I present below a powerful, very well written essay from a Mexican blog (originally in Spanish) which addresses this view so beloved on the right, that the Civil Resistance in Mexico is, literally, crazy. I don't normally spend this much time translating if I didn't think it was worth it. It's one of the best political essays I've read in a long time.
From Bloque de Opinion, though it was first brought to my attention by
.
On the Reason and the Madness of the Civil Resistance
By Lucero Fragoso, on the Opinion Bloc blog (Spanish)
[quick translation by me, with best possible English vocabulary and punctuation I was able]
Saint Thomas Aquinas, revisiting a thesis of Aristotle, was the first to speak of civil resistance. This philosopher distinguished between two types of rights: those created by people organized in society (positive rights) and those inherent in all human beings, with which they are born independently of the legal structure ofthe community in which they live (natural rights).
One of the rights that Saint Thomas located in the category of natural rights is, precisely, that of opting for disobedience in certain circumstances. The premise of this theory, simple but resonant, is that no man is obligated to obey an unjust law. From this arises thus, almost immediately, another question, "How do we know," or, if you prefer, "who defines when a law is just or not?"
This question was resolved by distinct legal currents, particularly by the rationalist branch, which was founded in the consciences of the men of capacity to distinguish between the just and the unjust. It is precisely this faculty of conscientious objection which indicates, in the light of day, that in the electoral process which took place recently in Mexico there ocurred flagrant acts of injustice and inequity, where competent authority allowed (as if nothing had happened) a campaign of verbal lynching which was responsible -- it's necessary to indicate with complete clarity -- of the injury and hate fostered toward a wide sector of the population that now one sees worsened by classist and racist slogans, terms which, we once thought, had been already erased from the mentality of a great part of Mexican society and that merely were used to poke fun at our own selves.
It is not necessary to be a famous analyst to understand that Lopez Obrador, beginning years before he had launched his presidential candidacy, has been the target of diverse strategies which had as their goal to block, at all cost and superseding any other appearance, his becoming president of Mexico.
Neither is it necessary to be highly educated to note the rampant and illegal campaign by the Executive and power groups favoring one candidate.
Anyone who cannot see this greatly obvious thing -- which fell to even including such gross proceedings as the defining of AMLO [Lopez Obrador's nickname] as a "threat to Mexico," and to affirm, with no evidence be it logical or empirical, that he would plunge the nation in debt -- cannot see it because either he or she does not live in Mexico, or, simply, because he or she does not wish to see it.
It is this capacity of reasoning and conscientious discernment which allows us to differentiate between a democratic political competition and another where one was punctured by fear and savage insult in order to surge ahead in the polls, taking advantage of the innocence and the lack of knowledge of the citizenry.
Therefore it is just not a plausible argument that whosoever supports the civil resistance follows a leader in an irrational manner and in a near-hypnotic state; certainly it is the case that to articulate a movement it's necessary to have a leader, but beyond him, and even independently of him, the evident antidemocratic roots and tricks of this process are sufficient reason not to remain with one's arms crossed.
To those who define the Lopez Obrador movement in terms of an amorphous mass who praises the leader we would have to ask: Was the campaign of the right wing candidate based in convincing the people to support the governing program of the PAN? Was this campaign led by individuals who could be considered deep thinkers and with the ability to reason? Let's be honest, the campaign of fear was pointedly designed to play upon the most base and darkest fears within the human condition, a door into the unconscious where there is able to survive no longer either dignity or clarity of thought. Is it this, then, that we are to understand as rational?
One is able to disagree with a political project, with a party or a candidate, but it takes awfully cold blood and very little creativity to convince oneself (without even an ounce of shame) to defame the environment with a black campaign.
At risk we convince ourselves as well to make use of reason and of knowledge of political programs ofthe Mexican left to understand that, in contrast to the alarmist and exaggerated expressions of some opinionators and of the spokesmen of the right, AMLO's program is not even remotely close to a socialist one or to a dictatorial regime.
One is dealing simply with demands for social responsibility from the most powerful economic groups and of political elites, of turning to face the least favored sectors and with demands for a democracy with conditions of certainty and plurality. Is that so much to ask? Is this tremendously revolutionary, exasperating, the behavior of a lunatic to be moved by these principles, which are characterized as indispensable for a democratic society and of developed nations?
