Cuba USA
by Juan Villoro
source Aristegui Noticias
interviewed by Carmen Artistegui
"Mexican politics is a theater of appearances," says Juan Villoro. The writer and journalist has just published 'Funerales preventivos' [Precautionary Funerals] (Rafters), a volume that combines Rogelio Naranjo's political cartoons with Villoro's political fables. In it, he takes critical stock of the moment facing the country and the contradictions of our democracy. "It's not that it's a failed path, it's that it's gone wrong," he concludes.
Aristegui: The first thing you write in your book is that we have passed from the perfect dictatorship to the perfect caricature; how is that?
"Following Vargas Llosa's phrase [that the one-party rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution, from the 1920s to 2000, was the "perfect dictatorship"], in 1990, we had democratic alternation with the [election of the] PAN [National Action Party]. By not changing anything with Vicente Fox, we become a country even more ridiculous. So I say that from being the perfect dictatorship we became the perfect caricature. Mexican politicians have been Rogelio Naranjo's main sponsors. He is a stupendous portrait artist, not only of the physiognomy of rulers, but ot their hidden agendas and personality. His caricatures are derived from very concrete news; they have dates; they are characters with names. So I raised the possibility of writing fables with a symbolic content."Aristegui: The book itself suggests that one laugh, so as not to cry.
"Kafka said he wrote in order for his friends to laugh; even if his stories are bitter and explore the human condition, his handling of the absurd leads to laughter, which functions as an offset to a world gone wrong. The imperfections of life quickly trigger a witty response that allows mocking reality and getting revenge. It is very difficult for laughter not to have a moral component; in a sense of humor there is always a critical intention to correct an imperfect world."
Aristegui: Is that why you continually use humor in your writing?
"Yes, I continually try to include humor in what I write. For these fables I concentrated on some typical habits of our politicians: they promise everything, to inaugurate modernity, and then discover that it is better to make declarations than to govern."
Aristegui: Is there a Mexican style of politics?
"Of course. Mexican politics is a theater of appearances. Here the representation of reality has been more important than reality itself. The price of not having a real dictatorship is not having a true democracy. This theater led to a masquerade in which a party may define itself as "institutional revolutionary", which is an absolute contradiction, because the revolution turned into a bureaucratic procedure; that's a caricature. In his last State of the Union address, President Peña Nieto said, 'those opposed to government institutions destabilize power, destroy it through anarchy'. This is said by a president who belongs to the party that originally defended the Mexican Revolution, a movement that emerged precisely to change institutions. If that's not a caricature, I wonder what it is?"
Aristegui: How would you evaluate Enrique Peña Nieto's management three years after the beginning of his government?
"Unfortunately, he is moving Mexico [Peña Nieto's motto], but backwards. Most of the reforms were interesting, because after 12 years of political inactivity, with a zombie president [Vicente Fox] and another [Felipe Calderón] who ruled in a military mode with the so-called war against drug trafficking, Peña Nieto set a new scenario. The problem is that many of these reforms remain incomplete and insufficient promises that were badly focused and modified for the pleasure of their clients.
"We have a tele-presidente isolated from reality, who prefers to govern distant from the people and who feels vulnerable if he breathes the wind of the real world. He seems to be encapsulated in a television studio. It is amazing that after what happened in Ayotzinapa he did not immediately go to Iguala to visit the parents of the victims. He believes he can rule by telepronter, announcing things prepared by his writers. This is a really worrisome case of dissociation from reality."
Aristegui: In reviewing Naranjo cartoons and your fables, it seems that the country's problems remain the same.
"They remain the same. For a long time, we had inordinate confidence in democracy; we thought that with the alternation of the party in power, things would improve. It wasn't so. The parties can all compete and the results are worse. The political parties have discovered that politics is an arena of conflict and they prefer to perpetuate the problems rather than solve them. The parties are disconnected from reality and only care about their own aims."Aristegui: In a catoon Naranjo wrote: "We are sick to death with democracy."
"It's not that democracy is a failed path, but that our democracy is going wrong. We need to citizenize politics, be more involved and find more direct ways to do politics. For example, in Mexico it is very difficult to be a truly independent candidate. 'El Bronco' ["The Unbridled One", Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, independent governor of Nuevo Leon] has little independence, as does the mayor of Morelia [Salvador Abud Mirabent]. It is necessary to lower these requirements and have more direct forms of access. I believe in democracy and political parties, but definitely not in this democracy or these political parties."Aristegui: But isn't there a global disenchantment with democracy?
"We have to change the paradigm and mindset. My father [Luis Villoro] was much criticized for being utopian. They said that his diagnosis of reality was correct but he imagined impossible worlds. His experience with the Zapatistas and other groups led him to conceive of another type of community. The newspaper opinion writers who questioned him didn't understand that philosophy, from its inception, has been dedicated precisely to imagining communities to come. For many, it's science fiction, but we cannot change reality without first imagining it.
