To María Amparo Casar with admiration, recognition and affection.
The marches for democracy in recent months were not about candidates or government projects. They were for something that precedes them and that conditions them. We march to defend the institutions and the rules of the democratic game. They were not electoral or partisan marches and their importance and meaning lay largely in this. The speeches of José Woldenberg, José Ramón Cossío and Lorenzo Córdova at the end of these citizen mobilizations record their meaning and objective.
But the opposition candidate for the government of the Republic and the candidate of her coalition for the government of CDMX have decided to appear at the demonstration that has been called for next May 19. It is okay that they do it and also that they are invited. The representative of his coalition before the INE, Acosta Naranjo, has confirmed that invitation on behalf of some of the groups calling for the other demonstrations. These were his words: “Talking among friendly organizations, we made the decision to invite Xóchitl Gálvez and Santiago Taboada to participate in this mobilization (…) we believe that we should not be neutral at this time when democracy is experiencing the risk that we are experiencing. , when Morena increasingly acts with greater authoritarianism.”
We may or may not agree with his diagnosis but it is clear that this is a campaign march, during the campaign, in favor of two candidates. In that sense it is a march of a partisan coalition. So, when Acosta Naranjo himself says that “all our mobilizations have to do with the defense of democracy, the Constitution, independence, the Judiciary, because there is transparency, because impunity ends,” it is worth standing up Eyebrows. This demonstration has another immediate purpose: to support two candidates ten days before an election. In other words, it is a proselytizing demonstration.
That, by the way, is nothing wrong. But it is what it is and not what the other three mobilizations were in which, although political parties and actors were present, they were genuinely citizens for their causes and for a good part of their organizers. This, plain and simple, will be something else. The president of Morena, Mario Delgado, and his bench in the Chamber of Deputies are right about that. But they are wrong when they make the partisan nature of this demonstration retroactive to the three that took place in a very different context, in the recent past.
Nor is it true, as the Morena leaders say, that the May 19 march is “a hypocritical demonstration in favor of the PAN”; nor that “the movement in defense of the Federal Electoral Institute (sic) was always to defend Xóchitl Gálvez.” The first statement is false because those calling for future mobilization have openly opened their letters by announcing that they have invited the two candidates to support them. The second saying is also true because, beyond each person’s partisan preferences, the calls and messages in defense of the INE and the SCJN were very different.
Those of us who marched on those occasions knew that we were doing so to defend the electoral authority that has allowed democratic elections to be held for three decades, to demand an end to the attacks against our constitutional court and the people who administer justice in general and to reject the government’s attack against the division of powers and the counterweights to presidential power. In short, we march to defend our constitutional democracy.
Those who march now – which will not be the case for me – will do so to support the opposition against the government in the face of an imminent electoral contest. They have every right to do so and to support whoever they see fit, but they only represent themselves. So they cannot, nor should they, promote their manifestation as a continuity of the others. They are very different initiatives, legitimate, without a doubt; but it is necessary to have them separated. For this reason, in fact, not all the organizations that called for the previous marches have joined the call for the one to come. This is the case, for example, of the Institute of Studies for the Democratic Transition (IETD) of whose Governing Board I am a member. As it is a non-partisan organization, it did not call.
P.S. The attack by the government, with the President of the Republic at the head, against María Amparo Casar, is, in addition to being cowardly, vile.
