Fooling
Mexican Fans/
Francisco Goldman is the author of the forthcoming book The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle.
The
New York Times | 23-06-14
The
day before the Mexican soccer team’s thrilling underdog tie with the World Cup
favorite, Brazil, last week, the lead editorial of the news site SinEmbargo was
titled, “Ready for your Clamato and Gatorade?” — common hangover remedies. “In
about three weeks, when you wake from your World Cup dreams,” the editors
wrote, “remember that when the soccer fest began, the country was on the verge
of monumental decisions. If upon waking, you realize that the country’s energy
reserves have been cheaply sold off or whatever else, don’t bother protesting
because this is a chronicle foretold.”
To
debate and pass laws that could open Pemex, the nationalized oil company, to
foreign investment, the Mexican Congress scheduled legislative sessions from
June 10 to 23, dates precisely coinciding with you know what. Final passage
might be pushed back, but it originally looked like it was supposed to happen
on Monday, when Mexico plays Croatia to decide which country advances to the
elimination rounds.
Protesters
demonstrated this spring in Mexico City against energy reform that would open
up the nationalized oil company to foreign investment. Recently, debates on the
reform were scheduled at the same time as the World Cup tournament. Credit Yuri
Cortez/Agence France-Presse
For
weeks, critics of President Enrique Peña Nieto and his political party, the
PRI, have been denouncing this ploy to hide the historic reforms behind World
Cup fever, it being taken for granted that almost no one will be paying
attention to whatever happens in Congress.
The
writer Juan Villoro — a commentator on both politics and soccer — says this is
not the first time the party has tried this. In 1998, under a previous PRI
government, Congress passed a $67 billion rescue of Mexican banks, to be paid
by taxpayers, on Dec. 12, the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the start of
the Christmas holiday. This past Dec. 12, PRI legislators, joined by allies on
the right, “fast track” approved, with almost no debate, the constitutional
reform opening the way for the Pemex privatization.
Here
is a sample of news stories from the last few days (to some of these,
SinEmbargo has been affixing the slogan, “And while you go on enjoying the
World Cup”): skyrocketing “disappearances”; crackdowns on the press; the
corruption of the police, political parties and the justice system.
Mr.
Peña Nieto seems to regard the plight of his citizenry as a public relations
stain that needs to be kept out of sight. Yet it was only a few months ago that
Time magazine heralded him on its cover as the savior of Mexico. Outside the
country, he was seen as a modernizing reformer and a committed partner in the
war against the narco cartels.
But
as his dismal approval ratings make clear, many Mexicans see a different Peña
Nieto, one who was elected with only 38 percent of the vote, in an election
rife with allegations of vote buying and other irregularities. And they see a
different PRI — not a new and improved party, but the same institution that
ruled Mexico for 71 years of “perfect dictatorship,” before it was temporarily
pushed out of power in 2000. The structures and culture of the party that built
modern Mexico are still deeply entrenched. Over nearly a century, the PRI
perfected nexuses of government, organized crime and corruption. In his new
book “Campo de Guerra,” the Mexican essayist Sergio González Rodríguez
describes the PRI’s Mexico as “a state that simulates legality and legitimacy,
while at the same time it is an un-State: the lack and negation of itself.”
Who
could blame those Mexicans who, when considering the proposed energy
legislation, suspected a repeat of the privatizing reforms of the 1990s, which
created fortunes for a small elite and PRI cronies, but did little or nothing
for ordinary Mexicans but saddle them with what is considered to be the world’s
most expensive and unreliable cellphone service? It’s easy to see how
privatizing Pemex would benefit some foreign oil companies and create some new
Mexican millionaires, without “trickling down” to anyone else.
The
energy “debates” have a recent precedent in the government’s handling of
telecommunications reforms. These were portrayed as measures that would
democratize telecommunications and the media, and rein in apparent monopolies
such as the TV monolith Televisa’s. But when scholars and a few honest senators
were finally able to read and decipher the pending legislation, it turned out
that the government and allied legislators were actually designing the laws to
benefit Televisa, and to crack down on Internet freedoms and access to radio
licenses for community and indigenous groups.
Even
the capture this year of the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El
Chapo — a major public relations victory for the government — was a letdown for
the Mexican public. As Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior research scholar at Columbia
University, commented, the capo’s capture “didn’t even minimally guarantee the
dismantling of a criminal network.” He said: “El Chapo Guzmán and his people in
Sinaloa had hundreds of Mexican politicians in their pockets. Let’s see if they
arrest them now.”
The
truth is that Mr. Peña Nieto is a politically insignificant figure, ruling at
the service of established powers within the PRI and elsewhere. In fact, he
seems so absent and unforceful a leader that in recent days some have
speculated that he is gravely ill. Cuauhtémoc Gutiérrez de la Torre, the former
president of the PRI in Mexico City, better embodies the Mafioso depravity of
the PRI. In April, Mr. Gutiérrez was accused of running a prostitution ring
with party funds. At conventions, he allegedly showed up with his army of
women, making them available to other politicians. It wasn’t government
investigators who finally exposed Mr. Gutiérrez, but a prominent female
journalist, who immediately became the object of a vilification campaign.
There
is a famous line from Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” which also served as
the epigraph to Roberto Bolaño’s Mexico City masterpiece “The Savage
Detectives”: “Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our
king?”
“No,”
is the answer.
Who
will save Mexico? Not politicians, the police, corrupt functionaries or greedy
elites.
There
has been much talk lately about the way the style of soccer teams manifests
national characters. I don’t know if that’s true. But when I look at the
Mexican team which, after barely even qualifying for the World Cup, has been
playing so well, I see a team without stars — a gritty, hard-working, pretty
humble, resourceful, creative, disciplined, joyous, friendly-seeming group of players
who seem to be learning to play the game as it is meant to be played.
These
are values that we see enacted and re-enacted all over Mexico, and in Mexican
communities elsewhere, every day. Someday Mexico will get another chance to
vote the PRI away and to restart the long process of building the country from
the ground up. It could do worse than take some inspiration from its national
team.
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