With nearly thirty candidates assassinated in the electoral campaigns underway in Mexico, one a day this week, it is clear that criminal violence is already a factor in the elections. A tragic regression because although we Mexicans grew up in an environment in which electoral fraud and bad arts at the polls were in common use, (and they continue to be, although to a lesser extent), the political system had recently banished decades ago the “revolutionary” practice of physically disappearing the adversary in the transition of powers. It is urgent to ask ourselves why this primitive and savage regression is due and if this constitutes the warning of something more sinister and harmful.
An easy explanation would be to attribute the violence that has been unleashed in the campaigns to organized crime. It is partly correct, but staying at it distorts the true origin of the problem. It is true that the omnipresence of the drug cartels in some regions led them almost naturally to the task of seeking to impose the local authorities. The city councils in the territorial pockets they control constitute an appetizing booty. Why have hitmen if the municipal police can do their dirty work better, capture their victims and serve as shock bodies to prevent the invasion of rival gangs. And for the rest, the criminal diversification of the local cartels is such that the control of municipal services, the property and the treasury provide enormous advantages for extortion, the dispossession of land and properties, the sale of water pipes, the collection of floor law and a long etcetera.
However, in the long string of aggressions that the candidates have suffered in this campaign (including innumerable threats, in addition to the well-known kidnappings and murders), it is noted that in many cases the perpetrator is not organized crime but their own political actors. City presidents whose reelection is threatened by a charismatic rival; local power groups willing to do anything before losing the control they now exercise.
It would seem that the same thing is happening with the elections as with the deadly attacks on the press three decades ago. The first journalists were executed by annoying drug traffickers with coverage, but given the impunity with which they did so, the attack was soon imitated by local chiefs and powers. The temptation to suppress an uncomfortable journalist, as the cartels did without any risk, began to be irresistible for governors, municipal presidents, chiefs, and local government security chiefs. For some time now, the annual reports of the international organization Article 19 have warned that half of the attacks against journalists have a political origin, not strictly criminal. Consequently, Mexico became the country that, without being at war (and that is to say), constitutes the one with the greatest risk for the press in the world. Apparently, the same thing would begin to happen with the elections and with those who dare to participate in them.
It should be emphasized that drug trafficking is not the beginning and the end that explains violence in public life. The cartels and their unstoppable expansion are the most brutal and visible symptom, but ultimately it is a phenomenon that is due to a more entrenched cancer. Wild powers lead the way, but the alacrity with which other powers and actors concur reveals that deeper causes are at stake. The way in which entire communities turn to the systematic extraction of fuels, the kidnapping of officials by neighbors and aggrieved populations, the proclivity of marginal groups towards the looting of public and private goods (be it motorways or trains and trucks of load). In short, the growing inclination of groups and social actors to act not only outside the law but also through violent and criminal acts.
“Before anyone can start the violence, many others have already prepared the ground,” said psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, with good reason. When 56% of the working population is forced to work in the informal sector, as is the case in Mexico (that is, regardless of permits, taxes or social security), people learn that solving life does not go through rules of the system but by the practices that each one can build; especially if they can be carried out with total impunity. When the notion is generalized that the authorities and the rich use their position to enrich themselves and illegality and abuse to sustain their privileges, that the institutional system will not only not solve but will work against me, a luck occurs of legitimation of any measure to which I resort for my benefit and mine. Once you start from this premise, even violent acts become legitimate acts.
The other side of this clamp is impunity. Whether my acts are legal or not is morally irrelevant because they are legitimized by a higher justification, the only thing that matters is that I can carry them out with total impunity so as not to suffer the consequences. Something that is practically guaranteed in Mexico, be it the taking of a booth or the elimination of a political rival.
The violence that begins to invade new territories of national life is fed, then, by a complex number of mutually reinforcing factors: the inability of the economic model to offer a way of working within the system to the majority of Mexicans, which in entry makes millions of people “illegal”; the prevailing social injustice that fosters the widespread feeling of being a victim of the system; the prevailing corruption in public and private practices that delegitimizes the institutional order; the ineffectiveness and discredit of the judicial system and the security forces; the impunity that surrounds the first violent actions and small acts of dispossession and appropriation (be it of a governor or a rural community), which ends up making the seriousness of the actions “invisible”.
Of course, the killings and infamies of the cartels and criminal politicians force immediate action because they are the spearhead of the ongoing decomposition of public life. But at the same time it would be necessary to reflect and make decisions about the causes that originate anger, illegality, corruption, poverty and social injustice. Without all this the drug phenomenon would simply be a police issue; the problem is that a long time ago it stopped being just that. If we don’t do something, hell is the limit.
@jorgezepedap
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source https://pledgetimes.com/hitmen-at-the-polls-whats-next/
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