Mexico, Populism, and its Geopolitics

Mexico, Populism, and its Geopolitics

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero

In modern Mexican history, the six-year terms of Luis Echeverría Álvarez and José López Portillo exemplify how poorly managed sovereignist populism can lead to economic and political disasters with profound consequences.

Echeverría, in particular, was an excessively pragmatic president who adopted a Bonapartist style of governance, concentrating power and acting with a personalistic and authoritarian vision.

His eagerness to assert national sovereignty and challenge foreign influence, in a context of international crisis and the exhaustion of the import substitution model, led him to decisions that deeply damaged the Mexican economy.

The nationalization of the banks, the increase in unsupported public spending, and the confrontation with the United States were symptoms of a populism that prioritized sovereignist rhetoric over the country's economic and social realities.

The result was a serious deterioration of institutions, a crisis of confidence, and soaring inflation, which marked the end of that era and laid the groundwork for a weakened economy.

The lesson of that chapter is that sovereignist populism, when it becomes a strategy of confrontation and self-sufficiency, ends up harming rather than strengthening the nation.

Misunderstood sovereignty, stifled by arrogance and authoritarianism, can cause a collapse that undermines the foundations of the state and social welfare.

Today, this same logic is being repeated in Mexican politics, which continues to risk aligning itself with populist regimes in Latin America.

The perception in the country is that, after the damage caused by governments like those of Echeverría and López Portillo, sovereignist populism is a perilous path that only brings more poverty, insecurity, and a loss of real autonomy.

These governments, with their anti-imperialist rhetoric and eagerness to challenge the United States, end up promoting a dangerous dependency and a weakening of national institutions.

The perception is that the country lives under a low-quality democracy, where elites and powerful vested interests skillfully manipulate discourses of sovereignty and nationalism to maintain their privileges. This type of populism, when combined with authoritarianism, ends up fragmenting social cohesion, perpetuating inequalities, and ultimately consolidating a system of domination that prevents the advancement of a true democracy.

The risk lies in the fact that, in their eagerness to maintain the image of a sovereign and independent state, the country becomes hostage to a discourse that, in reality, favors the elites and local bosses, who use anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify their power and privileges.

This scenario is exacerbated by the escalating violence of the cartel wars and the normalization of authoritarianism, which in Mexico has been on the rise as political and social conservatism has strengthened.

Mexico continues to face the risk of falling into a sovereignist populism that, instead of strengthening its institutional structure and economy, weakens them even further.

True sovereignty requires solid institutions, respect for human rights, and a vision that prioritizes collective well-being over confrontational rhetoric and self-sufficiency.

Only in this way can Mexico overcome the shadows of a past that, disguised as patriotism, has actually been an obstacle to its development and true independence.

Echeverría and the Nomenklatura

 Echeverría and the Nomenklatura

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

After the death of Luis Donaldo Colosio and the failure of his project of social liberalism, Carlos Salinas de Gortari blamed the nomenklatura and, specifically, the faction of Luis Echeverría Álvarez for sabotaging the modernization of Mexico. Over time, Vicente Fox's political impotence was also pointed out by his collaborators as activated by the Echeverría Álvarez device. In reality, more than Echeverrism, Salinas – and other analysts involved in modernization – proposed this political clique as a scapegoat to justify the enormous difficulties involved in transforming our country. Problems that even the LEA itself faced and that it resolved with an authoritarianism similar to that of the CSG; though both failed.

Mexican despotism is explained by a colonialist structure that unites, in the form of muégano, patrimonialism, corporatism, cacicazgo and corruption. The Latin American anti-liberal regimes must face the enormous challenge of forming Nation States in order to modernize; on the authoritarian, liberal or socialist path.

Echeverría and Salinas were more similar than dissimilar, only that the first was the socialist path implemented by the North Americans and the second, the neoliberal path implemented by the Americans. As well as the joke that the Nazi scientists that the gringos had were better than the Nazi scientists that the Soviets had.

Latin American anti-liberalism, populist or capitalist, left or right, liberal technocrat or socialist technocrat, reflects the colonial model of Spanish colonialism where the different castes remain united in a dynamic space, but without consciousness of fusion. The castes in Latin America are united, but not concentrated; and therefore there are no nations. The rulers and the people only understand each other in the conservative-authoritarian key that inhibits any attempt at social change.

Echeverrismo is a window that allows us to understand the colonialism of Mexico with respect to the United States. In addition to this political clique, other social conglomerates, nations and characters; They also benefit from ruling the social control of the country.

Most Mexican presidents have had to behave like Luis Echeverría, including resorting to violent, authoritarian and public control measures to control some groups for the benefit of others. Sometimes it is thought that this is the least cost, compared to a military intervention by the Superpower, as has occurred in other Latin American latitudes.

In the end, Salinismo turns into Echeverrismo, mortar bogeymen who, more than individuals or cliques, represent a culture, the anti-liberal one, but which always ends up linked to North American imperialism to guarantee social control and modernization; for a moment.

The common denominator of these authoritarian, psychopathic and violent trajectories is represented by anticommunism and the national security of the United States, elements that social analysts and alternative groups in the country must begin to understand better.

