By Francisco Peyret
With the upcoming 2024 presidential elections, many Mexican political actors are talking about social polarization—a phenomenon that has emerged recently in Mexico. On the one hand, it seems that the social polarization in our country is invented by the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. On the other hand, however, groups of political opposition to the federal government are concerned about social inequalities and the lack of national unity. These two ideas seem disproportionate and tricky: they seem to be superficially created arguments to justify two political campaigns preparing for the 2024 electoral contests.
It is true that in many countries, societies have recently been polarizing. The political parties offer a choice between liberals or conservatives, capitalists or socialists, and the whole range of opportunities to choose between the radical left and the extreme right. Current geopolitical thinkers speak of a new battle between globalists (neoliberals) and nationalists (populists). One has to take care in these characterizations because for each country there are nuances since each nation has its history and social complexity.
In Mexico, polarization in the nation goes back to the Independence movement of 1810. The insurgents, led by Ignacio Allende, were initially motivated by the French invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in Spain in 1808. This directly affected life in New Spain, as the territory was called at the time when Mexico was not yet a sovereign country. The Independence movement fought for the creation of a republic, but the Church and monarchy played a major part in defining the new regime.
For much of the 19th century, Mexico slowly and painfully established itself as a republic amid a battle between liberals and conservatives. The liberal movement was led by Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, who were influenced by French and North American thinkers. The conservatives also wanted an independent country but believed that they needed the figure monarchy and the Church to lead the nation. This long controversy was finally settled when Emperor Maximilian, Habsburg Archduke, was arrested and sentenced to death. Benito Juárez, the liberal president at that time, refused to absolve him, and he was executed by firing squad in 1867. A secular state, as we know it today, was installed.
At the end of the 19th century, Porfirio Díaz, a well-known liberal, ruled always burdened with the values of the conservatives. Little by little, the government became reconciled with the Catholic Church, centralized its power for 30 years, and openly played with foreign interests in sectors such as oil, mining, and railways. By 1910 the long dictatorship of Diaz was overthrown through the Mexican Revolution. The process was consummated by the nationalist liberals with the 1917 Constitution. It proclaimed the ownership of the state over the nation’s assets.
The liberal movement in Mexico consolidated the revolutionary process, appropriated history and the heroes of Mexican Independence, reform, and revolution. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), from the 1930s, turned business chambers, labor unions, and peasant organizations into a corporation. This party institutionalized public education and absorbed the scientific and cultural unions. For the second half of the 20th century, in Mexico the State was a powerful monolith that seemed eternal and omnipresent.
Mexican politicians have forgotten the recent past, and they wake up in the 21st century discovering that there are conservatives and liberals, the poor, and the social classes. It seems to me that Mexico has a high level of cynicism in politics, and the media represents very clear interests. In a good part of the last century, there was no freedom of expression and there was no competition for political power. We were a rigid society that moved according to the dictates of an absolute regime. In the 1980s, writer Vargas Llosa, in a forum organized by Octavio Paz with Televisa, defined the Mexican State as the «perfect dictatorship.»
The good news is that in this century, with the development of digital media, we are discovering who is who in political life. Almost all Mexican politicians call themselves social democrats. They are far from being that, and the citizens know it. Every day they are more exposed. From my point of view, everyone has the right to represent their ideals and fight for their interests, but let it be done in the open. Take off the masks!
