They say that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as comedy. Who knows: sometimes fate simply puts us in the face of tragedies so that we learn from them and act differently when they happen again. What happens is that many times we don’t learn and we stumble over the same stones again.
For many reasons, this early 2024 reminds me more and more of 1994 in which the president who had the greatest control over all the variables of his six-year term, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, lost his reins and five very successful years of government ended. in a political crisis, with the Zapatista uprising, the assassinations of Luis Donaldo Colosio and José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, and finally financial, with Ernesto Zedillo as president.
There are even actors who are not the same but who play similar roles in very similar contexts. First, there is the succession process: in those years there were only two viable players: Colosio and Manuel Camacho. Today, saving all political and public personality distances, Claudia Sheinbaum plays a role very similar to the one Donaldo had in those years: she is the president’s candidate and her political apparatus seems to turn towards her. There is also an Adán Augusto López in a deck of three.
Marcelo Ebrard was then, in 1993, a very young politician, but he was already the right hand of Camacho, who always thought that he would not only be but should be Salinas’s successor, because together they had participated in the creation of the Salinas political project. On November 28, 1993, with Salinas at the height of his popularity, Colosio was the designated candidate. Manuel did not accept the decision, but disciplined himself, left the GDF government and went to the chancellery.
Camacho knew (President Salinas and other officials, including the Defense also knew) that a guerrilla movement was being built in Chiapas. Colosio also knew about it when he gave me information and contacts, in August of 1993, so that I could write a comprehensive report on the subject in Chiapas. That report was going to be published in December or January in the magazine Nexos, but the text was won by the Zapatista uprising. We published it years later in the book The Year We Lived in Danger (hopscotch editors, 1995). But the truth is that on the advice of the former governor of Chiapas and in 1993 Secretary of the Interior, Patrocinio González Garrido, nothing was done because, according to what he told Salinas, he had everything under control.
Camacho had other information because of his then family relationship with former governor Manuel Velasco Suárez and with Bishop Samuel Ruiz. The supposed control was lost on January 1 when the Zapatista uprising broke out, the same day the Free Trade Agreement began. From then on, the succession derailed and even forced that meeting at the end of January 1994 between Salinas and PRI leaders and governors, where the president asked the attendees “not to fool around,” that there would be no change of office. candidate.
Later we know what happened: in Lomas Taurinas the bullet that killed Colosio also ended the aspirations of Manuel, who began a long journey through the desert that ended up leaving him as a very close collaborator of López Obrador. Ebrard also did all that path, who does not want that history to repeat itself: without understanding and knowing it, it is not fully understood why and how the still chancellor is acting like this in succession. He does not want, as Messi said, for someone else to decide his own destiny for him.
The truth is that now they are trying to legitimize through a series of agreements, a process that, in the end, will have the presidential stamp, but that hopefully is also marked by a certain openness. Hopefully it has been learned from 93-94. If there is someone who knows how expensive that process was, it is the president of the national council of Morena, Alfonso Durazo, who will lead the session next Sunday.
But there are other similar factors as well, although they are even bleaker today than then. Today in Chiapas there is a crisis that is not seen by anyone who does not want to see it. But what we have is not an insurgent movement organizing in the mountains and the jungle, but rather an overwhelming presence of organized crime that is occupying more and more space, has co-opted social organizations and even what were Zapatista territories for years. , have become spaces of dispute, very violent, between organized crime cartels, especially between the Jalisco Nueva Generación, two factions of Sinaloa, that of the Mayo and that of the Chapitos, and groups from the Gulf (these operating more towards Tenosique and Tabasco). When the criminal struggle is disguised as a political, and even social struggle, the diagnoses must always be bleak.
Another factor that was not taken into account in those years was the fight between drug cartels. It did not even remotely reach the current rates, but the confrontation between the Arellano Félix, Juárez (which then included what we now know as the Sinaloa cartel) and the Gulf cartel was already bloody and had claimed victims such as Cardinal Posadas. The attempt to influence politics was also in force via campaign financing. The drug trafficking side is there, behind the murder of Colosio. And we are talking about cartels that did not reach the current level of empowerment and violence. And if you believe that with the policy of hugs and no bullets, everything is under control, we are going to end as before.
#control