Caciques or Neoliberals? The tragedy of Mexico
Diego Martin Velázquez Caballero
The persecution that neoliberals experience today is similar to the deception that, for much of the 20th century, Mexican society contemplated during the anti-communist campaigns. It is true that significant violence was unleashed against the communists; what has not happened with the neoliberals. In the end, both acts are entelechies that are justified to legitimize a regime that tends to increase authoritarianism.
Mexico never ran the risk of becoming a communist country, nor has it been - and will not be - a neoliberal country. And the reasons are the same.
Joaquín Costa, a regenerationist, interpreted the chiefdom in Spain as an Asian remora that had been imported from the New World and, as a pandemic coronavirus, generated severe conflicts between the institutions of the Old and New Regimes. Caciquismo finds itself in the middle of many worlds and adapts to the political institutions of modernity.
The cacique is a form of authority that the European world found in the American world and, in the case of the Spanish empire, it was imported as an element that would promote counter-reformist anti-modernity. The purpose was achieved, but the chiefdom stopped time forever in Latin America. Even the Asian world has achieved a successful modernization combining totalitarianism, technology, industrialization, religious syncretism, capitalism and communism. In all the routes they have done well, for the Latin American case something like this cannot be affirmed, even in Spain itself
The pain that Joaquín Costa exhibits with Spain is that, thanks to the caciquismo, it is understood that the King does not have greater representation. Spain, like Latin America, is a Comala where the chief appeases everything, takes everything, commands everything and destroys everything.
The chiefdom is the most challenging riddle for Western modernity. It is not terrorist like the Arab leadership, nor is it tribal like the African rule. It is the Hispanic Catholic malinchismo that has Latin America in the strangest of the Middle Ages: the Catholic colonialist.
Joaquín Costa tries to explain the way in which the indigenous chiefdom perverted Spain. He manages to make a description of each of the elements, but he forgets that the cacique was a form of leadership invented by the Catholic Church. The chiefdom ceased to be solely indigenous and spread to all castes, social classes, genders and contexts of the Ibero-American world.
In Asia, the primitive leadership did not detach from its civilizing identity and this has allowed them to evade and take advantage of modernity in the best way. In Ibero-America, attachment to the Catholic Church destroyed civilizing and national identities, invertebrate nations, and suspended modernity. Asia, with all its chiefdoms, has a more successful modernity than Latin America.
The problem with caciquil rule is that the homeland, the nation, vanishes. They cannot emerge. Following Costa, the caciques have various benefits from the country's political networks, a society is produced kidnapped by families and lineages of caciques. Empires like the United States and the Catholic Church promote and defend them. There is no explanation for so much power, for so much political control, but it is a reality that cannot be hidden. The inheritance of the chiefdom is pure rancor, pain, shame and corruption.
Destroying neoliberalism is one of the idle exercises of Q4. In Mexico, as in Latin America, the true transformation will occur when the chiefdoms end and the institutions can be consolidated.
Morena faces the Ibero-American decadence that broke out in Spain in the Civil War of 1936. Chasing corruption is not chasing neoliberals. Neoliberalism ended when Ernesto Zedillo was kidnapped by the Atlacomulco Group, which has led the socio-political processes ever since. Why isn't AMLO going after the Atlacomulco Group? What is the use of displacing designated neoliberal factions to replace them with others that have also been neoliberals, and only a capacity for rapture towards the president distinguishes them? When Gral. Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated farms, he gave them to the people; he did not give them to other landowners. What is observed in Mexico is a replacement of caciques rather than a change of regime. This has been happening since 2000 when it was discovered that we are governed by PRIs of all political parties.
Neoliberalism is a category that is not even properly understood in Mexico. It is becoming a social persecution that will soon drown the ruling party and the president.