Society v. Politics: Mexican Democracy Has a Basic Problem of Respect Worldcrunch
go to original April 26, 2015

In Mexico City (America Economia)

Politicians and industry titans have been talking about building Mexico City's new airport for years now. In the meantime, China has built 10 airports a year and plans to continue until 2020. More notably, each of these airport projects involves not just erecting terminals but also realizing an integrated vision of city and regional development.

In contrast with China, which neither is nor claims to be a democracy, Mexico has not only been unable to build an airport but we have also fomented a social environment of corruption, impunity, denigration, hatred and deceit, preventing us from completing even one necessary bit of infrastructure.

In recent decades, we have moved from the era of vertical control by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, to a system of disorder. Society has changed, though the democratic context has yet to consolidate itself and a culture of dialogue has not emerged.

Social networks are increasingly coarse, and the press seems to believe journalism involves subjecting people to summary verdicts. We are seeing the persistence of pre-modern behavior in certain, supposedly democratic formations. Instead of building weights and counterweights, we see the growth of parallel worlds that don't communicate: society on the one hand and the world of politics on the other, each with its own vices.

What we call democracy has evolved into a form of secular fundamentalism that is provincial, self-involved and deeply anti-liberal. There is no better example of this than our electoral system, where a structure of simulated procedures and impunity hides behind a world of endless rules, all of which serve to curtail liberties.

Nobody should be surprised that such an illiberal system should provoke so many disputes. If there were the kind of trust one sees in more solid democracies, there would be no need for so much pseudo-legal paraphernalia.

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