Peter C. Baker
The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
The Torture Letters:
Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph.
University of Chicago Press,
242 pp., $75.00; $19.00 (paper)
Chicago has a police torture problem. The exact size of this problem is not known and perhaps never will be. What is known for sure is that between 1972 and 1991 at least 125 black Chicagoans were tortured by police officers in the Area 2 precinct building on the city’s predominantly black South Side. Depending on the day and the officers involved, the victims were beaten, shackled to steaming hot radiators, electrocuted, and raped with sex toys. They were tortured into confessing, and sometimes tortured more afterward; these confessions were used to send them to prison, and in some cases to death row. The horrors of Area 2 have received the lion’s share of attention from activists, lawyers, and especially journalists. But few would argue that Area 2 is the whole story: there are also serious and credible allegations of torture on the city’s southwest side, at what used to be called Area 3, and more recently at Homan Square, an off-thebooks interrogation site in the North Lawndale neighborhood. And over time, torture seeps into a community’s expectations, becoming one of the many silent threats accompanying every traffic stop. During the recent wave of protests set off by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it was obvious that, for many in Chicago, the city’s legacy of police torture was a palpable presence, informing the protesters’ anger—but also their anxiety about the fate of their arrested comrades. In Chicago and beyond, the city’s history of police torture is indelibly associated with a single name: Jon Burge. Burge was a Chicago police officer who served at Area 2 from 1971 to 1988 and at Area 3 from 1988 to 1991, climbing the ranks from detective to commander. Before joining the force, Burge had served in Vietnam, which may have been where he learned about electroshock torture. At Areas 2 and 3, he was often personally involved in torture sessions, and as commander had a central part in encouraging torture, especially among an “A-Team” of officers who shared his sense that brutal violence was a necessary tool for the policing of black Chicago. Thanks to his leadership in both precincts, Burge has often been the figure at the center of victims’ legal complaints. He is the singular villain of the story as it tends to get told in the media, and almost equally so in the version historically preferred by the Chicago law enforcement establishment (when they are not absolutely denying that torture ever took place). After all, while one thoroughly rotten apple in a city is bad enough, it’s nothing compared to a barrelful: the entire legal system of a city ignoring the torture of black suspects by white cops. From 1981 to 1989, prosecutions of Area 2 torture victims were overseen by Richard M. Daley, who was county prosecutor at the time and left the office to become mayor. Lawyers for torture survivors have repeatedly sought to compel Daley’s testimony on the subject, but with no success.
In
1993, Burge was fired for the “physical abuse” of a suspect; to this day, he remains the only Chicago police officer seriously disciplined for involvement in torture. He left Chicago for Apollo Beach, Florida, where he lived off his police pension and the proceeds of a small fishing business. Through the 1990s and 2000s, more and more Chicagoans brought claims of police torture into courtrooms. Some were able to have their sentences overturned or the cases brought to retrial with their original confessions thrown out. Some sued the city for damages; settlements in Burge-related cases have cost the city over $100 million. When deposed in these cases, Burge would generally plead the Fifth. But in a 2003 deposition he was, for whatever reason, moved to speak: he insisted that neither he nor any officers under his command had ever tortured anyone. In 2008 a creative federal prosecutor used this provably false statement to charge Burge with criminal perjury and obstructions of justice. (Thanks to a five-year statute of limitations on police brutality cases in Illinois, any possibility of criminal charges for torture itself had long expired.) A jury found Burge guilty, and in 2011 he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. In 2014 he was released, and in 2018 he died at home in Apollo Beach.
This meant Burge lived just long enough to see Chicago’s city council bow to years of pressure by antitorture activists and pass a bill that established a “reparations fund” for police torture victims. This bill, signed in 2015, acknowledged that police torture had occurred—though not the full extent of the city’s complicity—and set aside a pool of $5.5 million, from which victims of Burge or his subordinates could receive $100,000 each, regardless of the legal system’s final determination of their own guilt or innocence. The city also pledged to support the creation of a monument to police torture survivors, the opening of a psychological services center for survivors, and the creation of a curriculum on Chicago police torture to be taught in eighth- and tenth-grade public school history classes.
It would be impossible to deny what an astonishing—even historic—document the reparations bill is. It recognized the immorality of torture as a principle that stands alone, separate from whether the person being tortured is “good” or “bad,” “criminal” or “innocent.” Just as crucially, it acknowledges that reparation—the repair of harm—is by necessity a process that cannot happen without attention to the stories we tell ourselves through public spaces and school history lessons.
