Mexico City, México – On Sunday, June 27, more than 400,000 people, representing all walks of life, dressed themselves in white and gathered in the capital to march against the surge of crime in the country. Displaying their motto “not a single one more” -- not one more kidnapping -- the protestors marched from the Independence Angel statue to the Zócalo or main square, where the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace are located. At exactly one o’clock in the afternoon, the “white serpent for security”, as the local media called the caravan of thousands of protestors based upon the shape of the massive protest from an aerial view, sang the national anthem and witnessed the release of a thousand balloons from the atrium of the Metropolitan Cathedral. There were five hundred black balloons, in honor of the victims of suffering and death, and five hundred white balloons, symbolizing the hope that insecurity and violence will cease in all of Mexico. Such a gathering not only took place in the capital: the scene repeated itself in the cities of sixteen of the country’s thirty-one states.

Independent reports indicate that the security situation in the country has become unsustainable. Mexico has the second-highest number of kidnappings in the world. Three thousand kidnappings were reported just during 2003, and this statistic should be analyzed bearing in mind that a high percentage of kidnappings and other crimes are not reported to the police. Sadly, the victims know that the police will not only fail to render justice in reported crimes but they also fear potentially greater reprisal actions given that the police forces themselves are oftentimes involved directly in such criminal acts. A study published by Reforma newspaper estimates that businessmen in Mexico spend between $10,000 and $40,000 annually per person on insurance and private security. The number of companies providing private security services has doubled during the last three years and they now have a yearly turnover of a billion dollars. According to the National Registry of Private Security Companies, in March 2001 there were around 2,000 private security companies. By early 2004, the number had surpassed 5,000. In essence, corporations as well as individuals must pay heavy taxes that do not even guarantee them basic services such as security or justice, and they end up having to supplant the obsolescent public services with effective private sector equivalents. Meanwhile, the Mexican Congress has not passed any of 300 pending bills to reform the country’s archaic police and judicial system, in particular those submitted by the administration of President Vicente Fox three months ago. Overall, it displays little interest in dealing with the issue. Once again, the politicians are giving higher priority to playing partisan games than to the needs of the people.

Shortly before the marches of June 27, President Fox said that “providing security to Mexico is a common responsibility of all of the political parties” and urged the Congress to accelerate the approval of the police and judiciary reform projects. However, since the last congressional elections in July 2003, the Institutional Revolutionary Party -- the PRI as it is known by its acronym in Spanish -- which has 44.8% of votes in the lower house of Congress and 46.8% in the upper house, has decided the legislative agenda at its convenience. After all, losing the executive branch did not intimidate the PRI, whose politicians continue to line their pockets at the government’s expense, condemning the country to an eternal state of underdevelopment and extreme poverty. The seventy years of the PRI in power are not as far behind us as we’d like; the ghosts of the past continue to lurk before the nation from the halls of Congress.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose election was questioned since he – a native of the state of Tabasco -- failed to meet the residency requirement at the time that he ran for office, seems destined to undermine his own race for the presidency in 2006. After being linked in the media to several corruption scandals that involved his key advisors, shown on television in March, Lopez Obrador’s popularity started to decline, resulting in a loss of between seven and ten percentage points in his public approval ratings. The Mexican public saw Mr. Rene Bejarano, former private secretary of Lopez Obrador and leader of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD, the leftist party to which the mayor belongs) in the Legislative Assembly of the Capital District, accepting a large sum of money from businessman Carlos Ahumada, and the former Secretary of Finance for the city, Gustavo Ponce, gambling big money in a casino in Las Vegas. Facing this irrefutable videographic evidence, Lopez Obrador declared that it was all part of a conspiracy organized by the Fox government to make his administration look corrupt. Things got worse when in May he was the center of a new scandal in which he refused to comply with a court order that obligated him to stop “urbanization” work on an expropriated piece of land. In this last case he limited himself to discrediting the integrity of the Mexican courts, which in recent years have been gaining autonomy and integrity and thus the respect of the public. The deeper problem is that, like other socialists, and in this sense he has a lot in common with the officials of the PRI, Lopez Obrador preaches and acts based on the principle that “meeting the needs of the people is more important than complying with the law” when in reality political leaders should be serve as examples in terms of respect for the legal system. Finally, with respect to the massive anti-kidnapping march, Lopez Obrador and his team have disappointed the public by declaring time and again that the march was a mere political maneuver by right wingers to discredit him. We all know that corruption is a common factor in Mexican politics, but Lopez Obrador, by revealing his lack of common sense in ignoring the desperate request of 400,000 souls that of their own free will participated in a peaceful demonstration, has shown that he is not a good candidate for the left. At the end of the day, these hundreds of thousands of people will only pay their taxes if and when they receive something (of quality) in return. All corrupt and populist administrations engage in constant shortchanging of those whom they govern, but in cases in which the state fails to provide a minimum of services such as security and justice, voters eventually realize the level of deceit that they have been subjected to and act accordingly against those in elected office.

By no means is Mexico the worst country in the world. Many countries in Latin America face similar difficulties. First of all, making every little problem out to be a conspiracy has became a fashionable tool among political leaders in the region. As we all know, the left-wing in Latin America lives based on propaganda. There are various regimes on the left that have few successes to announce to the public and which survive by pointing out the errors of their political rivals and justifying their own failures on the basis of “external pressures” and conspiracies. The chief examples are Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina. Secondly, problems related to the kidnappings and other crimes occurring with impunity are common to countries like Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and El Salvador. In many cases, Latin American politicians allow the proliferation of violence since they obtain a double benefit: they weaken the political system and they get to scare people, obtaining “legitimacy” to subvert rules as they wish.

At present, the law is not enforced or respected in Mexico. The whole society is a victim of the absence of rule of law and lives in an environment in which the existing incentives reward people that violate the law and penalize those who comply with it. Laws currently in force are in many cases archaic and weak, sentences are absurdly lenient and in general do not apply to minors. On the rare occasions that criminals are sent to jail, they face a system that does nothing to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society as honorable citizens. As long as the Fox administration is unable to pass any legal reforms in Congress because of the partisan moves of the PRI and Lopez Obrador keeps seeing a conspiracy around every corner, there will be no positive changes. On July 27, people clamored for greater security in a pacific fashion, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that if there are no developments for the better, the coming marches against crime may not be quite so peaceful.

The unfortunate reality is that, in the medium term, there aren’t like to be great improvements in the security situation for Mexicans. I’m not optimistic on this issue, but polls show that after the march, popular support for Lopez Obrador diminished, making the event at least a key contribution to preventing him from becoming president. And on this final point the majority of analysts agree: if Lopez Obrador were to win the country’s highest office, the effect would be equivalent to kidnapping once and forever the hopes of the Mexican people.

(c) Eneas Biglione - 2004

Publications:
CADAL (Argentina)
Economia para Todos (Argentina)
El Disidente (Argentina)
Fundacion Atlas 1853 (Argentina)
Hispanic American Center for Economic Research (USA)
Fundacion Libertad (Argentina)