1^st 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 1^st 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.