Power and Republic • Porfirio Muñoz Ledo

From Morena, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo is the biggest critical voice of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.In recent months, the distance between them has increased.Muñoz Ledo's voice -the main representative of social democracy in Mexico -has been sharpening, and every day charges a greater relevance to understand what happens in the movement that Mexico governs today, which has to come and what it must change forthat the fourth transformation is up to its voters and their promises.

“The transformation experienced by the country since 2018 has consolidated freedom of expression.Its greatest gain is the public debate on the great national issues;His negative balance is the unlimited proliferation of injury, disqualification and rotten fruits of discrimination and hate.”-Porfirio Muñoz Ledo

“This is not a rupture document of Muñoz Ledo with the fourth transformation, but it is a distance statement.[…] It is undoubtedly a loyal reflective act, but it is also an honest criticism."-Ricardo Raphael, from the prologue

Fragment "The Power and the Republic" of Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, published by debate.Courtesy of Publication of Random House.

Porfirio Muñoz Ledo |Emblematic protagonist of the Mexican democratic transition, dedicated to education, public administration, diplomacy, parliamentarism and political leadership.Doctor of Constitutional Law and Political Science from the University of Paris, has been Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare, Secretary of Public Education, Senator and Deputy.

Power and Republic |Porfirio Muñoz Ledo

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FOREWORD

Controversial, tenacious and subversive, as it has always been, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo exposes in this text several of the issues of public life that have most concerned during the last decade.

It brings together writings of different nature, but similar intention: speeches, notes, opinion articles, essays, initiatives and positions that have in common concern about the transcendence of social transformations embodied in institutional construction.

The work as a whole tense dialogue with the self -proclaimed fourth transformation and the different currents that made possible the electoral triumph of the movement headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In the following pages, Muñoz Ledo coincides with that movement, but also clarifies to assert his own ideas and, plane, when he seems indispensable, disagree without concessions.

The author offers variations on the same issue: the long journey that the leftist opposition had to carry out to get to power and, also, both successes and the errors committed once in the government.

This is a book on the emergence of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and also on the leadership of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but, above all, it is a text about the look that Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, main actor of said movement, has respect, has respectof lopezobradorism.

It is undoubtedly a loyal reflective act, but it is also an honest criticism of a man whose long biography in Mexican politics is linked to complex bets in favor of the transformation and progressivism of the left.

Among the most relevant criticisms is the rejection of what Muñoz Ledo calls "the atmosphere of verbal lightness" in which today's political confrontation develops in Mexico and the rest of the globe.

The author of “the unlimited proliferation of injury, disqualification and rotten fruits of discrimination and hate complains complains.The intentional recurrence of false news, the abolition of the border between the important and the strident [that] feed political polarization and mental confusion ”.

In this regard, the power and the Republic seeks to provide certain anchors in an era astredled by relativism and its most stubborn engendro: post -truth.You cannot dialogue seriously, much less reach decent agreements in a plural and democratic society, if lightness triumphs over the severity of the terms and agreements.

It is no accident that, towards the end of the book, the author has delivered a series of short notes about characters that enjoyed a large stature in national and international politics.

Here Muñoz Ledo dialogue with individuals as dissimilar as Maurice Duverger, Julio Scherer García, Miguel León-Portilla or Shimon Peres, among several others.The resource has nothing random: in the face of the frivolity and lightness of politics is the resource to bring to those who yesterday faced problems of big people.

Nor does the chapter dedicated to the Constituent Congress of Mexico City reveal a forced coincidence, which had Porfirio Muñoz Ledo as a orchestrating head.In this effort the politician and the ideologist gathered to offer a political route other than that held by the rest of the country: a path agreed between political forces with inclusive ambition and reformist purpose.A revolutionary bet à la Muñoz Ledo: sincerely institutional.

Again, here the author refers to the re -foundation of Tenochtitlan, not as much as a reference located in the next past, but in what could be the future.His obsession to achieve a new National Constitution breathes along with his political vocation every time he reflects on the Republic and its transformations.A new Constitution corresponds to each era and there will not really be a fourth transformation if it is not accompanied by its own foundational text.

This is the main thesis of a book whose author does not usually deceive in his premises and neither in his convictions.

First the coincidences with the fourth transformation appear, that is, the rejection of neoliberalism, inequality and the Government of the elites.Muñoz Ledo encompasses these three complex themes on a single label: "The old regime".Here does not refer to the political regime articulated around the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that for seven decades ruled the country, and against which, after being part of it, the author rebelled in 1988.

