SALINAS, GORBACHEV AND THE MEXICO-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP
Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero
The electoral campaigns have moved forward in Mexico and the United States, perhaps for this reason the political climate is so intense that nothing can go unnoticed, for example: the death of Mikhail Gorbachev and the consequences of the frustrated modernity that Russia is experiencing, particularly reflected in the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict. The last president of the USSR is a benchmark of the change of era that affected the world and now, as well as at the time of the disappearance of the USSR, his absence invites us to reflect on the Western liberal-democratic globalizing failure.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari wrote one of the best diagnoses regarding the torn modernity of our country's political system: Mexico: a difficult step towards modernity. And even when the technocratic group is accused of implanting a counter-model to the structural characteristics of the Mexican Republic, the truth is that it was also intended to generate a nationalist modernization that would be synchronized, at least ideologically, with the United States. Mexican liberalism is nothing more than the path of social transformation to abandon the humanistic medieval Hispanism that gave rise to Mexico, but which was not useful in containing North American imperialism. However, this Mexican liberalism also has a terrible dimension identified with the ugly aspect of Mexicanness: violent factionalism.
The Mexican people may be as liberal and Darwinian as anyone else, but incapable of accepting political modernity and inclined to live in an eternal collectivist cycle of violence and structural poverty to protect their particularisms, whatever the cost. Mexico has a primitive and barbaric liberal root that manifests itself in uncontrollable cacicazgos, anarchist social movements and civil disobedience.
The sterile comparison made between Carlos Salinas and Gorbachev is controversial, especially because it is produced motu proprio from the former president. However, Salinas is not only comparable to Gorbachev but also to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and other modernizing leaders, as the late political scientist Samuel Huntington stated; but, above all, with General Plutarco Elías Calles. Mexico, Russia and Turkey are representatives of cyclical, failed and cumulative schizophrenic modernizations.
Our country, like the Tsarist Empire and the core of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, are hinge nations between antagonistic civilizations and breaking points for civilizational expansion or defeat. The Anglo-Saxon axis that determined neoliberal globalization was not able to share the complete recipe for successful modernities: the construction of the State. On the contrary, the interpretation of the Minimum State was confused -conveniently- with the Famished State, mainly that of limited governability -or ungovernability- at the service of the de facto powers, the groups of organized violence and, especially, imperialism. . More neoliberal than Salinas were the dinosaurs of the Revolutionary Family, the cassocks of the religious extreme right and the criminal caciquism disguised as drug trafficking, social movements and rurality. These dark forces, historical enemies of the Mexican State, found the dismantling of the National State and its subsequent liberalization more than useful to continue limiting the Mexican Prince.
Unlike Mexico, in Russia an elite emerged from the military forces that knew how to recognize the flower-scented poison that neoliberalism implied and, despite significant costs, set fire to Western modernization to rebuild the Russian state and resist the imperialist demands of the West that forgot the democratic, political and social compromises with the Baltic Slavic civilization. The United States is afraid of Russia and that is why it has always sought to destroy it, the Russo-Ukrainian war cannot be written without such a script.
Mexico and the United States are already at war. The fight against drug trafficking is but another version of the Mexican-American conflagration that took place throughout the 19th century and with some significant intrusions in the 20th century. Mexico and the United States have always coexisted under the scenario of low intensity warfare. Yankee interventionism has no measure and, in addition to forcing national governments to submit to its war economy, it invests in different drug trafficking groups and factual powers to destabilize the country. Who is who in this new patriotic war that we are going to experience? Who is the main interested in that the Mexican State does not finish consolidating? Manuel Camacho Solís pointed out the historical knots that the armed forces must destroy to consolidate the Mexican State, in addition to the criminal groups.
Organized crime, the ruling powers and the invisible power have established their realities in the United States, but what is the reason that in this space they are not risky? The political and institutional capacity of the North American government to regulate, control and take advantage of the socioeconomic interests of said entities. In Mexico, the State is increasingly limited and a pact of healthy coexistence cannot be generated with the hindrances of the old regime, although they disguise themselves as modern conservatives, they continue to be an obstacle for any government. The powers that be in Mexico have ended up devouring the State and López Obrador has had to recognize the failure of the Fourth Transformation because it is becoming more and more notorious that the powers that be order, not the president.
Salinas and Calderón reflect the dilemma of imposing laws and authority on Mexicans, as well as the failure of authority. Samuel Huntington analyzed the furious Mexican 1994 from the perspective of a conservative people that refused to modernize and a president that was unable to consolidate the armed forces to use legitimate violence. López Obrador faces this situation: without the honest awareness that the Mexican Army is going -again- to war with drug trafficking, the national State will not be consolidated and the Yankee Empire, as it has always done, will find the incentives and interests to come to an understanding with the powers that be: there will always be exploitation for the emigrant lumpenproletariat, possibilities of money laundering for all those interested in not paying taxes to the Mexican State and, mainly, an exalted market for the vice of addictions.
The Mexican Army has never stopped protecting the political system, the 20th century of our country cannot be explained without the strength of the Official Party, which was nothing other than the extension of military officers to regularize the political dispute, and it worked. There was a limited democracy, but also governability.
State public institutions are in a state of decomposition similar to that of the Santanista era. The Failed State is a plague that forms in our country and also infects the powerful neighbor to the north, however, mutual destruction cannot be the optimum of our futures.
The climate of opinion that develops around the relationship between Mexico and the United States forgets that they are completely different civilizations and countries. Particularly our country conflicts when it has to assume Hispanism, indigenism and Catholicism in the face of an Anglo-Saxon culture that determines everything from a rational liberal perspective. It is not easy to live next to North America.
For an economy like the Mexican, the institutional agreements with the United States have been of little use, the best understanding has been that of the informal economy. The FTA-TMEC has only benefited North American companies, while Mexican society receives income from emigration and, above all, drug trafficking; the rest of the population must endure public or private underemployment.
Mikhail Gorbachev's naivety explains the current circumstances in Russia, while Mexico's innocence and ambition regarding the good intentions of the United States also puts us on the verge of formal war.