Watchdog Mexico
The Temptation of Reelection
Everything can start with a huge inequality in the distribution of wealth. Societies resentful of the elites that exploit them, do not believe in the democratic model and accept the arrival of supposed heroes, leaders and even questionable messiahs who when they achieve power apply populist policies, distribute large amounts of money among the poor, the needy, who, in addition, feel included because they are asked for their opinion from the government for the establishment of public policies or for the realization of projects of great importance.
But what happens next?
The power is concentrated in a few, as we have seen in various Latin American experiences, such as Bolivia or Venezuela, and gives way to more corruption and less healthy discussion of public policies, it is not necessary to do them because the concentration of power overrides accountability, it becomes an obsolete resource, just like political competition, which eventually leads societies to ungovernability.
Mexico has already started that path
There is already re-election of mayors; deputies may be re-elected from 2021 consecutively up to three periods, while senators may do so for an additional period from 2024.
There is already an elected president who promises to distribute large amounts of money among the old, the undecided, they have already started the modification of “tailor made” laws that allow them to make that government what a single majority party decides.
The consultations have begun. What they don’t tell Mexicans is what happens after the money for the most vulnerable groups is over or when the leader disappears.
How to Impose a Dictatorship from an Electoral Victory
- Strengthening the political police and redirecting it to serve the regime and not the State.
- Involving the military high command in shady business, corruption, and violent crimes to ensure their loyalty to the regime’s project, and from the military, create a praetorian shock guard submissive to the leader and not the laws.
- Control of key institutions, either via the creation of new institutions and using these instrumentally, or via dismantling the meritocracy to populate them with their set pieces. This includes the control of the judicial system and the attorney general’s office via appointments of loyalists to the regime, as well as control of the electoral commission.
- Filling the public administration of agents of friendly foreign dictatorial regimes.
- Convening a Constitutive Assembly to redesign the Constitution and thus strengthen the executive branch and implement indefinite reelection.
- Accusing the media of being fake, having shady interests (national or foreign), or as enemies of the nation. Attacking free expression and free assembly.
- Acting more as an international cartel of organized crime than as a defined ideological project — shaping the ideology into the project of power and resources.
- Implementation of the social control that begins with handing wellness cards to the less well off, to give them pensions and other types of aid, and that end up being an electoral census, where the “card of the nation” is used in elections as an identification card to vote, and so the regime knows who had gone out to vote, who didn’t, and can call them to threaten them. This card is known as the “hunger control card:” he who has it, gets access to popular food, and he who does not have it, doesn’t.
- Reaching an agreement with employers to extract an extra-legal financial quota and make them promise not to intervene in politics, in exchange for giving them “protection,” gifts, and monopolies. That is, destruction of the economy in order to break up social cohesion and potential opponents.
- Using language that dehumanizes any critic or opponent as an enemy of the nation or controlled by foreign interests; including via anonymous on social networks.