In power and the Republic, the Old Regime is that whose foundations were built during the economic crises of the 1980s, when the Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado country (1982-1988) ruled.It is the same that the Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000), Vicente Fox Quesada (2000-2006), Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) andEnrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).

Muñoz Ledo's criticism is the same that supports the fourth transformation: 30 years of economic policies that expanded the inequality gaps, benefited a few economic actors and displaced the state of their role as rector of development and national cohesion.

To carry out the reform agenda consisting of the “neoliberal” program - a Muñoz Ledo Acusa - it was necessary for political forces to agree.It is in the heart of the author's political philosophy the need to promote pacts and consensus when at the same time there is respect for political plurality.

However, for Muñoz Ledo the pacts of the "neoliberal" era turned their backs on people, because they only privileged the interests of the ruling class.Unlike other democratic efforts - as, for example, the Chilean Concertación or the Poncloa's pacts in Spain - Mexican patient was elitist or, more precisely, Anti -Foplebeyo.That is why he assured privileges for a few and stripped of rights to a vast majority.

The cusp of elitist pactics - articulating work of the “old regime” - would have been the Pact for Mexico promoted between 2012 and 2013 by Enrique Peña Nieto and its party, the PRI, and to which a small group of leadership of the National Action Party (National Action Party (PAN) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

In the author's words: “The Pact for Mexico privileged the energy reform, the financial, the prosecutor, the telecommunications and the educational.The political reform was confined to the interests of the then political bloc in power, as well as by the inability of the opposition of raising an in -depth reform of the political system ”.

It refers to partisocracy as an antagonistic term against democracy.This assessment coincides with a time when political parties lost reputation and respect among the majority of the population.Instead of being vehicles to represent interests of citizens, they would have become machinery to strip, privilege and corrupt.

In addition to inequality, ”says Muñoz Led.

The corruption crisis and several events related to state violence, highly.

Speed, social discomfort grew along with the indolence of the ruling elites.Who paradoxically benefited from this circumstance was Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party, Morena, the only options that remained outside the Pact for Mexico and the Cupular Agreements.

Muñoz Ledo not only coincides with the political diagnosis that makes the current president of Mexico every day, it could even be said that he shared authorspersistent and the need to refound the Republic from principles other than the prevailing.

However, in this text the author also shares critical reflections regarding the political work Lopezobradorista.It emphasizes, over others, the vision that Muñoz Ledo promoted as a federal deputy regarding well -being programs dedicated to transferring public resources to economically punished populations.

The author of these pages almost proposed at the start of the Lopezobradorist administration that the minimum vital income from a universal register would be created that will ensure the right to food for the entire population.Behind this initiative was obviously the conviction that this support, because it was generally used in favor of the ruling party.

Although 137 legislators from different parties joined such an initiative, the leadership of the Morena bench in the lower house opposed this proposal arguing that, for President López Obrador, the priorities were other.

This parliamentary dispute passed at the time unnoticed, but it was key in the disagreement about the partisan politicization that Muñoz Ledo proposed to avoid with respect to the well -being.

Muñoz Ledo has also been critical regarding the excessive body of the government.Said in his own words: "One of the dogmas of neoliberalism that invaded us more than 30 years was the thinning of the State".

It coincides with López Obrador that the government must be stripped of ostentation and superfluous spending and also that the salaries of public senior administration grew in excess during the era "neoliberal".

However, he is not a thinker who incurs excesses or the simplistic understanding of the public budget.For Muñoz Ledo, the government's effectiveness is directly related to its size.One value on the other cannot be privileged, because both correlate.Without a doubt, the "neoliberal" governments sacrificed efficiency favoring austerity.The serious thing is that, so pretext of corruption, the fourth transformation could end up doing the same.

Muñoz Ledo's thought is also distinguished in its valuation regarding civil society.While for Andrés Manuel López Obrador the organized society is mostly right and therefore complicit of the "old regime", for Muñoz Ledo it is a body "contrary to the concentration of power and [is also] a denial of corporatism".Recognizing its importance implies respecting their diversity and human values that nourish and qualify it.

On this issue, the author of El Poder and the Republic does not give up the official position: without civil society - without native peoples, LGBTTI community, environmental fighters, independent unions, leaders of the popular urban movement, sexual servants, defenders ofanimals and feminist, among many other groups - it would not be possible to operate modern democracy.

It contrasts this vision with that of President López Obrador, who is convinced that his government can talk without intermediaries with people, govern without society organizing and being democratic without bodies that add the concerns of the various social expressions.

