The position in which the U.S. justice system has placed Mexico by requesting the arrest of Rubén Rocha, a governor from the ruling party, will be a turning point, for better or worse. The Government can declare Rocha innocent and be criticized for its “complicity” with corruption, or it can incriminate him and be blamed for surrendering to the United States. In both cases, it loses. In another text, I have addressed the implications of one or the other variant.
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However, the problem runs much deeper than a temporary scandal. Every crisis requires a damage control strategy; in politics, it is relatively acceptable if it achieves a definitive cancellation of the problem. Exonerating or incriminating Rocha may fend off an attack with greater or lesser damage, but unfortunately for the 4T, that does not save it from the following attacks. There is talk of a list of 50 possible individuals incriminated by the U.S. justice system, of which only the 10 from Sinaloa have been disclosed. There is no damage control strategy that is useful if it will not stop the hemorrhage. What will happen when U.S. courts begin to release files on authorities from Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Tabasco, Guanajuato, the federal Government, and the army who protected the drug lords now being tried in New York? Is there any Mexican who believes this was not the case beyond how unacceptable we find Donald Trump? Perhaps playing the sovereignty card and choosing to repudiate interventionism might work once, which I even doubt, but it is unsustainable in the face of evidence and common sense in the other cases.
As painful or complicated as it may seem, the best option for Claudia Sheinbaum, it seems to me, is a way forward. After all, the second tier of the 4T did not create this state of affairs; it originated over decades and worsened with the years of hugs, not bullets which, by the way, she has already corrected. She would do wrong to assume as her own anything that could be perceived as a defense of a political class that, deep down, the president herself is interested in purging.
Why hasn’t she done it, then? My impression is that she took on that task as a process that the electoral turnover of governorships would have naturally carried out; it was part of a cleansing strategy that, at the same time, would not cause waves with the framework built by López Obrador.
Two examples. Undoubtedly, she would have preferred not to have Adán Augusto López as Senate coordinator, but she had to wait 16 months before considering that she had the strength and that the Tabasco politician was sufficiently worn out to replace him without causing outbursts. Rubén Rocha’s case is another: Omar García Harfuch, federal Secretary of Security, arrived in Sinaloa after the outbreak of the war between Los Chapitos and the forces of Mayo Zambada, and the first thing he did was to sideline local authorities, disarm their police, and provoke the departure of the State prosecutor; he surely informed Sheinbaum of the degree of narco infiltration in the upper echelons of Rocha’s Government. And yet, the president chose over these months to explicitly support the governor and offer him one endorsement after another. Either she knows something good about Rocha that we do not, or caution prevailed in her, considering that he was a figure who had been promoted to power and protected by López Obrador.
Rather than adding to the reproaches or abusing the advantage of judging past events, it would be advisable to reflect on what comes next. López Obrador’s true legacy is not the decisions he made along the way but the national project his movement founded: “For the good of all, first the poor.” In many ways, the world’s situation is different and Mexico’s particularly so. Only 20 of the 72 months that Claudia Sheinbaum will govern have passed. The present and immediate future of the 4T largely depend on her ability to face the challenges of a country shaken by the end of an era.
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I have the impression that the firmness of her leadership is greater than she herself has attributed; she postpones the frontal fight against undesirable practices so as not to risk the unity of the movement. In reality, the risks of division are smaller compared to the growing erosion caused by what is beginning to be perceived as Morena’s disinterest in taking its prominent figures to court.
And on closer inspection, the situation offers a unique opportunity. For decades in all these tough regions, elites (and society itself) opted for a kind of tolerated coexistence with organized crime. The narcos generated economic spillover, and people assumed there would be no major problem if they limited themselves to their own affairs. But two things happened: first, they did not limit themselves and went from planting and trafficking to committing crimes against the population and corrupting political power beyond security areas; second, and as a consequence, some merchants and certain members of the political class left mere coexistence and tried to take advantage of the narco’s economic and firepower for their own benefit. They believed they could manage it but ended up subordinated to it. Today, there are state and municipal governments in these regions that are hostages to that criminal power.
The crisis in Sinaloa could help change this paradigm and generate a new political intolerance to the agreements to which governors felt obliged. And not to forget that such agreements were essentially a reflection of a society as a whole that had normalized a false notion of coexistence with the narco.
The quota of violence and crime against the population shows that such coexistence ends up being a myth. Not to mention that it serves as a pretext for abusive U.S. intervention. Claudia Sheinbaum could well use this crisis to undertake a thorough change in this regard, promote a crusade to cleanse public administration in relation to the narco, introduce new protocols and monitoring. The first task, however, remains to clear doubts about the 4T’s interest in putting justice above political loyalty or the unity of the movement.
