Idioma
In the National Palace, Enrique Pena Nieto established the foundation upon which his government will be built. The focal point of his message was how the authority and responsibility of the Mexican State, forgotten and ignored for at least the last eighteen years, will be recovered during his six-year term.
This explains why he chose, as his first act of government, to call for a “Pact for Mexico” amongst the three main political powers in the country.
What does this pact mean? What is its essence? It means that the President of Mexico has taken up the constitutional, ethical and political obligation of seeking multilateral agreements to achieve stability in the country.
Instead of making a declaration of war, like what the Presidency did six years ago, on December 1st, a declaration of peace was made. The incoming government committed itself to using all of the judicial, economic and political resources at hand to make it happen.
Perhaps this is the reason why Pena Nieto didn’t use the terms “drug dealing”, “organized crime” and “drug cartels” in his first three public appearances as the President of Mexico. We could say that one of the first things he managed to do was “de-drug” political discourse.
Without being explicit or firing a single shot, the Mexican Head of State’s first move was to defeat organized crime by excluding it from the conversation.
He didn’t mention organized crime when he talked to the Armed Forces, either. He didn’t talk like a war-monger, like someone who would just as soon wear a military uniform as a suit and tie, but rather as a President who asked the Army and Navy for the one, essential thing to be able to keep the peace in Mexico: their loyalty to their country.
This doesn’t mean that he is evading or forgetting about one of the most serious problems facing the country right now, such is the war on drugs. What he did was come up with a plan with solutions that are completely different from those that had come before.
What is the plan? It is explained throughout the first 13 government decisions that he announced in the National Palace and in the 95 points detailed in the Pact for Mexico.
Instead of more soldiers, tanks, police officers and prisons, Pena Nieto’s government seems to want to get at the social roots of organized crime: poverty, hunger, unemployment, a failing education system and moral decay.
The presentation that Pena Nieto gave in the National Palace offers up another interesting point. He dared to bring up the topic of “factual powers”. The applause-meter hit its high mark when he mentioned that teachers would no longer hold posts for life if they didn’t have the merits to back it up.
Something else remained clear this past December 1st: the difference between one person who goes about and explains how they will rebuild the country, and another person who insists on destroying it.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador suffered political death on Juarez Avenue in Mexico City. He suffered it in every rock, explosive and Molotov cocktail that so-called anarchists threw at the police. He suffered it in every broken window, looted business and in every violent and angry act against the city and its inhabitants; all of which has been engraved in his epitaph.
On T.V. screens, the whole country saw the planned violence that various gangs, perfectly well-paid and organized, let loose in the streets.
Everyone knows who is behind these gangs. The parents of the young people who were arrested, who are howling at the authorities to let their children go free, have forgotten to also reproach those who would use these very same young people to further their own political ends.
Human rights organizations shouldn’t only defend those who were unfairly detained by the police. They should also protect the police officers who were mercilessly attacked and the millions of people who live in Mexico City who want to live in peace, no matter what their political leaning is.