But it is easy, especially for journalists, to misrepresent the nature of the reparations victory. Just as journalists love villains like Jon Burge (because they provide their stories with memorable characters), they also love victories, because victories give their stories satisfying endings. The truth, however, is that the reparations bill was not the end of anything, but one way station in a long, ongoing struggle. Most Chicago residents—black and white alike—are not aware that the bill exists, much less what it asks of the city. Almost five years later, the promised monument has not been built; activists have selected a design, but it is not yet clear who will pay for it, or where it will go. The counseling center is open, but the city’s pledged period of support has ended, and the center’s longterm financial future is uncertain. The school curriculum was unveiled for the 2017–2018 school year, but teachers receive very little training on how to deliver it. While reporting a story on the first-year rollout, I learned that at some schools it wasn’t being taught at all, while at others it was being introduced over vocal opposition from concerned parents. Even when it is being taught, the content of the curriculum is likely enormously different from school to school and neighborhood to neighborhood, not least because Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Teachers have great latitude to present Chicago police torture as a contained story— something that happened in the past but is now fixed— or as one that’s wide open: an illness that continues to fester, finding expression in many symptoms besides those stemming from Burge-ordered torture. Even the basic facts of the story are still undetermined. In 2009 Illinois established the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to expedite the review of Burge-linked torture cases. The commission was quickly overwhelmed with petitions, most of which it hasn’t yet processed even eleven years later. In 2016, in response to the weight of revelations about torture not overseen by Burge, the commission agreed to expand its scope to include cases from anywhere in the city. It now has 543 cases pending; according to a recent calculation by the investigative news organization Injustice Watch, if it proceeds at the same average speed it has shown over the last decade, it will take another three decades or more just to process the claims that have been filed so far.
The vast majority of what has already been written about police torture in Chicago has been focused—for understandable and proper reasons—on marshaling the essential facts: exactly who did what to whom; who knew what, and when; who turned a blind eye. On this front, the contribution of Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters is relatively minor. Ralph, a Princeton anthropologist, doesn’t add much new material to the record. The immense value of his book lies instead in how he delivers this information to the reader. It is, to a striking extent, a project shaped by an awareness that while unearthing and circulating true stories of brutality may sometimes be necessary, it is rarely sufficient, and always fraught with peril. The writer who takes up violence always risks becoming a voyeur, or, more accurately, a scavenger, harvesting and arranging the details of other people’s suffering for purposes that may include stimulating and facilitating the voyeurism of readers. In formal academic writing especially it often seems that brutal violence, including torture, gets pressed into the service
of this or that theory—often something to do with Foucault—in hopes of spicing things up with a dash of raw evil plus the frisson of intense physicality. Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and authority on government torture, has noted that academic debates about torture are rarely about torture itself and instead reenact abstract debates about the law and politics:
One could substitute for torture controversial concepts like the death penalty, abortion, political deception, or hostage taking, and the dance form will be more or less the same. The form of the dance washes out any particulars about the specific practice being debated. It is a cultural form Americans use to talk about hot topics; other cultures have other dances.
Self-consciously literary writers who address violence have a tendency to note their own ambivalence about doing so; this sometimes feels like honesty, sometimes like a preemptive bid for absolution, and most often like both at once.
Putting violence on the page is especially treacherous when—as in the case of Chicago police torture—the violence targeted members of particular communities, accompanied long-standing racial prejudice, and inflicted lasting wounds in the psyches not just of individuals but also of their families and neighbors. It is all too easy to push aside one prejudicial account (in which they are fundamentally inferior) only to end up replacing it with something not much better: a story in which they are fundamentally broken. The scholar Eve Tuck has a useful term for work like this: “damage-centered.” Ralph’s first book, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, was deeply concerned with damage but also with not becoming damage-centered. Rather than dwelling exclusively on the injuries and indignities experienced by residents of poor black Chicago neighborhoods, Ralph focused on how those residents themselves conceptualized those injuries, and—crucially—the enormous individual and communal effort they made toward overcoming them. The Torture Letters shows a similar commitment, never shying away from torture’s destructive effects but also refusing to present those effects as a dark morass that is impossible to overcome.
