Leave it alone!; sons of bitches!
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
Holy Week for Christianity is a time of reflection regarding the suffering that the Historical Christ lived for the salvation of humanity. I remember with nostalgia and pain the marches of my community when the Passion of Jesus was plastically represented. On one occasion -observing the torture that the Roman soldiers applied to the Nazarene in the artistic experience- a middle-aged companion shouted angrily: Leave him alone! Sons of Chingada! The expression shook the feelings of the people who accompanied the procession. Between laughter and tears, the cry of the screamer was justified and also the dilemma that the representation had to be violent to convey the human model of the Redeemer. In some theatrical performances, the necessary realism that seeks to print the experience for the audience requires that whoever represents Jesus of Nazareth receive an average of 400 lashes in a walk of approximately 4 kilometers (a madriza worthy of the Holy Christ! ). For this reason, the people who represent the procession of the cross ignore the requests for commiseration that some spectators make in an emotional way. Thus, the Romans in the narrative did not stop and took whoever imitated the character from Bethlehem to Calvary; with the usual beating that -according to the script- distinguishes the evangelical narration.
In many places in Mexico and Latin America, even other latitudes; the evangelizing pedagogy of Holy Week is violent and terrifying. Joan Manuel Serrat questions her in the song that speaks of the Christ of the Gypsies, a friend who shares the food and the party, who drinks wine and dances, who cries for the daily suffering of the people. Neither does Chabela Vargas sing to the character that the Romans punish to death, one of her famous songs pays tribute to the Christ of Palacaguina, the guerrilla who defends himself from the Romans, who frees the poor and takes the merchants out of the temple, reviewing the parable of the Needle and the Camel, also expressed in León Felipe when he said that Christ is the Man, any Man. The Historical Christ is a Revolutionary Man.
The hermeneutics of Holy Week is applicable to various Latin American political systems. Hugo Chávez pointed out, for example, that the oligarchy had the Crucified Christ as a sign of punishment for the dissident principles of the Hispanic Catholic capitalist social order. More than the message of sacrifice for the sins of humanity, the Man on the Cross represents the memory of the imperialist penalty for those who decide to confront them. Hence the gypsy need to lower Jesus del Madero, but not the dead one but the living one, the one who draws the pedagogy of the parables to teach the people to defend themselves, the one who offers a lot of affection and counts for everyone. The Jew who runs everywhere and resembles Friederich Nietzsche's superman Zarathustra, who thinks of transcendental death, but thinks first of the here and now, of building a just social order in earthly life under the realistic awareness of pain, war and fighting.
The tragic fate of the Messiah in Holy Week is the symbolic reference of some nationalist leaders in Latin America. The Church of Peter accepts the sacrifice of Jesus to create an oligarchic imperial order. The axiom has been fulfilled in the six-year history of the Mexican political system: Cardenismo is the best example. General Lázaro Cárdenas experienced a viacrucis during most of his government, the attacks went beyond propaganda and political baseness to become terrorism. And despite the fact that he defended himself and the people from him as the Christ of Palacaguina, he faced the death of the six-year period and the praxis of power that allowed him to modernize the underprivileged classes. The posterity of the federal public administration would never again have a Missionary General (Enrique Krauze) who received, and also granted, a disproportionate number of lashes. Mexico never had another Tata Lázaro, although it continues to pray for his return.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador was conceived, politically, as Messiah. His government has also been a very tough viacrucis. The scourges of the press, the oligarchy and North American imperialism are overwhelming. The indolence and indifference of pro-Yankee Hispanic neoliberal Mexico has no qualification, they want to take the country to war and, given the support of the narco-empire, they are preparing to cross the Rubicon like Roman Caesar: they are Romans, do not try to change them.
Should the Tropical Messiah fulfill the tragic destiny of the mortal God at the end of the six-year term? Although the distance from cardenismo is wide, lopezobradorismo has made superhuman efforts to carry out social equality, gender equity, the rescue of poverty and the recomposition of the State. The actions were more than necessary to rebuild a country that was in a situation of Failed or Supplanted State (Samuel Schmidt), but much is needed to organize the great national problems. The Mexican nomenklatura has sabotaged every modernization project in the country, they are responsible for enforcing the unwritten rules of the political system; above all, the cancellation of the transexennial continuity, the death of the presidential God at the end of his term. The symbolic "non-reelection" of contemporary Mexico has prevented transexennial projects -sometimes necessary-, from defining a modernity for Mexico, a country project different from the moderate colonialism in which the United States locks us up.
The nomenklatura has betrayed each president, even killed him so that the new Messiah can live. However, Mexico needs a transexennial modernizing project that promotes the historical ruptures and social adjustments necessary to balance the political, economic and social spheres. The nomenklatura only wants to remain an employee of the American Caesar.
AMLO and Morena face their Holy Friday in the second half of the presidential term, the Executive knows that it must accelerate its macroprojects and legislative policies if it intends to approach Cardenismo. AMLO has popular support, they approve and defend him, but, although they strongly ask the Romans to stop whipping and torturing the Holy Christ; the Romans do not listen, the representation has to continue and, at the end of the six-year term, the Messiah must die.
General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río accepted the tragic destiny to found a Church, the largest branch of the Revolutionary Family, but which is now distinguished by being a religion without believers and much less priests. Will lopezobradorism also accept metaphysical transcendence to create a Church without believers? Will the Tropical Messiah be crucified forever? In the end, the town always saves Barrabás. Poor towns, saturated with gunmen, chieftaincy, mafia and oligarchy, Sicilianized underemployed communities that only survive because of the slavery of the North American narco-empire. How are they going to defend their Messiah if they don't have weapons or the capacity for militant organization? The imaginary citizenship that Fernando Escalante points out is not a product of populism but of the patrimonialism that the nomenklatura has historically developed,
Perhaps the Tropical Messiah is not the Messiah of Nazareth, it probably has more resemblance to the Messiah of the Desert who did not enter the promised land. López Obrador will sow the strain of a nationalist project that is current and necessary in the future post-Covid world. The unwritten rules of the Mexican political system are ineluctable, they have been fulfilled at the cost of everything. Strong presidents like Lázaro Cárdenas, Carlos Salinas and Luis Echeverría; they could not control the cacique corporatism of Mexico.
Transexennial continuity depends on the Narco-empire, integration with the United States of America must be subject to the argument of the disease called "Failed State", if Mexico falls, so does the United States. The nomenklatura only knows how to misgovern and develop the anomic tendencies of social poverty that its hegemony allows. The sociological pathologies of Sicilianized societies have already spread to North America. The Mexican invasion, which will be the campaign argument in the Republican Party, is no longer planned in Mexican territory but in the south of the United States. The less support for the López Obrador government, the more social pathologies will contaminate the American social order. Mexico is not, nor will it be, the Japan south of the Rio Grande, but it is already a territory under the control of various armed groups that constitute a flank for US national security. The United States has to join the Leave it! Sons of the fuck!
Mexico is an eternal Holy Week