By Victor Hugo Arteaga*
In recent weeks we have seen horrible things that are happening throughout the country in terms of public security and that make Mexicans reflect on whether this is the country we truly want and long for.
In conversations with Colombian journalism teachers they have made me think about what Mexico is at this moment and they define it very crudely: Mexico is the Colombia of the 80s.
Today Mexico does not fight for democracy. Well, whether we like it or not, whatever ideology we have, we have already earned that one and we have tried it anyway, especially in the last 30 years.
When I was young I heard about the “traitor” who was former President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, who reconfigured the Mexican judicial system, which in the nineties was much worse than it is now.
I believe that one day, new generations will study and understand what Zedillo did well in that sense, but he also managed to make many of the things and changes that Luis Donaldo Colosio wanted in Mexican politics.
Zedillo did not make a speech, nor did he express that he saw a Mexico thirsting for justice. No, Zedillo did not say. Zedillo did. And because of what he did, this country was able to move to a first stage with alternation in the Presidency of the Republic, when in 2000 the PAN member Vicente Fox arrived at that instance.
Democracy is not a fight since we Mexicans have to fight. That has already been achieved and consolidated and today we are an electorally mature people, aware of what the priato was, then the alternation of the hand of the PAN, and then returning to the PRI and in 2018 deciding as a people for the left of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
We already know how all ideologies govern and we are responsible for our decisions as voters and the parties as protagonists of power. The left knew how to be the opposition and the right did not know how to do it, to become a “disposition” that was only interested during that period in the personal triumphs of its legislators.
The only thing that interested the PAN at the time were economic victories to fatten its pockets and leave Mexico at the mercy of the left, which won on the playing field its right to the Presidency and to continue in it.
Today, the only thing that the largest political forces in Mexico do agree on is that they cannot combat organized crime and every day they are increasingly overwhelmed by the terror generated by these groups.
Mexico no longer fights for its democracy! Mexico today fights for sovereignty! Mexico and Mexicans today fight to see who will win the battle to take real command of this country. The fight for sovereignty is to see who wins.
Will the State win with all its strength? Will the criminality that has begun to permeate and place and remove, for better or worse, the rulers at all levels win?
What a task he faces and that was left to the first President (and I am going to be faithful to the correct and non-populist language), that at least in the first hours and first dalliances, it would seem that he wants something different from the previous administration .
What a task they left to the new head of citizen security, who in the axes presented the previous week, at least made reference to the fact that, now, there will be total and absolute coordination with the states at all levels of government.
The cards are cast. Mexico and its public security system goes with all the technology and innovation in search of real intelligence work to address the darkest moment that the country and its inhabitants are experiencing in all corners of the country.
Let’s do what we have to do from our trenches. Security starts with yourself.
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*Víctor Hugo Arteaga is winner of the National Journalism Award 2016 for the investigative report The Ghost Companies of Javier Duarte, the former governor who is imprisoned thanks to that work.
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