This refusal determines the very shape of the book. With the exception of the prologue and an appendix, The Torture Letters consists entirely of open letters, written in prose much more direct and accessible than standard academic texts. Some of these letters are addressed to imaginary or generic recipients: Chicago’s future mayors, the city’s youth of color. Others are written to specific individuals, some living—like Chicago’s former police superintendent Eddie Johnson (in the gap between the book’s completion and publication, Johnson was fired)— and some dead, like Andrew Wilson, the first person to bring a civil suit for torture against the city of Chicago, in 1986. Ralph writes to black antibrutality activists of the past and present. One letter is addressed to Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man tortured in 2002 at a CIA black site in Jordan;
later that year he was transferred to Guantanamo, where he was also tortured, with many of his most violent interrogations overseen by a Chicago cop named Richard Zuley. Slahi was never charged, and was released in 2016.
The open letter is, by definition, a literary Janus. To the extent that it is like a letter, it is imbued with a certain directness, and creates a heightened sense of intimacy. To the extent that it is “open,” it knows its intimacy is at least partially artificial, constructed out of words with a wider audience—or, often, multiple audiences—in mind. James Baldwin’s 1962 “A Letter to My Nephew” is full of things Baldwin wanted to say to his teenage nephew about race and America. But he was also talking to other black youth his nephew’s age, and to other black uncles and aunts and parents about what they might say to the next generation. The letter contained a message—implicit but thus perhaps all the more effective—for Baldwin’s considerable white readership, too, something along the lines of Do you see? This is how America compels me to talk to my beloved nephew. A recent example of this dynamic can be found in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which takes the form of a long letter from Coates to his fifteen-yearold son.
In The Torture Letters, this effect is refracted several times over. While preparing the book, Ralph held a series of focus groups in Chicago, soliciting the views of city residents on the police and torture, and sharing excerpts from the letters he was working on and asking who else he should write to, what else he should say. Along the way we get a sense of Ralph’s own evolving motivations. One of the book’s earliest letters is addressed to “the Boy and Girl with Matching Airbrushed Book Bags on the Corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road”—children whom Ralph saw getting stopped by a team of six Chicago police:
I am writing to you today because when I see kids in Chicago being stopped and frisked by the cops, I always feel guilty for not knowing what to do, just like I still feel guilty for not helping you that day. I’m also writing because we all need to talk—whenever and however we can—about the awful things that we have to deal with as Black people in this country, as well as what we can do about them.
In the next letter (“to Chicago’s Youth of Color”), he confesses his ambivalence about academic research on torture:
Back in 2015, I had been researching police torture for more than a decade. In fact, I was thinking about giving up my research because I was convinced that nothing would ever change. But the thought of helping to educate you filled me with a renewed sense of purpose. I felt that my contribution could be to help teenagers of color like you rethink the idea of what it means to be guilty and to help explain the damage that judging someone to be guilty can do . . . .
That’s why in all of my letters I ask you not to think of the innocent person as the quintessential torture victim. Rather, imagine a person who committed a crime that you regard as especially heinous. Imagine that person being bagged and suffocated and beaten within an inch of his life. Ask yourself, can I see enough humanity in him to understand why it is just as wrong to torture him as it is to torture an innocent man?
The final letters frequently reference both one another and the focus groups, alchemizing several scattered exchanges about torture—some imaginary and some real—into a single conversation that is a bit of both: it never actually happened, and yet you can hold it in your hands and feel its power. Writing to former superintendent Johnson, Ralph states bluntly that “your city government . . . has created a world in which the tortured exist but torturers do not. This contradiction is a stain on your police department. It is part of what makes your talk of trust and legitimacy ring false.” It makes a difference that Ralph’s arrangement of the book places this letter after the other two I have just quoted. The more you read, the more it feels like the letters are drawing all of their recipients—living and dead, powerful mayors and ordinary teenagers— into one impossible room together. Of course, the reader is there too.
To what end? Certainly the letters, read together, do a decent job of telling the story of what happened at Area 2. Ralph advances—slowly and patiently, and with sympathy for the fact that his readers may disagree—his moral argument that torture is always wrong. He encourages his readers to conceptualize police torture not with the usual image of bad apples but rather through the metaphor of a tree, one with deep roots and lots of branches, in Chicago and elsewhere, including the US military. But any of these goals could have been pursued effectively without open letters; none of them, it seems to me, is the primary purpose—or at least the primary accomplishment—of The Torture Letters. Though Ralph never explicitly says so, a central function of his book is to nurture one of the primary forces that torture sets out to destroy, and which the vastness of history tends to obscure: the sense that individual action has meaning.