From this argument the book is emerging with emphasis towards the dissidents that Muñoz Ledo also has with the fourth transformation.To do this, he points out that the opposition movement - whose triumph at the polls was obtained in the summer of 2018 - includes and at the same time transcends lopezobradorismo.For the author, it is a political force whose origin is in 1988 when he and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas created the National Democratic Front and a year later they founded the PRD.

It is not possible to omit in this reading of the story that it was Muñoz Ledo himself who invited Andrés Manuel López Obrador to join the ranks of that opposition mobilization, in the early 1990s of the 1990s.

He claims, therefore, in power and the Republic, "the overwhelming impact of a national majority consolidated around President López Obrador [which] seems to erase the past that made it possible".

From the Presidency of the Republic.

Another great dissent has to do with the relevance that Muñoz Ledo gives to institutions.Again and again distinguishes between the true change of regime, which goes through a reform to the institutions, and the change of discourse that, usually, transcends little to its time.

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It is eloquent and at the same time lapidary when he affirms that "the battle for the future is not a struggle of gladiators, but the search for institutional solutions and alternative development schemes".

Reiterates, then, that the relevant is the reform of power and that such a thing happens to build new institutions that leave behind the old regime.

At this point Muñoz Ledo proposes anything that has not preached before.He is convinced that Mexico needs a new constitution in which the premises of the New Republic are reflected, to put it in lopezobradorist terms, the bases of the fourth transformation.

If independence had the Constitution of 1824, the reform with the Constitution of 1857 and the revolution with that of 1917, why the claim of a new regime would not be similar?

In 2000 Muñoz Ledo tried to convince Vicente Fox to tour this same path, but he did not succeed.Subsequently, he was the architect of the Constitution of Mexico City and, strong of this experience, he is still convinced that the country could still see the emergence of a new constitutional text according to the Mexican Mexico of the 21st century.

He adds as the main key to his proposal a transition from the presidential regime to another of parliamentary cut, argument that according to Muñoz Ledo would allow the governance with plurality to be compatible.

They contrast these proposals with the vision of President López Obrador, who is not a believer that societies really change from public policies and institutional reforms, much less than a new constitution.In addition, its leadership evidently unfolds with greater comfort within the presidential regime.

This book concludes with an epilogue called "Inclusive dialogue about the Republic".In strict sense it is not a rupture document of Muñoz Ledo with the fourth transformation, but it is a distance statement.In those last pages, as in the rest of the book, the author and the politic.The Window of Opportunity for the Matiz has been closing strongly, a little for stridency and the same because reality is imposed on expectations.

Power and the Republic is a doubly biographical book: it refers to the life of one of the most important politicians of our era and also to an era where few are the politicians who will finally be remembered.

Ricardo Raphael

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The present work is the novena of a saga of books published by various publishers over 35 years: commitments (Posada, 1988), society against power (Diana, 1993), original dream and nation project (National Presidency of the National Presidency of thePRD, 1995), for a new Constitution (parliamentary group of the PRD, Chamber of Deputies, LVII Legislature, 1999), summary of a republican left (ocean, 2000), the coming break (Grijalbo, 2008), the radical route forCovering the Republic (Grijalbo, 2010) and Memory of the Word (Debate, 2013).These texts that are now presented are independent of the document entitled Porfirio Muñoz Ledo.Oral History 1933-1988 (Debate, 2017), whose authorship belongs to Professor James W.Wilkie from the University of Los Angeles, California.

It is integrated by a compilation and selection of diverse texts, written and published over a decade (from 2011 to 2021): opinion articles, speeches, essays, positions and initiatives.It contains analysis carried out in an evolutionary way, although not necessarily chronological, about the political, social and economic situation of both Mexico and other international countries and contexts, always from critical and propositive perspectives.

They begin in the end of the old regime, during the six -year periods of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, when the neoliberal doctrine and corrupt structures of power that were giving the passage to the progressive forces reached the progressive stage.The texts corresponding to that time deliberately thinned in order to accentuate an evanescent optics.They are grouped in the chapter "Agony of a regime".

The second chapter, "Covering of Tenochtitlan", collects the works that settled and content to the political reform of the capital between 2012 and 2017.It includes the legal and theoretical debate to coexist the sovereignty of the city with that of the country and the enriching debate of the Constituent Congress, which resulted in an articulated letter based on enforceable and justiciable rights.

