Letter 104 to friends and familiares: México's challenge; México's opportunity

El presidente Enrique Peña Nieto announced yesterday that his administration is set to take measures to streamline and reform the Mexican police system. This effort will prove to be a herculean task in view of the massive bureaucracy, the confusing structure, the insinuation of gangsterism into some parts of the force, entrenched interests of unpalatable profitability and the low pay that induces petty corruption among many of the street cops.

Another sobering announcement surfaced this week that, previous to the atrocity against the forty-three students in Ayotzinapa that has sparked a spectacular national revulsion, another thirty-one students had gone missing (likely murdered) in another village in the same awful state of Guerrero; news was slow in coming since the pueblito involved was directly threatened with total massacre.

The President has a lot facing him, as the senior elected official of the “Institutional Revolutiory Party” (the P.R.I.), which ruled México for seventy years as a one-party autocracy that eventually mired the Repúbica deeply in unfettered corruption. That systematic inefficiency stagnated an inventive, hard-working people for many decades. Yet the corruption creating so much turmoil today is not that of money but that of power (far worse).

My gut says loud and clear that el presidente Peña Nieto is a very decent man who has the courage to cut right to the heart of the current corruption of power in México. Nevertheless, the P.R.I. today came out saying it will propose a "complementary alternative" to el presidente Peña Nieto's initiative.

This latter announcement is not necessarily good news as the P.R.I. plan may be a ruse, with all the right words, intended to undermine the proposed reform. Undoubtedly, el presidente Peña Nieto knows how high the stakes really are. Failure could de-rail México’s ascent into economic stardom.  This man has worked earnestly to modernize the economic and political governance of his country.

Sadly, he gets very little credit for that. Sure, it is a no-brainer for me to believe that this man is far better than I; ergo, no judgements of his character, here. What is less evident, however, is that Enrique Peña Nieto may very well be placing his life at risk in service to his country. No, I am neither kidding nor being dramatic. In all of this high-velocity tension, one may find a few reasons for optimism. 

First, el presidente Peña Nieto may be breaking with P.R.I. hierarchy with today's announcement by the P.R.I. of a "complementary alternative". People here have long deemed el presidente Peña Nieto to be a “Gel Boy” (pronounced Hell Boy in Spanish) to be a Frankie Avalon marionette of former President Salinas Gortari, deeply dishonest and deeply disgraced in the eyes the world after wrecking the country’s finances two decades ago. 

Personally, I have never bought that theory; were it ever true, I sense that President Dippity Doo-Dah is cutting the strings that have bound him. To wax historical, el presidente Peña Nieto has issued his private "Unilateral Declaration of Independence", one that is far better than its fifty year old name-sake in Rhodesia.

Much like President George W. Bush, I believe el presidente Peña Nieto is far more intelligent that he seems.  Nonetheless, it is unwise to bite the hand that has fed you, even if a president need not worry about re-election in this República; no, not the mangey mano of Salinas but that of the larger P.R.I. leadership.

Second, el presidente Peña Nieto’s hard-driving reforms may be hitting close to home, creating push-back, leading gangsters inside the various shades of government (or, in this case, the Mme. Nhu of Guerrero) to feel the pressure and start making stupid decisions that reflect desperation that the gravy train may be ending. This particular optimism is, admittedly, a stretch but it does link to the third reason for guarded optimism.

Third, the people of México have had enough. The message may be revolutionary. Yet it is only contingently so. The citizenry is repudiating the gangsters and their enablers. That repudiation comes at great risk to themselves. The President's hoisting their banner comes at great risk to him. It has been a long time in coming, as so many guns (mainly from the U.S.) have overwhelmed México, much like a self-replicating bacterium that debilitates and kills the host organism.

In one sense, Mexicans are already rebelling, not against the state, yet, but against intimidation by gangster régimes pocketed throughout the byzantine federal structure. The element of contingent revolution, literally burned into the country’s psyche over the past ten days, is quite clear: “El Sr. Presidente, tiene una elección: limpiar nuestra sociedad con nosotros o ser eliminado por nosotros.”

(Mr President, either you clean up this savage corruption or we will clean you out.) This is both a sobering and an exciting time for México.  El presidente Peña Nieto’s choice is rather stark: turn both of these atrocities, unspeakable for nations in the developed world, into the “cause célèbre” needed to cut right to the heart of the corruption of power in México and slice away its tissue of death.

Or he can forfeit México’s opportunity to take her properly earned place on the world stage. The popular outrage and repudiation can be harnessed into police reform. While I never enjoyed Frankie Avalon films or made much time for Hell Boy, I remain convinced that el presidente Peña Nieto is a leader of courage and substance who will tap this deep popular resentment to complete the work of his equally gutsy predecessor. 

Perhaps the President’s first step might be to bring back el ex presidente Calderón Hinijosa to head up the arduous, dangerous and critical work of reconfiguring the police into a smaller, better paid force that taps the community consensus to enforce neighborhood (pueblito) policing so that, together, all México can finally choke off the narco-gangsters from the bottom, up.