This nurturing happens in part in the individual letters, but ultimately in the expanded zone of intimacy that the book creates as it moves from letter to letter. For example, Ralph writes to Doris Byrd, a retired Chicago police officer who worked alongside Burge in Area 2. As a black woman, Byrd was not a candidate for inclusion on the A-Team, which was composed overwhelmingly of white, male military veterans. But Byrd and other black officers—Ralph refers to them as the B-Team—knew more or less what was happening. They also knew that Burge had enough support within the department that lodging any kind of complaint against him would likely generate reprisal. They’d seen white officers get demoted after crossing him: What would happen to them? In 2004, called from retirement to testify under oath for an Area 2 civil suit, Byrd described her decision to keep her head down. Ralph narrates it back to her:
You developed ways of remaining willfully unaware of anything that might compromise your ability to rise in the ranks of the police force or put you at personal risk. When it wasn’t your shift, you stayed out of Area 2 precinct as much as possible. Whenever you got wind that the A-Team was on the verge of giving a criminal suspect the “Vietnamese Treatment,” you hit the street to pursue leads, or you took your paperwork home so as not to be within earshot of a suspect’s pleas. You...even came up with a name for this willful circumvention: “the ostrich approach.”
This confrontation would be discomfiting enough on its own. But the presence, in the text, of Ralph’s other interlocutors—especially present-day black Chicagoans disappointed by her actions—makes it especially devastating. It is possible to feel sympathy for the situation Byrd found herself in, while also feeling that she made the wrong choice. Ralph doesn’t claim to know that Byrd could have stopped Burge or anyone else. But he does imply that trying would have mattered, if only because it would have lent strength to anyone else also inclined to try. Byrd is still alive, and Ralph ends his letter by asking her directly to join the battle against police torture. A similar effect is achieved by a longer chain of letters that stray not just from Area 2 but from Chicago altogether. Ralph starts this chain by writing to Francis Grayson, a black Virginia man executed in 1951 after being found guilty of rape. In another, he writes to Francis’s still-living wife, Josephine, who after her husband was executed signed “We Charge Genocide,” a Civil Rights Congress (CRC) petition to the United Nation accusing the US government of treating its black citizens with genocidal intent. He then writes to William Patterson, the deceased former CRC president who had the original idea for the petition, and who delivered it himself to a UN meeting in Paris. (According to one telling of the story, which Ralph relates, the copy of the petition Patterson packed in his suitcase was confiscated by US officials en route to Paris. In anticipation of exactly this development, Patterson had mailed different sections of the petition to allies in the city. After his flight landed, he went to each of their houses, reassembling the document piece by piece.) Finally, Ralph writes to Dominique Franklin, a Chicago teenager who died in 2014 after being Tasered three times by police. He describes to Franklin— but also, implicitly, to William Patterson and Josephine and Francis Grayson and everyone else in the book—how, in the aftermath of his death, several of his friends started a group called We Charge Genocide. Using online funding tools, this group raised money to fly to Geneva, Switzerland, where they spent several days living in an Airbnb and lobbying the UN Committee Against Torture to include the ongoing police violence in Chicago in one of its annual reports. He tells Franklin how much his friends enjoyed Geneva’s public transit, and how simultaneously difficult and invigorating the trip was for them, the way “the fight for recognition was wearing [them] down and saving them at the same time.” Finally, he writes to Page May, the Chicago orga
nizer who led the trip, telling her how rewarding it was to show pictures of the group in Geneva to the frustrated young people in his focus groups. In Ralph’s imaginative linking of the sacrifices and schemes of these farflung actors, he manages to make palpable the way that, however isolated and defeated they sometimes felt, their lives and actions went on to create a supportive web of meaning that stretches across time. If the letter to Doris Byrd functions as a kind of moral alarm system—beware this variety of compromise!—the chain from Francis Grayson to Dominique Franklin makes the idea of doing your part feel that much more possible and valuable, whether you are
Chicago’s next mayor, a low-ranking employee who learns her workplace is a branch on a torture tree, or, like Ralph (or me), an outside observer trying to figure out how to write about torture— and why doing so might matter. Q
him as such: “You are our Messiah” read a placard carried by an aged indigenous man in a remote Oaxaca village. The adjective “tropical” was not mine, either—that, too, was his. In his book, AMLO equated the passionate nature of Tabasqueño politicians and the “tropical” environment of the region, with its impassable rainforests and tempestuous rivers.
