There are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades pass, Lenin said. What is happening this September in Mexico is not exactly a Russian revolution, but there is a desire to give a dizzying and rushed conclusion to a new process of hegemony called the Fourth Transformation.
In the midst of trans-sexennial alienation, one side proclaims the fight for justice and the other the defense of democracy, but both use their respective flags to hide —albeit with little grace— what is genuinely a struggle for the same interest of both parties: the accumulation and/or preservation of power, whatever it may be.
That is what the fog that covers this stormy month is made of, in which another authoritarian fantasy will also materialize by finishing the militarization of the National Guard, just ten years after the disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa, without us knowing yet what happened to them that unfortunate night in Iguala, although it has become clear to us that the armed forces are not interested in getting to the bottom of the facts.
And that’s the crux: neither populists nor elitists care about the truth about justice, democracy, Ayotzinapa and other national realities. Through morning verbiage or grotesque hashtags, each side creates its own mythologies and imposes them with greater or lesser skill on legions and bureaucracies. Pure fog.
Now efficiency is openly invoked to justify the corruption and coercion with which the legislative battle against corruption and coercion was won. It must be recognized that we had already seen this efficiency almost twenty years ago when we looked at Carlos Ahumada’s video library.
It was all a preventive strike against the Judiciary, in order to avoid an imminent lawfare like that which occurred in Brazil, another euphemism used, although this one in a low voice, to purify the hegemonic struggle. Thus, President López Obrador and President Sheinbaum were looking at themselves in the mirror, real or fictitious, of the succession of Lula and Dilma.
As if the issues of the so-called realpolitik were not enough, in these weeks it also seems that an authentic war is being settled at a neuralgic point of geopolitics with the US and the conformation of the previous and new national hegemony… because what happens in Sinaloa does not just happen in Sinaloa.
Beyond so much fog, we must try to dispel the fog that accumulates in September with a change of government, hegemony and era.
Original article by Diego Enrique Osorno, Milenio, September 18th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.
Original photo by Eduardo Torres, Diario del Sur.