(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Mexican Contrasts)
Last Thursday, the Mexican Senate was the stage for a perfectly grotesque but highly significant day in which, within just a few hours, the country went from comedy and farce to a tragedy of pain without end. In the morning, a ceremony of hypocritical multilateralist and globalist do-goodism was carried out, with a formalistic and insubstantial get-together of parliamentarians from Europe and Latin America, complete with their anthems about saving the planet, “we are on the new path,” and “everyone in the world is good except Donald Trump.” In the afternoon, a brutal extraordinary session of the Mexican Senate was held in which the power of the Morena party imposed upon the powerless opposition yet another turn of the screw toward the liquidation of the last remaining vestiges—not merely of the rule of law or of democracy, but of a reasonably civilized State.
Mexico has already moved beyond that initial corruption of politicians by the organized crime of the drug cartels, and then beyond the transactional agreements between political power and the narcos, to arrive today at having the narcos directly in political power. The unyielding defense that Morena’s senators make of major drug lords wanted by the United States—men who hold offices and honors within their ranks—is an astonishing spectacle. Those who attack their narco-senators and narco-governors are, quite simply, traitors. Sheinbaum—the friend of Sánchez and Zapatero, the happy participant in the coven of organized narco-socialism staged by the head of the Spanish government together with Lula, Petro and all that nothingness, the woman who says one must not dig into the murders committed by Raúl Castro thirty years ago yet never stops attacking Spain over events from half a millennium ago—knows that today she holds all the power in Mexico. And she is taking steps to make this situation irreversible.
Sheinbaum’s Morena party has completed its judicial reform whereby all judges are “elected by the people,” but not without having first been preselected by those in power—that is, by politics and organized crime. But it goes even further. With any possibility of independent judges now liquidated, the time has come to do away with any chance that the general, municipal or gubernatorial elections might produce an unpleasant surprise for Morena or for its organized-crime allies.
That is why they invent and approve a “law for the defense of sovereignty” that grants the government the power to annul any election result whenever they suspect, intuit or invent foreign interference behind it. Just like what happened in Romania, with the applause of the European Union, but on a far more savage scale. Any contact with the outside world, any interview in a North American outlet, any contact with foreign journalists, politicians or businesspeople can become grounds for the annulment of an elected office.
But Mexican power under Sheinbaum cultivates many faces, because there are many balancing acts she must perform among the narcos to whom she owes her power, the various factions and cartels, and her northern neighbor with its demands. That is why ceremonies with European parliamentarians—most of whom neither understand nor much care what is really happening in Mexico—never come amiss. Thus it proved so useful to bring a large group of MEPs to Mexico to hold the EuroLat summit there in the Senate, which Sheinbaum had even promised to drop by and greet. She did not do so, and instead sent her foreign minister, who—like his predecessors—belongs to the far left of Latin America and at times seems more Castroist than the Castroists themselves. The fact that at the EuroLat summit of elected parliamentarians there were Cubans—one of them, on top of everything, president of the Parlatino, despite having been elected by no one but the criminals of the dictatorship—only irritated the European representatives of Patriots, Conservatives and Sovereigntists.
The final plenary session of the EuroLat Summit—the parliamentary assembly made up of the European Parliament and the three parliaments of the Latin American continent—was held without surprises. As always, the parties of consensus and of “do not disturb” on both shores of the Atlantic—the popular, socialist and similar parties—were so tolerant of themselves that at certain moments they seemed to be a single bloc. The only friction and discordant noise there came when the European right—the far right, as all the others would call it—denounced that sinister consensus between Latin American leftism and the European Commission in regarding freedom of expression as a grave danger.
This parliamentary assembly is marking twenty years of existence, and it can be said that, apart from the personal promotion and agenda-padding of the politicians of both continents, it has served only to spread leftist ideological junk that over this past decade has been converted into eco-climatism, wokeism, indigenism, and litanies of egalitarianism, socialism and anti-Yankeeism.
For many years now it has been clear that the influence the European Union has exercised over Latin America has been disastrous. It has been unreservedly catastrophic in the political, cultural and ideological sphere, and ineffective in almost everything else. The European Commission and the European Parliament itself—both dominated by the social-democratic consensus politics of the popular and socialist parties—have applied a policy marked by a toxic mixture of Rousseauian inspiration about the noble savage, a romantic vision of the emancipatory struggles, and a supposed superiority that took the form of massive support for the self-proclaimed progressive forces.
The EuroLat assembly is perhaps the most harmless and not the most costly form of this counterproductive commitment of the popular-socialist consensus on this continent, because the EU spends billions on far worse ends in Latin America—thousands of NGOs, foundations, forces and media outlets of the left, all of them with manifest sympathy for the forces of socialism that are now objectively “fused” with organized crime. Thanks to the leftist high representatives the European Commission has had, and to the influence of the PSOE over the entire discourse of the institutions, the EU has supported all of its socialist, communist, guerrilla and ultimately narco-communist friends—and likewise, directly, the dictatorships. It continues to finance Cuba, even though the criminal regime does not meet a single one of the conditions of the shameful agreement that Brussels signed with Havana at the urging of the Spanish governments—that of Zapatero, but also that of Rajoy.
And so things stand: the MEPs left Mexico convinced that the globalist, deluded and empty communiqué issued there served as a pretext for the trip and has no greater significance, nor will it bother anyone. That is true. But those of us who, hours after the close of the EuroLat summit, witnessed in the Senate the brutal totalitarian offensive of a power without checks and balances, fully identified with the interests of drug trafficking and all of organized crime, were able to see how the inanity of the morning leaves all the more room, in that very same place, for political acts of terrible consequences that are dragging Mexico into the dictatorship of organized crime.
It had occurred to no one in the morning to denounce—as every democrat must—the dangers that the very nature of the Mexican government poses for Mexicans, for the entire continent, and for the world. It is openly totalitarian offensives like the one in the Mexican Senate that afternoon that allow one to see the colossal power of the narcos in full expansion. And they give a glimpse of what will be—if there is no general reaction of lucidity, conscience and firmness—the fate of other countries, and not only American ones. Look at Spain, where co-religionists, allies and partners of Sheinbaum and her friends govern, and where the presence of the power of organized crime increases without pause. Only that alliance of conservative, democratic and anti-socialist forces now being formed in Latin America, in alliance with Washington, can stop this monstrous totalitarian drift that we see in Mexico—whose forms, people, powerful influences and money have leapt across the Atlantic with their dramatic consequences, which threaten not only Spain, because they have flooded Europe with drugs and have all the money needed to buy off wills, administrations, institutions, municipalities and entire parties.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.
