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Mexico Elections: The Fear of Not Voting

by Javier Sicilia

source Mexico Voices

The conditions are ripe for boycotting the elections, with a voided ballot or by not going to the polls. As never before in the history of modern Mexico, the symbiosis between politics and crime, and the absence, at the same time, of a true political offer that ends insecurity, corruption, extreme poverty, crime, and impunity, have revealed not only the absence of the State, but of a true democratic foundation. All the same, some sectors of society will insist on going to the polls on June 7th.

Outside of those who will go for non-civic reasons, meaning for reasons that have destroyed the life of politics: coercion, corruption, and the patronage system (what’s defined as the “hard vote”), the true citizens who will vote will do it out of fear of the void, that is to say, because of the terror of accepting that there is nothing and that we should start over, almost from zero.

Not without good reason, too. Becoming aware of a reality that is the antithesis of the stable world that we imagined is hard. It never happens suddenly. Only little by little, despite the havoc. It is hard work for us to accept that our friend betrayed us, that the woman we love slept with someone else, that the libertarian ideas to which we once devoted ourselves were the mask of tyranny, that our beloved child will never come home.

It’s also hard to accept that our country is absolutely destroyed, realize that what we made of democracy (for the how many generations that fought and gave their lives) is a simulation, and that going to vote is nothing more than raising criminals to power who use our dreams to rob us, to sell the land and water, to allow our children to be stolen and keep us subjected to the forces of fear, impunity and horror. Very few dare to bear it. The elections aren’t good from the start, given the most superficial arguments of political thinking:

"The PRI is going to win with the hard vote";

"They are less evil than the others";

"If we don’t vote, we’ll leave the power to the worst";

"What will happen if we don’t vote?"So everyone goes to the polls, only to discover themselves in the deepening horror a few months later.

The fear, which is building this democratic illusion, doesn’t let us see the systemic problem: the PRI is not a party. It is, however, a criminal culture that corroded the political infrastructure and morality of all the parties and much of the nation. Changing one for another (we have not stopped living it six year term after six year term) is to repeat the systemic culture and sink deeper into the horror of its corruption. Wherever we turn, the political parties, be they of any stripe, increase crime, impunity, corruption, repression, lies, simulations and links with organized crime groups.

However, in the illusion, the elections that make that reality possible (every atrocity occurred in this country since the non-existent democratic transition has been sustained and supported by the illusion of the vote), erase the devastation from the imagination, diminishing its importance and reducing it to a matter that the magic of those elected will erase. Fear of accepting reality ensnares the imagination in the comfortable areas of the illusion and, like all fear, helps to legitimize the unthinkable.

Despite that, reality is repeated again and again. The news that we run across daily (vote buying, the lawsuits between parties, the wasting of public monies and organized crime in dirty campaigns such as the Green Party, the murdered and missing every day, human rights violations, the incompetence of the INE [National Electoral Institute], the absence of political sense in the candidates and in the levels of government, daily insecurity, conflicts of interest, the impunity, government officials colluding with organized crime, silencing freedom of expression and protests, etc.) is evidence of reality’s existence and a revelation of the unreality of democracy.

Accepting this is painful. But it is the only way to remake our country and lives. Our electoral democracy isn’t in crisis. It died long ago. It only exists in the illusion and fear endorsed by the elections and allows the reality of the devastation to continue on its frightful march. Going to the polls is giving a blank check to this savagery and prolonging it over time in increasingly unprecedented ways.

Politics and its democratic source need another language and another way to conduct themselves. But that can only be born of those who have accepted reality, and who understand that the language of the elections and the partyocracy[rule by the political parties] is a language that lost its meaning and only produces corruption, chaos and death, which are the absence of reason. This is the experience of everyone in Mexico.

Many, however, for fear of accepting it, intoxicated by the illusion, unable to see that we are witnessing the collapse of a world that needs to think and remake itself from its foundations, will continue believing in the elections as a dogma of faith and will go and vote. Then, as the Zapatistas said, the storm and the catastrophe that come after will be even worse.

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