New Citizen Group Called ’Nosotrxs’ Forms to Pursue Mexico’s Rule of Law Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo - SinEmbargo
go to original May 13, 2017

Politics in Mexico has historically been an intermediaries' responsibility. From the Viceregal times, the enormous social inequality and cultural diversity has been managed by a dense network of local chiefs, intermediaries, political strong men, and leaders who ended up becoming a political business specialized in selling special protections and negotiating the acquiescence or disobedience of its clientele.

Mexico is a nation built on a mosaic jumble of pre-existing collective identities, which each had individual privileges under the rule of the Spanish Crown in order to relate with a distant, weak State. It could not be born as a community of citizens made equal by common law, individual subjects of rights and obligations. The theoretical equality established by liberal order became embodied in the particularist interpretation of laws, depending on the resources and strength of each individual or group. Social, economic and ethnic inequality became the breeding grounds for intermediaries who were indispensable for war and peace and were needed to ensure the domain of a state machine that they gradually ended up taking over.

The Mexican State, from its first consolidation during the Porfiriato [dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, 1876-1911] but above all from the classical era of the PRI regime [mid-20th century], has been an organization of intermediaries who privately sell services that should be provided universally. Every public decision-making process ended up becoming coins for political exchange: from birth certificates to building permits, disability pensions to public housing, and development projects to tax exemptions. That is how the relationship between the State and society in Mexico ended up being institutionalized. It was not done so as a direct relationship, governed by clear rules, in which State officials offer their services equally for all citizens; rather, it became a system of management of privileges and concessions in which the dense network of intermediaries holds a large amount of social wealth and takes personal advantage of inequality.



Thus, Mexican social order has not been based on the universal rights of citizenship; rather, it has been based on the clientelist management of demands and the granting of social benefits as privileges. A fundamental task for the construction of a true democracy, which is not the mere circulation of gangs of intermediaries, is to promote a large social movement for equality before the law and the universal enforceability of rights. Laws, social programs, and public policies should not be privatized by intermediate networks, and citizenship must cease to be an abstract category to become the active subject of social life.

To bring about this great movement and to promote a revolution of conscience and a civic rebellion against the private appropriation of public resources, Nosotrxs, "Us" has been born. It is an organization that defines itself as political, but it does not have electoral pretensions. It intends to recover the State for the people, which today has been captured by particular interests. It is an organization with an educational vocation, to ensure that laws and rights cease to be worthless and instead become instruments of justice and equality.

...The belief that moves us to speak in the first person plural is that the change needed depends not on a savior nor on enlightened leaders; rather, it depends on the organized, horizontal, collective action that points out injustices and abuses, displays them, and fights against them with the law and instruments of democracy in hand. Mexican society has changed. Now, it is time to change politics.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices | Spanish original

Translated by Leslie Castillo Navia

Mexico Voices is a blogging endeavor aimed at raising the awareness of U.S. citizens regarding the destructive impact of the U.S. economic policy and the War on Drugs on Mexico - on its people, their economic and physical security and their human rights, on the nation’s dysfunctional justice system, and on the rule of law and Mexico’s fragile democracy. Visit the website at MexicoVoices.blogspot.mx

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!