In a third chapter, "of opposition to government", reflections were combined about the rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the Presidency of the Republic, comprising from the 2018 electoral process to almost half of his government.Campaign proposals with public policies promoted by the new administration, mainly in economic matters, combat corruption, citizen security and migration, as those taken in an emerging way as a result of the pandemic caused by the pandemic caused by the pandemic caused by the pandemicCOVID-19.

In the fourth chapter, "the imperative to reform", I consider it convenient to resume some of the most important initiatives that as a deputy to the Congress of the Union presented during the LXIV Legislature, some already dictated and other pending to be processed.Thus, proposals of great draft appear, such as the Law of the General Congress of the United Mexican States, the comprehensive reform of substantive gender equality and others, of not little transcendence, related to the amount of minimum wages and universal basic income asPrerogative of all Mexicans.

In the fifth chapter, “Globality or neighborhood”, a selection of articles related to international and foreign policy of notorious relevance in bilateral, regional and multilateral border relations of Mexico is included, as well as the country's insertion into a global world in a global world.

The sixth chapter, "by a new Constitution", is dedicated to presenting and commenting on the proposals made during this last period, in order to give course to the elaboration of a new constitutional text updated and according to the needs of the 21st century.A new social pact that reduces the neat character of the current text, as well as its contradictions, redundancies and archaisms.A Magna Carta available to people, who understands a coherent project of the country and offers legal certainties for all, as well as a true national reconciliation.

In the seventh chapter, texts edited to important characters of public life meet, all of them deceased, with whom I shared vast experiences and common ideals.The texts dedicated to Commander Fidel Castro and President Salvador Allende, who articulated to offer them in this work, deserve special mention.

As an epilogue, the text “Inclusive dialogue on the Republic” is collected, the result of shared reflections on the future of the country, which aims to relaunch our aspirations for a more democratic, more just and more sovereign Mexico in a new horizon.

I hope this effort contributes to the historical conscience of the reader and I invite him to his reflexive consideration and the consequent debate of the facts and ideas.

Chapter I

Agony of a regime

Business pressure

The failed state is the sum and consequence of the inconsistencies of the political apparatus and the weakness of the rulers.The civic indignations that feed the daily event document it: one day the failed security, another failed justice, always the failed education and now the failed diplomacy.In the background, the regulatory disability of public authorities.

The dispute starring in 2011 by the great monsters of Mexican telecommunications gave full evidence of the absence of legal and political authority of the State to conduct and arbitrate issues of high national interest.Exemplified the law of the jungle and exhibited the extreme pathology in which the neoliberal cycle, built on immense monopolies and contrary to the free market that said it said.

For decades, the country's industrial development rested in a public strategy for consultation and promotion, impulse to infrastructure, credit institutions, cadres formation, extension of the domestic market, import substitution and use of natural resources for the internal economy.Capitalism was the posthumous work of the revolution, until the owners decided in the 1970s to keep power by their own means.

After the fictitious rise of oil overexploitation and the bad management of the external debt crisis, the government was launched into two suicidal slopes: the dependence of international financial capital and submission to the United States, as well as the privileges abusive to themonopolistic groups arising from privatizations.We travel from a national consensus policy to another from Public-Private Contubernios.

Coincided with our erratic political transition and with the massive fraud of public suffrage.Carlos Salinas wove a warp of interest to be administered from the outside of the State and established a bipartisan pact to regent them.In his catastrophic phase, this kneaded called "La Mafia" placed Felipe Calderón in the presidential chair to use his precarious authority.The presidential impotence is thus the rotten fruit of its illegitimacy.

The confrontation of the mastodons was a battle for business hegemony well above public authority.He also locked the omnimoda capacity to decide on the formal holders of power and group private satellites whose commercial lung are telecommunications.A fight between the three greatest fortunes in Mexico that dragged all others in its gravitation.

Scientific advance sometimes generates wars and frequently defines them.In this case, technological convergence has erased the borders between the telephony and television industries, giving rise to a mutual invasion of territories: while the television duopoly intended to make “Triple Play”, Telmex only settled with the “Home Run”.That is what was left of the strategic planning of the national future.

Carlos Slim, fond of phraseology, advertised the phrase "freedom of pressure", replacing freedom of expression.What is worth everyone, except for the State, that serves as Tancredo of History.It is clear that the country was drifting, between American interventionism without tapujos, the territorial empire of organized crime, social helplessness and the arrogance of the only beneficiaries of our decline.

