AMLO and uncertainty

Mexico trembles. It happens every so often. AMLO is the acronym forAndrés Manuel López Obrador, your president. The word that best describes what happens there is “uncertainty.” It is not known what can happen. When societies are in that situation, the worst usually happens. The murky forecast paralyzes investments and influences the negative outcome. Mexicans overwhelmingly chose a peculiar character and there are the consequences.

The stock market and the peso have fallen. Carlos Urzúa, a notable, moderate and reasonable economist, resigned from AMLO's cabinet and the fire started. He was, until a few days ago, the Minister of Finance. Like educated suicides, he wrote a letter in which he explains, more or less, his reasons. Obviously, he hasn't killed himself. He returns to the professorship, which is a way of taking his life, at least the public one.

AMLO is a person comfortably installed in the past. He wants to develop Mexico with the political vision of 1906, 113 years ago. But his model is General Lázaro Cárdenas,statist and anti-imperialist, who held the presidency in the six-year term from 1934 to 1940, a whopping 85 years ago. These crazy things appear in the papers of the MORENO sect, created by López Obrador to aspire to the presidency.

Another nonsense. Isn't the tragic performance of PEMEX (Petróleos Mexicanos) enough for AMLO to understand thatIt makes no sense to empower the state-entrepreneur again? The time of testing nationalization was that of Cárdenas and we have already seen where it led. Does AMLO realize that it is impossible to eradicate corruption by expanding the perimeter of the State and giving officials greater discretion?

The terrible Mexican corruption, which began in colonial times, but increased exponentially during the Republic, is the result, precisely, of the links between the State and the productive apparatus. When AMLO affirms that in his Government“the long neoliberal night” ended, not only reiterates an empty cliché that the epigones of the “Sao Paulo Forum” (Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega) used to repeat, but also demonstrates their inability to understand the harmful relationships between public spending and good government.

What AMLO calls “the long neoliberal night” was the result of inflation, the loss of purchasing value of the currency and the rampant corruption of the six-year terms of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) and José López Portillo (1976-1982). How is it possible that AMLO seriously thinks that the ills of our republics can be cured with a greater dose of statism and dirigisme if these are, precisely, the ills that have traditionally poisoned our public life?

The good governments of the first Óscar Arias in Costa Rica (1986-1990), of Luis Alberto Lacalle in Uruguay (1990-1995), of César Gaviria in Colombia (1990-1994), of Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico (1994-2000), of the second Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela (1989-1993), and also of the fourth Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985-1989), who began in the fifties leading the first populist project in Bolivia and, three decades later, proposed and carried carried out by the first liberal government of national salvation, were the result of the terrible consequences of Keinesianism applied in Latin America.

In that list of benign reformers we should include the Argentine Carlos Menem (1989-1999) for his privatizations. If he had kept public spending under control, which would have prevented the devaluation of the peso and the subsequent evil history of the “corralitos”, another rooster would crow in Argentina. In short, he would have buried the disastrous Peronism and the Kirchner gang and his 40 thieves would have stayed in their cave without reaching the Casa Rosada.

What happened in Latin America from the eighties and nineties was what happened in Israel with the arrival of the Likud to power (1977), in England with Margaret Thatcher (1979), in the United States with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan (1981) and in Sweden with the triumph of Carl Bildt (1991). The “long socialist night” was put to an end (let's get cheesy with just revenge), because the example of what was happening in Chile in the economic field was decisive, although we were disgusted by what was happening in the political field.

I end where I started: AMLO and uncertainty.If you don't rectify it, it will do a lot of damage to Mexico.. I fear the worst. That's what usually happens.