I thought a lot about the question that one student asked me: “Professor, what’s left?”. I’m sure that’s clear to many of you, but I didn’t realize that I needed a definition to convince me: “The left is defending that equal opportunities are possible,” I told him. And I’m holding it. I included equality and fairness in the definition: equal opportunities (equality) and their possibility (fairness). Put this way, any application of government that tries to counter one or the other is a blow to the left. Corruption is the process of rotting: the plant does not bloom. There is no left that does not fight against corruption. And corruption is fought by institutions dedicated to its prevention, not by the word of the boss. We must review the behavior of everyone: the boss and subordinates, and not take the boss’s words as indisputable truth. That’s not democracy, that’s authoritarianism.
Institutions aim to ensure that opportunities are possible. For example, the judicial system must review whether people’s behavior is in accordance with the norms we have established and make decisions in this regard. But human behavior is in so many areas that we need specialized bodies with specific rules. Elections are central: how do we get people to exercise our right to choose who will govern us and that such exercise is credible? In Mexico, because of our electoral history (party [PRI] and the state indistinguishable, counting votes) we had to build a sound institution. Thus, at the request of many, we built the National Electoral Institute (IFE was born) with a fundamental task: that citizens and parties trust the election results. And INE did it: we go to the elections, we vote and we recognize the results, because they are clearly credible (it’s funny, although in reality it’s angry, that people like Pablo Gómez lie to torpedo what they also built). INE guarantees that the same possibilities of exercising the right to participate in the election of our representatives and governors are possible. It is the central institution of the Mexican democratic system. We are all building it, slowly, painstakingly, and we believe in it, there are also polls (which, by the way, were decided by the parties in power, substitute primaries).
Those who govern our country today behave as if the institutions we built are the enemies of justice (it should be proven, but the reasons are in their way). They touched, for example, the CNDH, putting at the head of a person who is not at the top of such a commission: through recommendations to the state and government to show their own actions that violate human rights. They defend a prosecutor who has proven that he is using his abilities to prosecute crimes in pursuit of his own interests (this is indeed a violation of equal opportunity). They knowingly violate INA rules: they receive cash that they do not declare, they promote their candidates with public money. Is it possible that they don’t want us to believe in the elections?
Institutions can be better, their years of practice serve us to evaluate them and see how they limp. In the light of such information we transform it. Fabricating facts and destroying organisms is not transformation, it leads to destruction.