Through expressions such as “don’t tell me the law is the law” or his simple and self-serving reduction of law to mere formalities, Andrés Manuel López Obrador sought to build the foundations of his own political decisionism. He sought to eliminate the limits of rationality generated by the norms issued by legislators, judges and administrators, to make room for their personal and morning determinations. What was established in the laws was interpretable by him, what was resolved by the judges under his very personal control, or what was determined by the autonomous constitutional bodies, scrutinized by the moods of the corresponding morning.
However anecdotal or picturesque its expressions may be, the reiteration of preaching diminished the understandings and practices of law already absent in Mexico. He succeeded in deepening this old idea – not entirely false – of the real and formal country, of law as a simple instrument of exploitation or others of the same or similar character. At the end of her six-year mandate and, moreover, at the beginning of President Sheinbaum’s mandate, legal norms and their organs of production were marked by the vague idea of their uselessness, even of their simple opposition.
The reductive game on the law has been deployed at the national level because there is a large domination of Morena and his allies. However, and without this implying an apology for interventionism, these powerful people have not succeeded today in exploiting the law at the level of international relations. When it comes to extraditions, bans, aquifer debts, tariff rates, immigration quotas or other similar materialities, Mexican authorities cannot use the legal powers they give themselves and use on a daily basis. By not controlling the legislators of other countries, they cannot impose on them what they themselves wanted to say; Not being the bosses of judges and administrators, they cannot scold them for what they said or remained silent. Nor can they establish, whether or not, international standards or those of other countries, they constitute mere formalities or acts of violence like those that President Juárez faced.
It is in this dual context that President Sheinbaum, her government and the Obrador party are trying to determine whether or not the explosion of a van in the municipality of Coahuayana, Michoacán, on December 6, was a terrorist act. For Mexico’s formal and informal authorities – and their control of certain narratives – this is part of the expansion processes carried out by Mexican cartels to expand their territorial presence. From their point of view, the explosion and especially its intentionality are reduced to a question between individuals. The dispute for markets based on the control of territories by rival bands. To an event in which there is no presence of state authorities. A matter “between them”. To a story similar to that used during several six-year terms to consider that the increasing mortality of young people was due to the conflicts typical of organizations of affiliation and voluntary permanence. An attempt to “privatize” the dead and all the elements that surround them.
The attempt by current public security authorities to define the Coahuayana explosion as part of the process of cartel expansion also aims to privatize this terrible event. By attributing, once again, the character of an affair between gangs or organizations of which the State would be practically unconscious, perhaps considering that when it comes to criminals, there is an availability or abandonment of the participants. An area which, because it is criminal, does not concern a State which only has to defend the part of the population which is not involved in such illicit activities.
According to the Federal Penal Code, the crime of terrorism is committed by “anyone, using toxic substances, chemical, biological or similar weapons, radioactive materials, nuclear materials, nuclear fuel, radioactive minerals, radiation sources or radiation-emitting instruments, explosives or firearms, or by fire, flood or any other violent means, intentionally commits acts against property or services, public or private, or against physical, emotional integrity or life of people, who cause concern, fear or terror in the population or in a group or sector thereof, to undermine national security or to put pressure on the authority or an individual, or force them to take a decision.
Reading this legal provision allows us to see that the offense of terrorism is configured by the use of substances, the violation of people and the desired purposes. This provision does not refer to the direct attack on institutions. The qualification of behavior does not require that it aims to obtain power or to assassinate public officials. The evocations that the word terrorism arouses in each individual may or may not correspond to the criminal offense. However, for the purposes of the latter and its corresponding legal configurations, the provisions of the transcribed text must be respected.
The attempts made by the Mexican government to reduce the Coahuayana explosion to an affair between cartels and, therefore, to avoid it being classified as terrorism, seek to shield the Mexican State from the legal effects that national, foreign and international legislation can generate for it. Measures such as the imprescriptibility of offenses, the qualifications of the Mexican State, the freezing of funds, foreign intervention – unwanted – or even the opening of procedures against past or present government authorities before international courts.
The government’s attempt to conceive the Coahuayana explosion as a conflict between individuals has opened a legal debate which, with all its limitations, requires qualifying the facts in accordance with the regulations in force and not, as López Obrador did, through a global and disqualifying position on the artificial or ill-intentioned nature of the law itself considered. This discussion will highlight, once again, that in law – as in the rest of social spheres – words and their meanings are relevant. That it is not possible to suppose that the single voice of one who, at the time, is or is considered supremely powerful, can mean the whole of reality.
@JRCossio
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