As happens every year, the Ayotzinapa normal school students cause riots to mark the Iguala massacre of 2014. This time, they attacked the facilities of Military Camp No. 1 with a hijacked truck. Before that, on their way to Mexico City, they had already attacked other facilities, hijacked other trucks, and caused other damage. I suppose, as always, they will remain unpunished.
The lawyer who for a decade claimed to represent the parents of those killed in the massacre, Vidulfo Morales, is now secretary to the president of the Supreme Court, Hugo Aguilar. Aguilar is known for ties with other groups that can be described as radical, if not explicitly subversive. He seems to have little idea of Constitutional Law, judging by the Court’s first sessions, and the dozens of advisors he has hired don’t seem to be helping—among them, a pastor from La Luz del Mundo.
Incidentally, in recent days a training camp of a “military guard” of that religious organization, calling themselves Jhazer, was discovered. I don’t know if this discovery came from information obtained during the trial of Naasón Joaquín in California. The camp was located on the border of Michoacán and Jalisco, and clearly recalls the one found in Teuchitlán, which was quickly cleaned up by the Prosecutor’s Office, without any serious investigation ever being conducted.
The boundary in Mexico between supposedly religious, academic, or popular organizations and the illegal world is very porous—and has been for decades. Many of these organizations act as fronts for groups interested in seizing power violently, or operate in illegality, committing financial crimes, human trafficking, and drug trafficking.
The same porosity exists between informality and illegality. Millions of Mexicans must earn a living outside the formal labor market, and many end up working for organizations with those same ties to illegality. That is why it’s common to find on the streets goods stolen daily from carriers, and why there are areas of Mexico City where the real government is these groups. Extortion has allowed them to expand their zones of control to hundreds of cities across the country.
This phenomenon—the porous boundary with illegality—seems to have grown since the late 1970s, when the Revolutionary Regime began to collapse. The social structures the Regime created in the 1930s to sustain itself, which did not align with traditional ones, produced friction that the Regime managed with resource provision and occasional use of force. By the 1970s, it became very difficult to sustain, especially with the rise of urban (student) guerrillas and the boom in drug trafficking. With the 1982 crisis, the phenomenon expanded with the explosion of informality. In those same years, the government began exercising selective violence (Camarena, Buendía), which by 1994 put the country on the brink of collapse.
Now, leaders of those groups have entrenched themselves in government, which will generate tension with the armed forces—forces that have themselves been infiltrated.
A State cannot survive without a clear definition of rules. When rules apply to everyone, we have the rule of law. When each group, or each person, wants to play by their own rules, we have chaos. In between, an authoritarian State operates with two sets of rules: one for the chosen, another for everyone else.
I have the impression that many government actions intended to create authoritarianism are in fact fostering chaos. I don’t know if they realize it.