freedom threatened

There is no doubt that freedom in Mexico, the freedom of us Mexicans is threatened. This threat does not come from a strange enemy, but directly from the actions and claims of President López. Even since before he took office as head of the Federal Executive Power, practically everything he has done has had as its main objective, if not the only one, to strengthen his political power. Institutional destruction and the weakening of the rule of law has been the mechanism chosen to achieve this.

The president’s intention is to recreate a political and economic system similar to what was the PRI of the last century, a closed system in which, from power itself, the winners and losers are determined both politically and economically, and this entails as a consequence a loss of individual freedom, both politically and economically.

As I mentioned in the article two weeks ago in these same pages: political democracy and economic democracy are two sides of the same coin, the coin of freedom. The historical evidence is overwhelming; The countries that have developed for a long period in a system where both types of democracy prevail are, simultaneously, those that have managed to achieve higher levels of economic development and well-being for their population.

Historical evidence, on the other hand, also teaches us and warns us that a country that loses political democracy tends, on the one hand, to lead to an increasingly authoritarian government while, gradually, the economic democracy of individuals is undermined, little by little the government is imposing measures, laws and regulations of an economic nature that are increasingly restrictive, little by little an economic system characterized by being oligopolistic is being built and consolidated, a corrupt system of crony capitalism that allows them to appropriate rents ever larger at the expense of the well-being of individuals and their families. In the extreme, the abolition of political democracy with the establishment of a dictatorship ends up also abolishing economic freedom.

In these four years of the government of President López, what we have witnessed is the gradual erosion of the rule of law with the capture and/or destruction of autonomous institutions of the Mexican State, permitted and endorsed by legislators related to the president who lack a minimum of dignity and whose brains are in pause mode: they are paid to obey, not to think. This has notably weakened the system of checks and balances required for the proper functioning of the State under a liberal democratic regime. The consequence, economically, is the loss of legal certainty that has negatively impacted investment and growth to such a degree that, in the best scenario, GDP per inhabitant in 2024 will be 4% lower than it was in 2018.

This lower 4% of GDP per capita is the best of cases, but it can be much worse because the institutional destruction is not over. López’s next step (with an apology to Ibargüengoitia) is the destruction of the INE and its replacement with an electoral body dominated and at the service of the president and his party. If the electoral reform that he proposed is approved, it would be the coup de grace for democracy. It would be a regression of the political-electoral system as it was prior to the creation of the IFE. It would be returning to a system where the government manages the elections and allows it to decide who wins and who loses; the sure losers would be the Mexicans whose political freedom was taken away from us.

On the other hand, and regardless of what happens with the reform, the other threat that hangs over Mexicans is our economic freedom. López remains determined that he is not going to give in on the controversy with Canada and the United States, arguing that energy sovereignty, that notoriously erroneous conception of sovereignty, is not negotiated. The threat is that if Mexico loses in the panel, which is most likely, it will decide to repudiate the T-MEC; doing so would guarantee the worst economic crisis ever experienced, it would guarantee the destruction of the Mexican economy and he, like Nero, happy to have achieved his purpose of having devastated Mexico.

Twitter: @econoclasta