"We are dominated by technology and the market, the two great gods that we worship; on behalf of individuality we make ourselves all alike. There is nothing further from individuality than relying on prices, the market, consumption, the hours stores are open."
MV Note: Luis Villoro was a highly renowned Spanish-Mexican philosopher and historian of Mexico's indigenous peoples. Born in 1922 in Barcelona, Spain, he arrived in Mexico in 1939, at age 17, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), won by fascist forces under General Franco. Villoro earned his doctorate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was an active supporter of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. He died in March 2014.Aristegui: Are you a utopian?
"To be utopian isn't to lose the ground of reality, but to have a utopian impulse; it allows you to change reality. It is necessary to have a dose of confidence and hope in something that does not exist in order for that to be able to exist. Fourier [Charles Fourier, French philosopher and social utopian thinker] would be an extreme example, but the drive to reach that world is interesting."
Aristegui: Given the political landscape of Mexico, are you pessimistic or optimistic?
"Right now, I'm very pessimistic. One the worst things that can happen to a society is the loss of expectations and we already have that. Not only do we live in a critical situation, we have a lack of expectations. We must begin to build citizen options to modify access to politics. There have been groups that have defended hope arising from pain, such as the Movement for Peace [victims of the drug war, led by Javier Sicilia], or the Zapatistas and, in general the indigenous communities, environmentalists, small business people. If all of these could come together in harmony to create a civic front to change the rules, it might work."Aristegui: As a society, what do we have to do?
"They say that every people has the government it deserves, but to me this does not seem entirely correct. In a highly unequal country like Mexico there is a huge amount of manipulation. I can't blame a person who is starving for voting for a party that gives him a bunch of groceries. That is the reality we have. I couldn't say that rural residents of Mexico have the government they deserve, since they don't have the option of discussing it intelligently, because of the lack of education in the country. That is what we must fight against."
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Cuba USA
Mexico Government: "From the Perfect Dictatorship to the Perfect Caricature"
by Juan Villoro
source Aristegui Noticias
interviewed by Carmen Artistegui
"Mexican politics is a theater of appearances," says Juan Villoro. The writer and journalist has just published 'Funerales preventivos' [Precautionary Funerals] (Rafters), a volume that combines Rogelio Naranjo's political cartoons with Villoro's political fables. In it, he takes critical stock of the moment facing the country and the contradictions of our democracy. "It's not that it's a failed path, it's that it's gone wrong," he concludes.
"Following Vargas Llosa's phrase [that the one-party rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution, from the 1920s to 2000, was the "perfect dictatorship"], in 1990, we had democratic alternation with the [election of the] PAN [National Action Party]. By not changing anything with Vicente Fox, we become a country even more ridiculous. So I say that from being the perfect dictatorship we became the perfect caricature. Mexican politicians have been Rogelio Naranjo's main sponsors. He is a stupendous portrait artist, not only of the physiognomy of rulers, but ot their hidden agendas and personality. His caricatures are derived from very concrete news; they have dates; they are characters with names. So I raised the possibility of writing fables with a symbolic content."Aristegui: The book itself suggests that one laugh, so as not to cry.
"Kafka said he wrote in order for his friends to laugh; even if his stories are bitter and explore the human condition, his handling of the absurd leads to laughter, which functions as an offset to a world gone wrong. The imperfections of life quickly trigger a witty response that allows mocking reality and getting revenge. It is very difficult for laughter not to have a moral component; in a sense of humor there is always a critical intention to correct an imperfect world."
Aristegui: Is that why you continually use humor in your writing?
"Yes, I continually try to include humor in what I write. For these fables I concentrated on some typical habits of our politicians: they promise everything, to inaugurate modernity, and then discover that it is better to make declarations than to govern."
Aristegui: Is there a Mexican style of politics?
"Of course. Mexican politics is a theater of appearances. Here the representation of reality has been more important than reality itself. The price of not having a real dictatorship is not having a true democracy. This theater led to a masquerade in which a party may define itself as "institutional revolutionary", which is an absolute contradiction, because the revolution turned into a bureaucratic procedure; that's a caricature. In his last State of the Union address, President Peña Nieto said, 'those opposed to government institutions destabilize power, destroy it through anarchy'. This is said by a president who belongs to the party that originally defended the Mexican Revolution, a movement that emerged precisely to change institutions. If that's not a caricature, I wonder what it is?"
Aristegui: How would you evaluate Enrique Peña Nieto's management three years after the beginning of his government?
"Unfortunately, he is moving Mexico [Peña Nieto's motto], but backwards. Most of the reforms were interesting, because after 12 years of political inactivity, with a zombie president [Vicente Fox] and another [Felipe Calderón] who ruled in a military mode with the so-called war against drug trafficking, Peña Nieto set a new scenario. The problem is that many of these reforms remain incomplete and insufficient promises that were badly focused and modified for the pleasure of their clients.
