The political right in Mexico is engaged in lawfare - an attempt to use its power within Mexico’s legal and electoral institutions - in order to boost the electoral prospects of the opposition parties in Mexico’s midterm elections. Writing in The Jacobin, Kurt Hackbarth discusses the way in which federal courts have been willing to handout amparos - blocking key government policies, particularly AMLOS energy policies which have been focused on AMLO’s Energy Reform Act. Hackbrath has a previous article on the Energy Reform Act, which is focused on reversing the privatization of Mexico’s energy infrastructure, which, under PRIAN rule (the term refers to the neoliberal consensus that emerged between the PAN and the PRI in Mexico since the 1980s), had been overrun by foreign corporations irrationally supplying Mexico with what it already had plenty of: energy. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that the February freeze that gripped Texas also affected Northern Mexico, whose energy infrastructures were dependent of foreign corporations.
One way to think about energy privatization is that Mexico was immolating itself: undermining its own capacities in order to create profitable investment opportunities for foreign energy corporations. This might be a good way to think about the colonization of the public sector by profit hungry corporations - a policy that has been carried out in the name of neoliberal efficiency. Harkbarth explains.
In order to justify the influx of private energy, public infrastructure has been degraded, denuded, and dismantled. The nation’s oil-refining capacity was left to deteriorate to the point that, when AMLO came to power, no new refineries had been built in forty years and not one of the existing six was operating at even close to capacity. This put Mexico in the position of having to ship its oil to the United States and buy it back as gasoline, turning it, in the process, into the world’s second-largest gasoline importer. Meanwhile, oil bandits known as huachicoleros were systematically bleeding oil ducts to the tune of $3 billion dollars a year in losses.
As for the nation’s natural gas, it was left to be literally burned into the air while successive governments negotiated sweetheart contracts to import gas from abroad, locking in long-term deals to bind future administrations. Absurdly, this even occurred with countries that have no natural gas of their own, such as Felipe Calderón’s 2007 deal with the Spanish conglomerate Repsol, which acquired the gas from Peru and imported it to Mexico at a hefty markup (the Calderón administration also acquired 10 percent of Repsol stock several years later through the state oil company PEMEX, only to sell off the shares at a massive loss). To this day, Mexico continues to burn off up to a fifth of the natural gas it produces.
So what we have then is the destruction of the public sector for the sake of the private sector, which has always been justified by the supposedly superior efficiency of the private section. Hackbarth goes on to explain how media commentators have fixated on AMLO’s atavistic nationalism - he is still enthralled by the idea of energy sovereignty associated with Mexico’s 1938 nationalization of its oil industry, still a dinosaur, impervious to the fact that the relationship between fossil fuels and national development has now expired. Maybe this is because he was raised in Tabasco - an oil state - where, incidentally, AMLO is attempting to resuscitate Mexico’s capacity to refine its own hydrocarbons and thus move downstream in the value added processing chain while attempting to revive Mexico’s energy self sufficiency. Here is a snippet from Mexico’s CFE Director in testimony to the Mexican Congress:
En el parlamento abierto convocado por la Comisión de Energía para discutir la iniciativa presidencial de reforma a la Ley de la Industria Eléctrica, funcionarios de la CFE aclararon que no hay una nacionalización disfrazada y llamaron a “poner fin al saqueo de un pequeño grupo de particulares, de gángsters que se han hecho intensamente ricos” con los contratos obtenidos al amparo de la reforma energética del sexenio pasado.
According to the CFE, Mexico is not nationalizing its energy infrastructure so much as it is cutting back subsidies and asserting more state control over energy production and provision in Mexico. So this is what provokes the ire of the right in Mexico where dozens of amparos have been issued by the courts to stop the energy reform and defend the corporate interests which this reform threatens. Confronted with these legal challenges and possibility the courts might declare AMLO’s energy reform bill unconstitutional, AMLO is signaling his intention to up the ante and pursue constitutional reforms on the energy sector:
Faced with a second legal onslaught, he then announced that, if the courts declare the law to be unconstitutional, he would introduce a constitutional amendment (not an idle threat, as these are much easier to pass in Mexico than the United States). This, he has hinted, would be even broader in scope. As the next Congress would be the one to vote on such an amendment, it has the added advantage of turning the Right’s lawfare into a rallying cry for MORENA on the campaign trail. At the same time, the president is fast-tracking a parallel law that, in the case of threats to the economy, energy, or national security, would empower the government to cancel licenses for private companies in the processing and refining of oil and natural gas, as well as the import and export of oil and gasoline.
The other part of Hackbarth’s article on the Mexican right is the activation of the INE (the National Electoral Institute) in setting the parameters of the mid-term elections by the determining which parties will not have access to proportional representation, arguing that parties that form part of a coalition would be ineligible to receive such representation, a move that could cost Morena numerous seats in the legislature. INE has also banned AMLO’s mananeras, arguing that it was electioneering communication and would distort the mid term elections.
It is interesting to reflect on the INE has kind of crown jewel of Mexico’s process of democratization. The management of elections in Mexico used to be carried out by the Ministry of the Interior and, as such, was under the direct supervision of the president. This was how the PRI managed to combine a facade of electoral democracy and long term domination of the state. The reforms that produced INE shifted control over elections to an independent body outside of presidential control. There have been innumerable complaints in Mexico about the way in which AMLO has tried to claw back presidential power over the administration of elections and, more generally, over the administration of justice. Harkbarth offers a useful counterpoint to these discussions by arguing that the INE has become an instrument of partisan lawfare for the right, This is evident in the next major initiative by INE that Harkbarth considers:
All of this would have been enough to call the INE’s supposed rule as neutral arbiter into serious question. Then it went one better: on March 26, it purged forty-nine MORENA candidates for a range of offices ranging from mayorships to governorships to Congress seats, barring them from running in the upcoming election for the alleged crime of not filing expense reports for their primary campaigns. It was the only major party affected in this fashion.
INE had no problem with the much greater campaign indiscretions of the Pena Nieto or Operation Safiro and Operation Berlin - campaigns in which state governors and private entities illegally spent money against the AMLO campaign in 2016 and 2018. The point is that the INE is not the shining example of non-partisan electoral authority that its defenders make it out to be. It is very much a part of the political scrum and, more specifically, it is cleared aligned against Morena. Why? Obviously because the PRIAN wants to take back political control over Mexico - or, at least, this is what Harkbarth suggests.
But the depressing question that arises at the end of all this is why give a damn about Morena anyway. It is hardly a Gramscian instantiation of the modern prince - disciplined political force that could lead a progressive transformation of a country that has long been subject to a combination of foreign and domestic oppression (Mexico’s political class as an instrument of neo colonialism). That Morena is hardly able to differentiate itself from the political opportunism that characterizes the political class in Mexico more generally was illustrated in the nominations it made for seats in the Mexican Congress. Nods (or dedazos) were given to regional caciques, racists, criminals, political operatives from the PAN and PRI ready to infiltrate Morena (this was widespread as well in the 2018). Many of the nominations had no basis in the preferences of the people, which opens the question of how primaries are run by Morena or in Mexico more generally. Many of the nominations were just impositions rather than the result of any kind of internal democracy within Morena.
The question that arises is does AMLO or Morena have a progressive project for Mexico or are they just a neo-nationalist inflection to neoliberalism? This is an interesting question and not merely a rhetorical question because if neither AMLO nor Morena have a progressive project, then it is certainly the case that the opposition (PRIAN + PRD remnants) does not either. So does that mean that Mexico is without hope?
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