As president, López Obrador constantly declares that he is trying to establish a Mexico free of corruption, a Mexico that is pure. In order to achieve this, he has mobilized thousands of young people in the pay of the government: so-called servants of the nation. Indoctrinated by the evangelical churches—and as devoted to Trump as they are to AMLO—they travel around the country, improving the morals of the people by instructing them in the tenets of the Fourth Transformation and conducting surveys of social needs. The word “citizen” does not exist in AMLO’s vocabulary. There is only a collective called “the people.” (The 47 percent of citizens who did not vote for him are not “the people,” for instance.) And he alone represents the people, defends the people, embodies the people. He seeks to “make history” (as his campaign slogan says) by means of a peaceful revolution that recovers and expands the political, economic, social, educational, and ideological preeminence that the state maintained under the PRI for much of the twentieth century. This is, of course, a return to that past, but with some new aspects. The PRI presidents enjoyed a great deal of power, but they never fully controlled the party, which was a confederation of workers’ organizations, rural farmers and bureaucrats, and an electoral machine. They scrupulously respected their restriction to one six-year term. But AMLO might be tempted not to. He controls his party, Morena (which he founded in 2014, two years after he left the PRD, and whose name comes from the Spanish for “National Regeneration Movement”), as well as most of Mexico’s political institutions. His power is not just constitutional but charismatic. He is a savior in power. And saviors are not in the habit of observing limits, whether legal, institutional, or temporal.
In my 2006 essay I warned against the dangers of this concentration of power in a purifying leader. I feared that AMLO (who was then leading in the polls) would reverse the fragile institutional progress that Mexican democracy had achieved since 1997, when the PRI failed to win a legislative majority in the lower house, ending seven uninterrupted decades of absolute power in both houses. For the first time in our modern history we had a fully autonomous and functioning electoral institution, a multiparty Congress, an independent judiciary system, which was restored in 1997, and substantial freedom of the press (which had been suppressed or restricted until the 1980s). All this could be endangered by a strong caudillo, more so if he thought of himself, and people thought of him, as a redeemer. Messianic expectations, I thought, would inevitably be disappointed, and Mexico could lose years it would never get back.
AMLO has governed with a revolutionary zeal whose source is that messianic impulse to save the country. Before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, I wondered if Mexico had wasted a year. Now I’m afraid it will lose the next five.
AMLO is motivated by what he calls “ideals and principles” that he believes are unassailable because they spring from his self-proclaimed moral superiority, and they free him from considering the practical consequences of his actions, which he cannot conceive as being in need of correction. In the first year of his presidency those consequences were not encouraging. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, they are tragic.
The paradoxes in his social program have always been significant. “For the good of all, the poor first” proclaimed the billboards with his picture at the start of this century. He translated that powerful message into a huge plan for economic support directed at poor Mexicans. It aims to reach more than 20 million people, but it has serious flaws. First, it is not subject to any form of public accountability. In addition, instead of being open to all Mexicans, the program is partly carried out by those “servants of the nation,” who use their discretion to evaluate recipients, which lends itself to high-handedness and corruption. Until recently, these “servants” were representatives of Morena and the president; now they are employees of the government. AMLO conceived the idea of jump-starting a number of “well-being projects”: planting 266 million trees between 2019 and 2020 in the southeast, creating hundreds of public universities and millions of scholarships for young people who don’t study or work, and building the first 13,000 branches of a Bank of Well-Being to extend microcredits to the poor. All these projects have failed or stopped short due to improvisation or lack of viability. He had been financing them through draconian—as well as arbitrary, opaque, and disorganized—budget cuts and underspending on other programs. He used up 57.7 percent of the Budgetary Income Stabilization Fund, a reserve created by previous administrations to make up for any fall in government revenues, and he also diverted funds set aside for disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and catastrophic diseases. These measures affected essential public institutions serving poor Mexicans, such as the Mexican Social Security Institute and the eighteen National Health Institutes and High Specialty Hospitals, which in 2020 had their budget cut by four billion pesos. All of them suffered a major shortage of medicines and hospital supplies, which López Obrador blamed on “corruption” in the pharmaceutical industry and among doctors rather than on his austerity measures. More serious was the elimination of the Seguro Popular (Popular Insurance Program), created in 2003 and recognized internationally for its effectiveness in providing health coverage for the poor; 53 million people found themselves suddenly without health coverage. Its replacement by a new National Institute for Health and Well-Being, which has not yet come into operation, was heavily criticized. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, these decisions are showing their terrible consequences. For weeks after the first cases of Covid-19 were reported at the end of February, López Obrador continued traveling across the country, organizing mass meetings and inviting people to gather, rejoice, and embrace. Mexico lacks the basic equipment and medicines to deal with the outbreak, and it is one of the countries that has conducted the fewest Covid-19 tests: only 0.04 per thousand people (the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is 23). The numbers of infections and deaths keep rising—as of the beginning of June there were over 93,000 confirmed cases and over 10,000 deaths—but so does denial. After The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and El País reported in mid-May that the actual number of deaths in Mexico City was as much as three times higher than that officially reported by the federal government, AMLO attacked them in Trumpian style: “famous papers with no ethics.” In one of his mañaneras, he cast a magic spell on the coronavirus with amulets and sacred images.