Legaloid rhetorics -- which fight for blind and ferocious compliance to a legality employed at convenience, beyond all reason and common sense -- can lead to nothing more than a low intensity totalitarianism. Only in these regimes could there persist an unquestionable legal structure, because in the face of its insufficiencies and weaknesses no one can raise their voice. Only in such a place could there exist an impeccable "institutionality", for no one is authorized to dissent.
The normal and great thing about democracy is, precisely, the constant and dynamic transformations of its institutions. These institutions, those "which have cost us so much to construct," are much more useful and functional, and less inclined to decadence, when they stop being untouchable and quasi-sacred entities. It is both normal and desirable that institutions, despite their petrified name, remain open to their own constant renovation.
Far from the conservative discourse of these times, the much proclaimed stability is only a fiction within a pluralist society; it is even a principle contrary to life itself. For whatever body, social or human, applies the maxim that immobility -- stability, in other words -- takes it toward paralysis and its fall to pieces sooner or later.
So why are we surprised and scandalized by the existence of a social movement that manifests itself in a legitimate form if what we had been seeking for with "the change" was, precisely, space in the political spectrum where was made felt the diversity of voices and proposals in favor of the making of a better country, as if we didn't know that it was just these crises that shape and advance every
society?
Why are we peturbed by the rerouted traffic and the closing of an avenue as a method of protest, and we are not scandalized by misery and by humiliating plunges in wages?
Why do we not see it as a pathology, which it is, the act of considering another human being as inferior and, alternately, it's often categorized as psychopathic those who make us see -- unlike we would wish -- that a nation with 50 million in poverty will never enter the First World nor will it have security and social peace?
Mexican history is full of these dangerous "lunatics" who are, paradoxically, years later idolized and taken as symbols of patriotism. One example will suffice: Francisco I. Madero, now the hero and martyr of democracy, was labeled a fanatic and insane by the Mexican political elite of his time, at the head of which one found the US Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson.
As is well put by a cartoon by Helguera y Hernandez in a national weekly publication, from the point of view of the official, conservative propaganda, this is our history: "Hidalgo and Morelos were renegades who sought to weaken our institutions, but the peaceful ones decapitated them and then went on to dislodge the humble miner-rebel Pipila who was blocking access to the Granaditas Corn Exchange." [Note: the point of this is that this brave strike by the miner helped bring down the royalists, leading to Mexican independence -- in reality, as opposed to conservative opposition to change and to the rabble depicted by the cartoon.]
What fortune that Mexico is able to count on, from time to time, some of these renegades, lunatics, and fanatics, those who have sufficient fortitude to withstand these insults without losing their principles.
It is easy and comfotable to use terms such as madness and schizophrenia to confront "the other;" it is easy because this does not require the giving of arguments and because people generally arrive at this point when they have no good arguments to give.
Thus it happens that only a left which doesn't flinch in the slightest in the face of electoral irregularities, to say the least, is that which must be rescued, the peaceful left, the left which one misses in these moments of convulsion.
In his criticisms of the excesses of juridical positivism, Ronald Dworkin proposes 'taking rights seriously,' and seeking in the interpretation of laws the principle of justice behind each norm. This criticism applies to the TEPJF magistrates' decision, whose sticking to the letter of a secondary law, walked right over the precepts of certainty and transparency present in the Constitution.
Said precepts, as Raul Carranca y Rivas never tires of saying, necessarily must be kept in mind to solve a political conflict such as this.
And when the rights inherent to human beings are ignored, then the citizens are able -- according to their consciences -- to resist in a peaceful manner an imposition [of a leader] perhaps favored by legal ink, but unjust nonetheless.
It could be that we don't like the installation of encampments over a major avenue but, what other way do we have to realize a right, a right so basic as certainty and transparency [in elections]? How can we make ourselves seen? Carlos Montemayor said that the only visible pressure, the only one whose operation one can watch, is that of the civil resistance in the streets.
There are other pressures being exercised over the Tribunal and that work in a veiled form, and the pressure of the most powerful economic groups is neither subject to accounting nor does it have a public face, but it exists.
I will conclude with a quote from the writing of Henry David Thoreau, "The Obligation of Civil Disobedience," written in 1847. This man refused to pay his taxes as a form of pressuring the US from invading Mexico. It is his words which I had in mind when writing the preceding reflections:
[Note: quoting here from Thoreau's original rather than re-translating back. "Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau, on Berkeley's Digital SunSITE.]
Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?--in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?