(March 18th, 2020).- 85 violent homicides were committed in the country during the weekend, the highest number in several years. If things continue as they are, it will be one of the bloodiest periods in Mexican history. While our president does not seem to realize what is happening. He does not seem to be concerned about the rule of law, even if security is supposed to be government’s first duty.
Social gregariousness is based on security, but that is not understood or there are other reasons that prevent it from being accepted and acting accordingly by the federal power. AMLO during his campaign promised to end the violence, but now he is just the author of another demagogic offer, with a strong accumulation of failures and very bad results. The social perception of insecurity already borders on panic in various regions of the country. El Bajío is a clear example.
The federal government is ignorant of the facts, but it is also blind to see where it is failing. Without convincing results, AMLO blames his predecessors for the current situation. An almost absent Public Security Secretary, Alfonso Durazo testifies and multiplies the presidential indifference. The drug trafficking cartels seem to have overtaken the government’s step with the “Culiacanazo”, a public prelude to a lavish wedding that brought together, the most select of the Pacific drug trafficking groups, before the passivity of the federal government.
Little is known of the murderers of children and women in Bavispe, Sonora, or of the criminal acts between rival gangs. In Puebla, doctors are murdered, without absolutely no investigations leading to the arrest and punishment of those responsible. If one thing is certain, it is that AMLO will not change the strategy. From nothing will follow nothing, once again.
How far is the image of the man who traveled the country, inch by inch, for 12 years; who built empathy and understood that behind each calamity or stumbling block there was a well-tied pair between corruption and insecurity. The same candidate who politically processed impunity as an open sore and the mediocrity of GDP growth as a removable barrier and not as a fatality, today is insensitive and closed to all criticism, and accuses workers and peasants, in the face of any claim, of be part of “conservative provocation”.
The most authoritarian and opaque administration of many decades emerges from the government that offered to establish itself as the most democratic and transparent ever. And the main problem is that AMLO’s proposal for security and justice is not understood because there is none. And this recent health crises, has revealed that there is also no capacity to plan public policy.
Women, organized and not, demanded more shelters and children’s stays, protection houses for victims of family violence, which are serious problems in our country. They got the cancellation of all these programs, not their debugging and improvement. Today, the INSABI, an institute of uncertain reality, replaces the Seguro Popular, a program that was working well for thousands of Mexicans.
Third-level public hospitals and national specialty institutes received an administrative coup. With a worldwide pandemic in progress, in a nation totally unprepared to face such a contingency.
The virus knocks on the doors of Mexico with semi-dismantled health institutions, sunk in financial and operational unpredictability due to lack of supplies.
In the eyes of a world that reacts strongly and decisively to the aggressiveness of a viral threat, here is the schizophrenia of those who, on one hand promote the best they can control and containment protocols, and on the other, applaud the recommendations of the head of government, just to please the man. Given this situation, the WHO itself asks the Mexican government to fully assume its commitment to control the pandemic.
The Health Council, a powerful technical legal instrument created under Article 73 of the Constitution, allows the President to issue provisions in the event of serious epidemics. That federal instance does not even meet, an omission that has even led a judge in Oaxaca to issue a suspension against the federal government for lack of preventive measures in accordance with the danger of the pandemic, to which it is bound by the Federal Law of Health (art. 181).
From Friday to Monday the number of cases of contagion has doubled. The shares of listed companies continue to fall, the peso-dollar ratio breaks all-time highs, Mexico and Pemex know the first effects of a simultaneous shock of oversupply and low demand for hydrocarbons. And all of this, in the middle of a violence without precedent.
The balkanization of federal administration decisions is advancing, with some officials recommending limiting contacts, while others promoting them, and each one ending up doing what AMLO wants.
If the pandemic is benign when it strikes the Mexicans exponentially, we will have the only head of state who took the measure in three words and based on criteria that until now only he knows, saw it coming and diagnosed: NO PASA NADA “Nothing happens.” But what if it isn’t? His lack of empathy and understanding of possible devastating effects will not be a thing of the past, it will be his in rigorous present tense.
by IGNACIO MORALES LECHUGANotary public and former attorney general of the Republic
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed hereby are those of the author and not necessarily of the The Yucatan Times.