Why wasn’t there an enormous public reaction against this dismantling of the health system, which was likely to have most affected precisely those Mexicans who voted for AMLO? Since the beginning of 2020, protests have grown on social media and have now become widespread, but mainly among the urban middle classes. Beyond this more educated demographic, what counts is the omnipresence of state propaganda in radio and television. So does the old, deep-rooted political culture of millions of people who do not know what political representation means, who do not understand accountability (there is no single Spanish word for it), and who see the president as the legitimate possessor of power—all the more legitimate if he has tirelessly visited every corner of the country to talk to them as no president had before.
In economic policy, AMLO’s “ideals and principles” favor the state over the market, whose workings he despises and does not understand. But here he is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, with a contempt for experts that is similar to Trump’s, he has decimated public spending in crucial areas such as health, higher education, and scientific research. On the other, he is strengthening state oil and energy companies and is about to turn them back into monopolies, which they were—at least in oil—until 2014.
One of his dogmas is seeing oil as a kind of existential lifeblood for Mexico, and Pemex, the state oil monopoly, as a central lever of development. The result has been the de facto banning of private investment in the exploration, production, and distribution of oil and all other sources of energy, which has put the country’s economy at risk. In the beginning of 2020, it was feared that if Pemex’s credit rating fell, the country’s credit rating could be dragged down with it. That has now happened: with more than $100 billion in debt, the company has been downgraded to junk status by all agencies, and it posted a loss of $23.6 billion in the first quarter of 2020, after a net loss of $18.3 billion in 2019. Notwithstanding these financial problems and the 50 percent decrease in world oil prices since his election, the president has vowed to pour $8 billion into a refinery in Tabasco.
López Obrador’s contempt for ecology is every bit as dismissive and cynical as Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s. The refinery in Tabasco is a white elephant that will give priority to hydrocarbons rather than to clean and renewable energies. The wind and solar firms that were to start the final test required to operate within the national power grid have seen their startup permits canceled, while the Federal Electricity Commission is favoring investment in coal and heavy fuel oil over geothermal or hydroelectric power plants.
Perhaps the government’s most visible mistake was the cancellation of the construction of the much-needed new international airport for Mexico City. It was nearly a third complete and $13.3 billion had already been spent. Instead, the Santa Lucía military airport will be remodeled by the Mexican army for civilian use, which both global aeronautical authorities and domestic and foreign airlines do not consider technically viable, among other reasons because its location is too mountainous for commercial aircraft to land and take off safely.
AMLO promised that the Mexican economy would grow at an annual rate of 4 percent. In 2019, for the first time since the global crisis of 2008, it recorded negative growth, of 0.1 percent. Things have gotten worse. The peso has fallen 20 percent since January. In the first quarter of 2020, economic growth has fallen by 2.4 percent; according to JPMorgan, Moody’s, and Bank of America, it is expected to fall between 7 and 8.4 percent for the year. Meanwhile, in 2020 Mexico has lost half a million jobs (without taking into account the informal economy). According to CONEVAL, a national council that evaluates the impact of social policy, some nine million Mexicans will fall into poverty.