The destiny of Mexico is ineluctably connected to the United States and, because of them, various social groups have benefited from characterizing weak or marginalized groups -sometimes more Mexican than others- as evil, ungovernable, communist, narco-satanic, indigenous, etc.; causing the authorization of the Yankee Empire for the exercise of violence and budget spending.

To avoid the Echeverrías and Salinas, relations between Mexico and the United States – as Robert Pastor rightly says – have to change, be more original and authentic. The Mexican oligarchy continues to offer itself as "Polkos" who can order the Comanche territory, but they make things worse every time; until the Union Army and Ulysses S. Grant come along. Güeritocracia supremacy has residence in Madrid or Rome.

Echeverría, AMLO and Gelatine Populism

Echeverría, AMLO and Gelatine Populism

September 22, 2020

Diego Martin Velázquez Caballero

https://www.semanarioelreto.com/single-post/2020/09/22/Echeverr%C3%ADa-AMLO-y-el-Populismo-Gelatina

Why is the clique of President Luis Echeverría Álvarez still so important in the Mexican political system? Since the neoliberal modernization of our country began, the members of the Echeverrismo have manifested themselves as an independent political project that has been present, for and against, from the delamadridista administration to the current government. Carlos Salinas de Gortari pointed to Echeverrismo as the most reluctant and gloomy part of the transformation of the Mexican political system: the Nomenklatura.

Echeverrismo perfectly represents the diarchy between the Revolutionary Family and the Far Right in the Mexican political system. Although Carlos Fuentes affirmed that support for Luis Echeverría Álvarez was preferable instead of Fascism, this nomenklatura has the most violent methods of political control, the LEA's six-year term shows the high murderous training that a North American intelligence agent can have. the presidency of the republic.

The end of 1968 was an important time for the presidential succession of the 1964-1970 six-year term, within the Revolutionary Family there was a relentless struggle to occupy positions of power, Díaz Ordaz contemplated a communist operation in the country where the large intelligence centers of Russia and the United States, as well as old political cells of Latin American socialists. During his time at the Ministry of the Interior, before being President, Díaz Ordaz was characterized by being a hard-line boss, his objective was always to comply with the system, with the State; perhaps, these antecedents made him feel an exaggerated dangerousness of the youth demonstrations.

There are different versions of what happened on October 2, 1968 from the different positions of intellectuals and protagonists. Most point to the overt authoritarianism of Díaz Ordaz as the main cause, the few point to the students as the perpetrators, but another also points out that the student movement may have been manipulated to obtain benefits in the presidential succession.

For this tendency, it is the Secretary of the Interior who makes rigid decisions at critical moments of the conflict, which did not clarify the panorama of the President, on the contrary, they deplored him. Díaz Ordaz learned, shortly before the sad events in Tlatelolco, much of the truth and found in the crossing of the information that he himself made, clear signs of the mediatization of the movement in the merciless fight for the presidency.

It is Echeverría's loyalty to the black circle of the system that surprises the Revolutionary Family, demonstrating that he was capable of anything and thus being chosen as his successor. Echeverría knew how to use the controls, the confidence of the PRI structure and reached the luminosity of power. Echeverría was considered the only and fully responsible for the student massacre, since it fostered all that social and political environment to be favored politically and publicly during the presidential succession.

Echeverrismo is not an economic model but a style of government: gelatin populism. This ability to adapt, to take any form to remain in power, is due not only to the survival of this clique but even to reproduction. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Emilio Gamboa Patron are examples of this political pragmatism, the situation is more terrifying when the military, academic, religious and social side of the group is observed: MURO, Halcones, Compañera Esther, Emilio Uranga, Paramilitaries, Progressive Jesuits, Battalion Olympia, CIA. Sons of bitches.

The Technocracy, the business sector, the Left and the PAN, tried to make pacts with this clique to guarantee, they do, an economic model to start the transformation and the awakening of modernity in the country. Echeverrismo was with everyone and they betrayed everyone. In recent assassinations, the CIA-Ultra-Right-Nomenklatura triangle is useful to explain everything.

The 4T every day is more echeverista and less competent. Economic growth, modernization, political liberalism, and democracy are stifling. Even though it is possible to agree that the welfare state in Mexico is necessary, to dress the prince in his attire, it is also true that no economic strategy supports the politics of perversion. The decade of zero growth is more a product of a political style than an economic policy.

Although the LEA had some successes in the economic empowerment of the State, the subordination to the Revolutionary Patrimonial Family, is what generated the permanent economic crisis and the contagion of failure to the following models. Echeverrismo is the Santanismo of the nineteenth century. Even when Roderic Ai Camp speaks of a renewal of the power elites in Mexico, this has not happened, the Revolutionary Axis-UNAM-ITESM remains the same. No rupture has been generated that allows the replacement of the Revolutionary Patrimonial Family.

No historical breakouts in 4T. As in the case of Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, it only continues to be rhetoric. Liberalism, Democratic Consolidation, Development, Secular State, Social Welfare, Sovereignty, etc., are only words of the Seducer of the Homeland.