Rights Activist Javier Sicilia On the Emptiness of the Mexican State Javier Sicilia - Proceso
go to original May 27, 2013

Is there really a State in Mexico? If we rely on political abstractions, one would have to say "yes": we have a democratic, federal nation with a division of powers, supported by institutions. Every day, in addition, the media tell us about its life - its tensions, its laws, its political pacts, its confrontations, its strengths and weaknesses, and analysts lean over it, like a biologist over a specimen, to understand and find its healthy functioning. However, in practice, i.e., in the existence of the every day life of citizens, there isn't.

A State is not measured by its structure and its description in the Constitution, or by the discussions raised in the media or what political scientists say about it from the comfortable universe of their cubicles. It is measured by the good it does for citizens. There the reality is other: fear, insecurity, violence, states of emergency in hundreds of zones of the country taken over by crime, tens of thousands of murdered and disappeared, impunity, lack of justice, violations of rights, devastation of the land on behalf of voracious investment.

When this happens it means that the State is empty; it exists only as a shell and an abstraction of thought. It is also a sign that most of those who administer it have decided to turn it into a kind of company that manages counter-violence as a way to make and circulate money. It lacks real policies to control the flow of arms, regulate drugs, attack money laundering and build a path to peace.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

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