The main reason for the economic stagnation was apparent even before the pandemic: private investment, which contributes some 90 percent of the total investment, had practically ground to a halt. It was and remains a problem of trust, rooted, at least partially, in the illiberal nature of the Fourth Transformation. In one year, the president had managed to achieve an unprecedented concentration of power, not only restricting free expression but gaining the subservience of the National Congress (where Morena and its allies have a majority in both chambers) as well as many state legislatures, municipal presidents, and governors (who depend on federal funds for some 80 percent of their budgets). Among the main autonomous institutions, AMLO controls the National Commission of Human Rights and the Energy Regulatory Commission, whose chairman resigned, pointing to “incompatible technical approaches and points of view.” The Central Bank (founded in 1925) is still autonomous and so is the National Electoral Institute, founded in 1990, which has operated professionally since its first real test in the 1997 elections and is resisting the pressure of AMLO, who has cut its budget, tried to discredit it in his mañaneras, and is able impede its normal functioning and to impose yes-men as counselors. It is doubtful that he could do the same in the Central Bank but less so in the Supreme Court, where he already has substantial support. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, AMLO’s abuses and concentration of power, as well as a punitive law that
equates tax evasion with organized crime, had a negative impact not only on big businesses but on hundreds of thousands of small businesses and nearly five million microbusinesses, because all have lost confidence. A significant portion of Mexico has modernized to the point that it understands the extent to which absolute presidential power represents a danger to freedom, a word that AMLO almost never mentions in his speeches, but whose fragility is a crucial factor in the climate of mistrust.
This situation was already worrying, but the pandemic has caused a serious breach between AMLO and the private sector. Instead of applying the fiscal and economic measures being undertaken now in the majority of countries to help companies and save jobs, AMLO ruled, “Let them go bankrupt.” In a recent mañanera, he declared that standard measures of economic growth like GDP are now useless: what matters is the spiritual well-being of the people.
There were 35,588 violent deaths in Mexico in 2019—a level of yearly violence not far from that in the decade of the Mexican Revolution. Before the pandemic, this was the greatest concern of Mexican families, who by the end of the 1990s had become accustomed to living in a reasonably peaceful country. That changed after 2000 as a result of a combination of factors— among them the sidelining of Colombian drug cartels by Mexican ones and the lifting of the ban on assault weapons in the US in 2004.4 Unlike the PRI governments that in the last decades of the twentieth century had enough power to negotiate with the cartels— getting them to limit their violence and their transport routes while also taking a good slice of their business—the governments of this century failed to confront the new circumstances. Vicente Fox irresponsibly did not consider it a priority. Calderón rashly launched a war on drugs that captured a few top drug lords but multiplied the number of criminal groups, which expanded their territory and their deadliness. Peña Nieto almost ignored the problem and gambled instead on a few major structural reforms in energy and education that AMLO quickly revoked.
López Obrador has said that his predecessors’ policies toward crime were tantamount to “swinging blindly at a wasps’ nest.” But the solution he put forward in his first year turned out to be ineffective at best. His slogan “abrazos, no balazos”—hugs, not gunshots— is a sort of unilateral pacifism. Finding their hands tied and confused at the government’s clemency toward criminals, the forces of law and order became demoralized, while criminal gangs and even common delinquents kidnapped, extorted, and murdered in the country’s streets with growing impunity.
Almost all crime remains unpunished. The widely publicized stories of the aborted capture in Culiacán of the son of Chapo Guzmán, the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, and the appalling murder of the LeBarón family (American citizens based in Chihuahua for generations) were terrible evidence that some regions of the country are under the rule of the narcotics trade.
4See my “Mexico at War,” The New York Review, September 27, 2012.
In late March, AMLO made a goodwill gesture toward Guzmán, who is serving a life sentence in an American prison. He traveled many hours to publicly greet Guzmán’s mother and had lunch with his entourage. Not surprisingly, the editors of the independent newspaper Reforma recently reported that the Sinaloa Cartel had sent them a recording in which it threatened to blow up the newspaper’s building if it doesn’t stop its defamation of AMLO.
AMLO ordered the dismantling of the Federal Police because he believed it was irremediably corrupt and absorbed it into a new National Guard, which has in turn been shamefully used to stop Central American migrants at the southern border and to keep them under control, in subhuman conditions, at the northern one. In an attempt to appease Trump, he turned Mexico into a de facto border wall. On immigration, AMLO swapped the humanitarian approach he once embraced for harsh enforcement, adopting deterrence and deportation methods favored by the White House. “Even if they’re from Mars, we will deport them,” said Francisco Garduño, his immigration czar, who had previously been in charge of the country’s federal prison system. Much to Trump’s delight, National Guard troops assembled on Mexico’s southern border, where they clashed with Central American migrants, deporting them in record numbers. In addition to serious negotiations with the US over arms trafficking and the decriminalization of certain drugs, the real way out of all these problems is the arduous, protracted building of a state governed by the rule of law. Although since 1824 Mexico has had constitutions not unlike that of the US, they have been largely ineffective. Justice in all its branches and functions has depended on executive power. The transition to multiparty democracy in 1997 began to alter this situation, and it was to be expected that any Mexican government would continue to improve judicial institutions: police, prisons, attorneys, judges, magistrates, ministers. AMLO brought this process to a halt and, in crucial ways, reversed it, with the result that crime is rampant: there were 2,492 homicides reported in April 2020, making it the third most violent month in contemporary history after March and June 2019, when the number surpassed 2,500. In the time of Covid19, AMLO has gone from “abrazos, no balazos” to the opposite. In his election campaigns, he often said that if it were up to him, he would dissolve the army. Now he has issued an unprecedented decree that gives the army nationwide control of security for the remaining years of his presidency.
