“Vigilantes on the March” was the rousing title of an op-ed piece in the New York Times February 3.
But the piece caught many readers’ attention not for its headline but for its byline and its passive content. It especially grabbed the interest of those with a serious interest in Mexico’s culture and politics. That’s because it was written by Enrique Krauze. For those not enchanted by the intellectual/political trajectories of this country, Krauze’s impressive credentials are usually lengthily rolled out: “A Mexican public intellectual, cultural entrepreneur, historian, essayist, critic, engineer, polemicist and publisher.” In his 20s, Krauze became an associate of the godfather of Mexico’s 1950‘s literary “boom,” submitting articles to Octavio Paz’s ”Plural” magazine. When that publication was shut down by an angry President Luis Echeverria (1960-1976), he became assistant to Paz who founded the magazine “Vuelta.” (Paz was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.)
The sweep of this list of Krauze’s expertise and accomplishments makes the NYT column that much more surprising for many. Krauze’s adoption of a new, complacent post-2012 election view of Mexico shocked many Mexican readers.
Through his “cultural” magazine “Letras Libres,” distributed in a number of Spanish-speaking countries, he has in the past presented a more acute – and accurate – examination of Mexico’s reality than much of this country’s media. Krauze, a survivor of the government’s student massacre of 1968, is now 67, no longer considered demographically as “old” as it once was.
Yet, in the NYT op-ed piece, for some of his admirers, time seems to be taking a toll on Krauze’s ambitious keenness of political and cultural perception, his sharp-eyed analysis, and his intuition. Krauze has recently appeared to some of his long-time intellectual friends to appear variously as not just conventional, but “conformist” and “compliant,” defending political and cultural stances that to seem to emit a whiff of submission, of collaboration with quite possibly untrustworthy “powers that be.”
In “Vigilantes on the March,” he says that if Mexico’s “economic reforms of 2013 attract investment and are implemented efficiently (two big ifs, he notes), the major remaining obstacles to real social progress will be the powerful force of organized crime and the weakness of legal and practical measures to stem it.” He’s shyly speaking of Mexico’s congenitally corrupt police and military forces, its abysmally operated judicial system, and its inmate-controlled penal system. At one time he would have spoken sharply and accurately in enumerating these culturally persistent sins against Mexico’s citizens.
Thus, we have to pause to assess the reality of the concept of things being “implemented efficiently” – a verb/adverb set used in the past by Krauze to imply “fairly and uncriminally” – but here seemingly used promiscuously. It is burdened by so much false promise as to be openly, predatorily, slippery.
It remains a habitual carry-over, a verbally manipulative tool for a political party that declares through President Enrique Peña Nieto that, chameleon-like, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has changed its long-held brutal and corrupt oligarchic ways. Both citizens and on-lookers are assessing Nieto’s administration to see if this is true. Many aficionados of Krauze believe it should also remain in his armory of keen-eyed critical analysis. Unsurprisingly, the “two big ifs,” as he designates them, are seen by a great many citizens as not big, but vast and profoundly deep.
But Krauze is now a board member of Televisa, for decades the obsequiously obedient media arm of the PRI oligarchy that murdered political opponents and, in 1968, massacred his fellow students and friends.
Aside from that peculiar oddity, Krauze writes that “it would be wise for President Enrique Peña Nieto to press for the incorporation of the vigilantes into a legal entity.” Unfortunately, he compares this proposed amalgamation to policy of Mexico’s hated dictator, Porfirio Diaz, in creating the infamous – and blood-thirsty – rurales. Sound Mexican historians have classified Diaz’s rural police force created by “recruiting” – meaning capturing – a few bandits, giving them felt hats, smart gray uniforms, and the promise of regular pay if they would bring in other bandits, either as volunteers for the rurales or as prisoners. Using thieves to catch thieves resulted in a sharp decline in banditry, and for the first time in living memory the roads were safe for travel. Unfortunately for campesinos, bandits are bandits. And the gray-unformed predators carved a wide swath of terror through the countryside, eventually creating burgeoning ranks of rebellious farmers who joined the 1910 Revolution, brought down the porfiriato, and swept away all whom they saw as enemies, changing Mexico forever.
A poor and unpromising comparison. But one that has come to the minds of a good many people who suggest that Peña Nieto may possibly be creating a “Frankenstein force.” They’ve already defied federal forces sent to Michoacan to “pacify” them, refusing to lay down their arms until the top leaders in the local drug cartel that have been preying upon them are arrested or killed. Peña Nieto’s Minister of Interior Miguel Angel Chong had just vowed that no such agreement would be made, when he had his mind changed for him. Now a “modus vivendi” has been struck by federal troops with civilian rural forces. The government wants to sign up the vigilantes for its drug war. Yet, unsurprisingly, some of these militias don’t want to be “institutionalized.” And not all communities are pleased with vigilante groups, often made up of bristly armed strangers, patrolling their streets.
But Krauze is unperturbed by such developments. He has said that while the PRI may not have become a modern party, “the president now exercises only his prescribed constitutional powers. We have a multi-party congress and an independent Supreme Court. A transparency law has reduced free-wheeling corruption at the federal level, regulated by a federal institute of citizens. The Bank of Mexico is autonomous. In short, a return to the days of the ‘perfect dictatorship’ (which the PRI enjoyed in most of its 85 years of existence) is now impossible.”
Meanwhile, the newly minted imaginary middle class country, the United States of Mexico, is reeling from the cuesta de enero – annual government mandated January price hikes. These were given a special hefty punch by Peña Nieto’s newly added, inflation-spurring taxes on everything you can think of but produce and medicine, though the president also tried to hold out for taxes on those.
The tax “package” is hefty enough to be unhesitatingly passed on to defenseless customers. By that, one means the poor and the working classes, who can ill afford a heavier load. “Inflation on average in 2014 is going to be higher because of Peña Nieto’s fiscal plan,” Alexis Milo, chief Mexican economist at Deutsche BankAG in Mexico City, told reporters. He added that while he doesn’t see a spike in inflation in the early months, the rate will end the year at four percent. That’s within the central bank’s two to four percent “target” range. And Gabriel Casillas, chief economist at Banorte in Mexico City, has predicted that “inflation could go up to nearly five percent.”
(Krauze’s books include “Biography of Power” and “Redeemers; Ideas and Power in Latin America.”)