Such a deployment of factual powers left no room for traditional political combinations.The discussion about electoral alliances seemed to brace and only paid the discredit of a climbing and subjected political class.It was evident that we could not recover the lordship over our destiny but through a deep national regeneration movement.

The Congress had in his hands a project of constitutional reforms on radio, television and telecommunications that could be the principle of institutional reconstruction.An autonomous authority in the matter was urgent, capable of settleting conflicts, democratizing the means and making citizen rights prevail.That was the heart of debate and legislative responsibility.

Damocles' sword

During April 2011, in a few weeks two rapid and furious attacks of the parliamentary majority were frustrated to approve reforms contrary to human rights: National Labor and Security Law projects.In both the coordinated reaction of the left, the living shock of public opinion and civil organizations and electoral contradictions arising between the personalities and segments of the dominant block.

I described in the Chamber of Deputies the elements that determined the attempt and subsequent failure of imposing a flexible state of exception in Mexico.First the Albazo, under a schooly scheme: as well as in the labor reform it was intended to take advantage of Holy Week to corner the deputies, in the security it was sought to take advantage of the unbridled confusion of the end of sessions to advise an opinion outside the parliamentary processand cancel the competence of the commissions.

In both cases there was confusion and deception.The labor reform presented in March by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was different from the one that had previously introduced and then illegally withdrawn.The second agreed promptly with which the National Action Party (PAN) had advanced, to the degree that the Government made it its own and was known as "Lozano Reforma".The union and social mobilization in the vicinity of the elections of the State of Mexico forced the PRI to reculate and made it a victim of the claims of unairacy.

In the last "reddish" gallimaties were reached: a minute from the Senate was turned to five commissions from the Chamber of Deputies, none of which had ruled it.A document was then developed that faithfully responded to the demands of the Secretary of Defense and sought to force its adoption outside the regulation.The tangle dissolved when its origin in the Toluca bench was evident and the governor's interest in congratulating the Armed Forces was evident.

To top it off, the Senate leaders announced their decision to reject it, with what they would lead during the time that negotiations and concessions to the army were convenient, in favor of the second of the tricolor candidates.The PANs fell late in the realization that this calendar was not useful to the Executive, since it granted flight autonomy to the holders of the Armed Forces and almost the arbitration of the presidential succession.A TV in uniform.

The futuristic rivalries among the leaders of the parties dug the tomb of that legislature.Thus the fiscal reform succumbed and that a political reform gray with which the swallows sang to Xicoténcatl would be bogged down.The offer of extraordinary periods to vent the earrings was only an escape, for the precipitation of the political times that the conference work and the inevitability of a broad debate would do, which would exhibit the coup plotters and their acolytes.

Society could not sing victory: the defeats that we inflicted were only parliamentary.The legendary Damocles sword hung on our heads sustained by a fragile thread, which symbolizes our extreme vulnerability.The arguments of the proponents could not be more threatening: it is better to legalize phenomena that already occur and worsen day by day.The snake egg continued to grow in spite of the collective will.

The project was founded on the theory of the "gray": there is never complete peace or declared war and each definition depends on circumstantial and absolutist decisions.The objective was to "protect the army", which in turn would be an interpreter of foreign policy, without any view by citizens or less for the health of democracy and the integrity of the country.Shchedler said well that the "authoritarian regressions lead to a diffuse regime, close to the dictatorship".Condemned to the "slow extinction of institutions", from which only a national regeneration process could save us.

PACTICISM AND PLURALISM

On December 2, 2012, the Pact for Mexico was signed with a propaganda display and restoration airs of the State pomp, after two six -year periods of PAN frivolity.The agreements capable of paving national progress must be welcomed with approval, especially those that reflect the genuine will of the signatories and provide verifiable implementation methods.Not so those who only imply the co -optation of power and reduce the advances of our pluralism.

The event deserved to be contemplated from different angles.He certainly had the taste of the acts of "national unity" that proliferated, under various modalities, during the old regime to mitigate the tensions that had caused the revolutionary actions of President Cárdenas.They served to settle the power of the Government on broader bases, frequently hid pacts of complicity and were at the origin of the so -called "stabilizer development".

Like those, this also meant a legitimizing scenario independent of the electoral process.There was for the iconography the image of the leaders of the three main parties and the incoming president placing his hands on a text that is not precisely that of the Constitution.This is the document that picked up woven understandings with speed that developed and confirmed the program announced by the Government and included some concessions for the subscribers.It was not a full project for state reform, but made explicit the proposal to strengthen its rectory in fundamental aspects such as education and telecommunications.