“Power is like a violin. It is taken with the left and played with the right.” Eduardo Galeano
Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, coordinator of social communication for the Presidency, offered an in-depth reflection on his Twitter account on December 11: “Being on the left is a life project in favor of full freedom; of representative and participatory democracy; of social justice and respect for Human Rights. More than an ideology, it is a position against injustice and any oppression; solidarity with the oppressed”.
Seen like this, who could object? Perhaps the only thing one can say is that I hope we get to have a left-wing government in Mexico. That of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in which Ramírez participates, is not.
Leftist governments do not usually support “a life project in favor of full freedom.” They take action against economic freedom because they want to reduce inequality or maintain “state stewardship” over the economy. I understand, although I do not agree, that they argue that these measures are necessary for “social justice”, but they are lying when they say that they want “full freedom”.
In the López Obrador regime, measures contrary to freedoms have increased. Your prohibitions are meaningless. Vapers, for example, have been banned for health reasons, but not cigarettes, which are much more harmful. The regime has also banned glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, and GM corn for human consumption, despite no realistic field options for glyphosate, nor indications that GM corn is harmful to health. .
Ramírez says that the left is in favor of “representative and participatory democracy.” However, the regime’s electoral reform proposal is an attack against democracy that seeks to eliminate the alternation of parties in power. The structures of “participatory democracy” that he has promoted, on the other hand, are nothing more than a return to the practices of the old corporatism.
I applaud Ramírez for saying that the left is in favor of social justice and human rights. It is sad, however, that in this government poverty has risen from 49.9 percent of the population in 2018 to 52.8 percent in 2020 and that extreme poverty has risen from 14 to 17.2 percent. The lack of access to health has skyrocketed, from 16.2 to 28.2 percent. Subsidies are no longer targeted at the poorest, but favor more prosperous groups.
The defense of human rights is a cause not only of the left but of society. However, the current president of the National Human Rights Commission, Rosario Piedra, is more interested in promoting government programs than in defending individual guarantees.
I don’t know if the left is “a position against injustice and any oppression”, but I do know that the government used left-wing rhetoric during the campaign only to apply right-wing policies in power. Injustice has become a way of acting for the government and its prosecution, while the oppression of groups that think differently from the president is increasingly common.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote: “Being on the left is, like being on the right, one of the infinite ways that man can choose to be an imbecile: both are, in effect, forms of moral hemiplegia.” I agree with him, but if the left is all that Ramírez says, I understand the enthusiasm. I even wish that one day we will have a left-wing government in our country.
Pruning
The pruning that some Morenista senators, headed by Ricardo Monreal, are doing in AMLO’s electoral reform is not surprising. Dropping unconstitutional provisions from a secondary measure should be natural. The problem is that the president does not like to change even one comma to his proposals.
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