At the beginning of 2020, 64 percent of Mexicans believed AMLO’s fight against corruption was succeeding. But this is doubtful. Corruption has to be fought through transparent institutions and an effective judicial system. To this end, in 2003 the National Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (INAI) was created to supply citizens with information about where public money in any sector has ended up. The INAI’s performance has been outstanding, and the media and social networks turned to it to uncover a number of cases of corruption by Peña Nieto and his collaborators that in the past would have gone unnoticed and unpunished.
Unfortunately, AMLO does not believe in the INAI. He has called it “a complete sham.” He has cut its funding and will soon be in a position to control it or eliminate it altogether. Now there is absolutely no transparency in the use of public money and, at the same time, the awarding of contracts to companies owned by the president’s friends and cronies is more frequent and open than during Peña Nieto’s presidency. Within AMLO’s tight circle, there are a number of prominent figures from the former PRI regime who have committed proven illegalities: electoral fraud, union fraud, defrauding the public purse. But presidential pardons have made them untouchable.
The illegitimate blending of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary into a single power that distorts the truth and appropriates history—is this not the most serious corruption? That is what Gabriel Zaid suggested in his 2019 book El poder corrompe (Power Corrupts), without a single mention of AMLO. In Zaid’s conception, “rather than being merely theft, irresponsibility, or injustice, corruption is a deception.” In the case of AMLO, the deception consists of making no distinction between his official position and his mystical incarnation:
Power corrupts the meaning of reality, and so it stunts reason. Corruption demeans the people who abuse what they represent, by the abuse itself, not by the ways they benefit from it. It demeans them even when they don’t benefit at all, when they perpetrate abuse “in order to save the institution”. . . which they thereby destroy. At the same time, corruption demeans those who are complicit, whether actively or passively, and all society, destroying meanings and symbols.
López Obrador has abused his position, and to that extent—like Trump and all “elected despots”—he has corrupted the institution of the presidency, as well as the meanings and symbols of democracy.
No leader in modern Mexican history accumulated as much power as López Obrador wields. There is no political force that can compete with him. The PRI is deservedly ruined because of its history of corruption, the PAN is lacking leadership, and the other opposition parties barely count. Before the pandemic, it seemed likely that AMLO’s party would sweep the midterm elections in July 2021 for a new Chamber of Deputies and fifteen governorships. That would have given them a significant advantage in the 2024 presidential elections, in which López Obrador would either have himself reelected directly (by changing the Constitution, which didn’t seem impossible) or via a surrogate—an unconditional ally or even a relative—as Putin did. In that case, Mexican democracy would not only have lost many unrecoverable years. It would have lost itself. Now that outcome seems less certain, since 59 percent of Mexicans disapprove of AMLO’s handling of the pandemic. If the opposition parties unite before the midterm elections, Morena could lose control of the House of Representatives and, barring the Venezuelan option of stealing the election or dissolving Congress, Mexican democracy would still survive the second part of AMLO’s term.
Mexico urgently needed change. It needed to end the shameful corruption among its political elites and to make a serious attempt to correct social inequality through economic growth and the distribution of cash without clientelism; it needed respect for the environment, a professional fight against crime, and a strong, independent judicial system. But the longed-for change has arrived only in the Orwellian realm of power and propaganda, not in reality. Months ago, before Covid-19, I thought that an apocalyptic scenario of economic and social crisis, a crisis of security and violence more serious than anything we had experienced, was still improbable. That scenario would further encourage migration to the United States, which no wall would be able to stop. With Covid-19, that nightmare seems near.
The task of rebuilding Mexico will be titanic. The hope is that civil society, which has been increasingly active, might produce new leaders who, allied with a coalition of parties, could win the presidential election in 2024 and form a government that will face up to the country’s enormous problems, new and old, honestly and responsibly, without messianic expectations, preserving democracy and freedom with the institutions of a state governed by the rule of law. Q —June 3, 2020; translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn