The current GOP doesn’t envy Mexico much of anything, but doubtlessly its more avaricious hierarchy dreams about becoming an Anglo version of the PRI. The PRI, or as it’s known in English, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, has been called “the perfect dictatorship.”
An electoral process gives the organization a sheen of legitimacy. Think of an oil slick upon water. See it as pay-for-play democracy. Isn’t this the system the Republican Party prays someday burdens the United States?
Ideally, doesn’t the GOP hope to import and infect America with this Mexican model? Through it “freedom” and “justice” mean “shackled to rank ideology and life-draining consumer indebtedness” while “scandal” gets erased altogether from civic discourse because almost every transaction, even the most mundane — especially the most mundane ones! — requires “a little something extra.” A taste. Some beak wetting.
There. Privatization of public services in a nutshell.
However, “scandal” will retain its validity for particularly crass public officials, badly misbehaving bold-named figures and clerics caught diddling with their flocks. Fox News, the GOP’s sanctioned distortion and echo chamber, must have an outlet for factual reporting. Triviality is all theirs.
A covetous GOP looks at the Mexico that was — and will soon resume being — and dreamily longs for the possibilities of grafting what a rightfully fearful American public should only see as the worst. On the coin’s reverse, though, myopic free-market privateers will regard this as “optimizing and further unfettering constant revenue streams into value added targets.” (How soon until that phrase runs in The New York Times business section?) Or as we all know, run-of-the-mill corruption.
Yet unlike revered wardheeler George Washington Plunkett’s “honest graft,” whose tithes, distasteful as we today might find them, in fact helped immigrant ethnic voting blocs, the GOP’s intentions resemble those of the PRI’s: fill to brimming its own coffers, then disbursing these greasy funds among the party’s doggedly obedient and implicitly obsequious advocates.
Until 2000, the PRI ruled Mexico for 70 uninterrupted years. In the last gasp of the last millennium something the Mayans never foresaw occurred. Mexico held a fair election. PRI lost it. The political world’s Washington Generals, PAN (the National Action Party), had finally overcome lifetimes of rigged votes.
PAN, guided by Vincente Fox, and later Felipe Calderon, both rightists rather than nationalistic and nationalizing leftists professing sangre-pan-patria, ineffectively presided over our southern neighbor.
Each man attempted to set Mexico on reform courses. Both failed. They vied against a system which had become genetically ingrained after three or four generations. To have excised that strain from their country, Fox and Calderon would’ve needed jolts as cataclysmic as revolutions. And as pleased as their northern neighbor might’ve been with a less crude Mexico, no way Tio Sam lets incalculable change foment along thousands of miles of border.
Under Fox, Mexico staggered economically. Under Calderon, who danced at American behest, Mexico disastrously engaged the country’s police forces against its nacrotraffickers.
Imagine that. The enabled asks his enabler to stop enabling him. Instead of going cold turkey, the junky demands his dealer stop selling him fixes. As Frankie Machine might’ve observed, that doesn’t work.
During Calderon’s term violence which had been previously contained among the criminal factions and whatever policia and federales filled their pads, flooded into everyday life. Murder figures which had been negligible, thus ignored, jumped into irrefutable indictors of disorder. Over the last six years, Mexico’s drug conflict has clipped approximately 55,000 lives. Certainly some of the late and lamented were hip-deep in the trade and paid for what they plied.
Yet the vast majority were simply mushrooms caught between mower blades, mistaken identity victims or sacrificed just to make points. What these points ever were are best known to the pistoleros who slaughtered those people.
For Anglos residing there, Mexico has usually been inexpensive. Unfortunately, life in their own country has always been cheap for Mexicans. Throughout Calderon’s term the state seemingly ran a sale on lives. If that price insufficiently low, government added rebates.
What’s indisputable? Mexicans will once again serve the devil they’ve always known.
A prediction: having won his country’s highest office, by the time these lines are read president-elect Enrique Peñ a Nieto of the PRI will have speed-dialed the drug cartels rending Mexico. There won’t be deals, though he will propose an “accommodation.” Peñ a Nieto will turn back the calendar by six years. Mexico 2012 won’t give the narcos carte blanche, but it will allow them to pursue business under 2006 strictures.
Meaning, as long as they keep their killing internecine, federal authorities will tailor its law enforcement efforts. Dog and pony shows to satisfy the gringos? ¡ Seguro! But substantial interdiction or eradication operations? ¡ Ese dia está terminado!
The greatest attribute about Mexico’s futile attempts to please Americans? At its bloodiest, their off-the-chart violence never spilled across our border. With all the lead flying from Tijuana to Matamoros, not one bullet reached Stateside.
The narcos knew had a single cross-border projectile glanced off some ol’ boy’s pickup, much less drawn American blood, Mexico would be inundated with a-hoopin’ ‘n’ a-hollerin’ Yanquis looking to plug anybody remotely resembling a Pedro or Jose.
Battling forces whose weaponry exceeds your own is bad for any kind of business. And business is what today’s GOP promotes above all else. Loving the country? Lip service to that. Barely.
Recent judgments have proven theirs is a lightly-held affection. When occasions rise to hoodwink the public, it gushes. However, when the nation seeks true stalwarts these scoundrels are only good for holding the coats of those who truly sacrifice.
The GOP will cheer troops deploying into their dubious conflicts. Then displaying the same fervor turn around and deny returning veterans what should be gratefully offered benefits. One ought to understand the Republican’s “America First!” invariably translates into “Only Me!”
Nonetheless I’m not implying Republican pooh-bahs would lend free rein to organizations who’d distribute poison, commit murder and exact extortion. At least not the vast majority of them. Not overtly. Not without having incorporated in Delaware beforehand.
Who hasn’t recoiled at Republicans’ unhinged reaction to the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the Affordable Care Act? Who doesn’t see the GOP’s Tea Bag absolutists blocking rejuvenative, recuperative or palliative measures to suffering or dying Americans if that denial means fattening bottom lines? They’ll have us dismiss respectful bedside manners — but would advise investing in mortuaries.
An entirely Mexican point of view, no?
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