The Messiah, the Bishops, and the Caesar
The Messiah, the Bishops, and the Caesar
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
The current crisis of governance in Mexico has ceased to be a matter of domestic politics and has become the epicenter of a geopolitical reconfiguration.
The State has exhausted its traditional mechanisms of mediation and is heading toward forced integration under Washington's aegis.
The Messiah narrative, embodied in the figure of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, represents the last gasp of a sovereignty that, paradoxically, has deepened the structural ties between political power and organized crime.
Like its predecessors, the current leadership has been unable to sever the umbilical cord with the powers that be, allowing the metastasis of drug trafficking to reach high levels of territorial control.
The Catholic Church has not been a mere spectator, but a historical intermediary that has skillfully woven networks of social containment where the State has deserted.
However, this mediation has crossed the line from pastoral care to organic complicity.
The infiltration of drug trafficking into ecclesiastical structures has created a social fabric where the sacred and the profane are blurred to legitimize the criminal order.
This symbiosis has failed in its primary objective of maintaining social peace, leaving a void that can only be filled by a larger external force.
The US presidential power, after years of observing the decline of its neighbor, seems ready to act according to a national security logic.
Friedman and Huntington had warned about the disruptive potential of an out-of-control Mexico.
Brzezinski's vision suffered from an alarming lack of perspective by underestimating Mexico's demographic and cultural power, focusing his attention on Arab fundamentalism while the real challenge was brewing in its own backyard.
Today, the rampant corruption and violence in Mexico represents a more existential threat to the United States than any insurgency in the Middle East, due to the porous nature of a border that no longer separates two nations, but rather two interconnected realities.
The outlook for Mexico points to a radical transformation: ceasing to be the American Sicily, an enclave of tolerated but contained illegality, and becoming the New Puerto Rico.
This process would not necessarily come about through a military invasion, but rather through a systemic intervention justified by the collapse of Mexican institutions and the pressure from the 50 million Mexicans residing in North America.
This demographic segment, weary of the ineffectiveness of governments in their country of origin, is beginning to look favorably upon an intervention by the Caesar that imposes the order that the Messiah and the Bishops could not.
Mexico's demographic capacity, far from being a barrier for Washington, becomes the social base that would legitimize a de facto external administration under the premise of regional survival.
The American war economy requires a minimum level of stability to guarantee its supply chains and nearshoring, which clashes head-on with the entropy generated by drug trafficking.
The failure of the social mediation of the Mexican Church and State opens the door to a technocratic and militarized protectorate.
Mexico faces the definitive loss of its autonomy in exchange for a peace imposed from abroad, marking the end of an era of pretense and the beginning of a new political geography where sovereignty is a luxury that institutional failure can no longer afford.
The survival of transnational criminal organizations in the face of an imminent intervention by the American Caesar would depend on a radical transformation: from being a collection of violent fiefdoms to becoming a para-state actor with strategic utility.
If drug trafficking groups in Mexico were to seek independent survival in the face of forced integration, their only path would be to mutate into a counterintelligence and territorial control entity serving Washington's national security interests, emulating the pragmatism of the Sicilian Mafia during Operation Husky in 1943.
In the logic of power, narco-politicians are now toxic assets that justify foreign intervention.
By promoting the capture and extradition of these figures, criminal organizations would eliminate the pretext of a narco-state that the Capitol uses to invoke forceful measures.
This "offering" would allow these de facto groups to present themselves as the only interlocutors capable of pacifying the territory, replacing a civil bureaucracy that Washington already considers failed and deeply infiltrated.
Mexican drug trafficking should shift its business portfolio to align with the United States' existential priorities: fentanyl and Chinese influence.
Just as the Italian mafia guaranteed the security of ports in New York and facilitated landings in Sicily to counter the Axis powers, Mexican groups would have to unilaterally eradicate the production of fentanyl and chemical precursors from Asia.
By assuming the role of guardians of American public health and a barrier against Beijing's economic penetration in the Mexican Pacific, these organizations would transform from a "terrorist threat" into "irregular allies."
Controlling migration flows and monitoring the infiltration of agents from adversary countries at the border would become their new currency.
To avoid being devoured by the American military machine, these organizations would have to demonstrate that their total eradication would create a power vacuum that could only be filled by chaos or hostile foreign powers.
By presenting itself as a state-sponsored mafia that protects the interests of the USMCA and expels the influence of Arab and Chinese capital, Mexican drug trafficking could aspire to survive under a regime of conditional tolerance.