"We have a tele-presidente isolated from reality, who prefers to govern distant from the people and who feels vulnerable if he breathes the wind of the real world. He seems to be encapsulated in a television studio. It is amazing that after what happened in Ayotzinapa he did not immediately go to Iguala to visit the parents of the victims. He believes he can rule by telepronter, announcing things prepared by his writers. This is a really worrisome case of dissociation from reality."
Aristegui: In reviewing Naranjo cartoons and your fables, it seems that the country's problems remain the same.
"They remain the same. For a long time, we had inordinate confidence in democracy; we thought that with the alternation of the party in power, things would improve. It wasn't so. The parties can all compete and the results are worse. The political parties have discovered that politics is an arena of conflict and they prefer to perpetuate the problems rather than solve them. The parties are disconnected from reality and only care about their own aims."Aristegui: In a catoon Naranjo wrote: "We are sick to death with democracy."
"It's not that democracy is a failed path, but that our democracy is going wrong. We need to citizenize politics, be more involved and find more direct ways to do politics. For example, in Mexico it is very difficult to be a truly independent candidate. 'El Bronco' ["The Unbridled One", Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, independent governor of Nuevo Leon] has little independence, as does the mayor of Morelia [Salvador Abud Mirabent]. It is necessary to lower these requirements and have more direct forms of access. I believe in democracy and political parties, but definitely not in this democracy or these political parties."Aristegui: But isn't there a global disenchantment with democracy?
"We have to change the paradigm and mindset. My father [Luis Villoro] was much criticized for being utopian. They said that his diagnosis of reality was correct but he imagined impossible worlds. His experience with the Zapatistas and other groups led him to conceive of another type of community. The newspaper opinion writers who questioned him didn't understand that philosophy, from its inception, has been dedicated precisely to imagining communities to come. For many, it's science fiction, but we cannot change reality without first imagining it.
"We are dominated by technology and the market, the two great gods that we worship; on behalf of individuality we make ourselves all alike. There is nothing further from individuality than relying on prices, the market, consumption, the hours stores are open."
MV Note: Luis Villoro was a highly renowned Spanish-Mexican philosopher and historian of Mexico's indigenous peoples. Born in 1922 in Barcelona, Spain, he arrived in Mexico in 1939, at age 17, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), won by fascist forces under General Franco. Villoro earned his doctorate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was an active supporter of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. He died in March 2014.Aristegui: Are you a utopian?
"To be utopian isn't to lose the ground of reality, but to have a utopian impulse; it allows you to change reality. It is necessary to have a dose of confidence and hope in something that does not exist in order for that to be able to exist. Fourier [Charles Fourier, French philosopher and social utopian thinker] would be an extreme example, but the drive to reach that world is interesting."
Aristegui: Given the political landscape of Mexico, are you pessimistic or optimistic?
"Right now, I'm very pessimistic. One the worst things that can happen to a society is the loss of expectations and we already have that. Not only do we live in a critical situation, we have a lack of expectations. We must begin to build citizen options to modify access to politics. There have been groups that have defended hope arising from pain, such as the Movement for Peace [victims of the drug war, led by Javier Sicilia], or the Zapatistas and, in general the indigenous communities, environmentalists, small business people. If all of these could come together in harmony to create a civic front to change the rules, it might work."Aristegui: As a society, what do we have to do?
"They say that every people has the government it deserves, but to me this does not seem entirely correct. In a highly unequal country like Mexico there is a huge amount of manipulation. I can't blame a person who is starving for voting for a party that gives him a bunch of groceries. That is the reality we have. I couldn't say that rural residents of Mexico have the government they deserve, since they don't have the option of discussing it intelligently, because of the lack of education in the country. That is what we must fight against."
- Mexico Is Not A Functioning Democracy
by John M. Ackerman source Foreign Policy Authoritarian leadership, stifled dissent, limited freedom of assembly, and endless violence are the hallmarks of Mexico under Peña Nieto. It's time for Washington to pull the plug. The United States...
- Mexico Government: Civil Society Way Ahead Of Its Political Leaders
by Víctor Flores Oleasource La Jornada Among the indicators of today's Mexico, one stands out: the superiority, the advance of civil society with respect to the government. Society has greater dynamism and a more accurate view of the future, with...
- 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...
- Mexico Elections: Detestable Green Party Reflects Mexico's Weak Democracy
by Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquezsource mexicovoices Some say that Flaubert's letters were his masterpiece. More than his novels, writing comes alive in his letters; you can see critical spark, irony and venom. In one of them I find he confesses his...
- "mexican Hope" The Land Of Zapata Has Once Again Become A Beacon Of Hope In The Middle Of The Arid Desert Of Corruption.
By John M AckermanSource Latino Rebels The land of Zapata has once again become a beacon of hope in the middle of the arid desert of corruption which today controls politics as usual in Washington, Mexico City, Ottawa and beyond. While Mexico’s...