Politics: AMLO’s first post-election setback
Despite the initial blowback that greeted Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s vague musings during the campaign about how amnesty and forgiveness would play a role in trying to overcome the violence inflicted by criminal organizations, he proved reluctant to clear up the confusion about just how that process of forgiveness would play out, much less who might be eligible for amnesty. The problems caused by that lack of precision became apparent from the very first of the 41 “Listening Forums for the National Pacification and Reconciliation Roadmap” that the transition team is organizing.
These forums are a good idea to the extent that they allow members of the public, especially those whose lives have been impacted by the violence, to engage with future authorities. However, from the start they have been saddled with the structural problem of the incoming administration’s lack of clear concepts on which to base its “pacification” and “reconciliation” strategy, much less the institutional reconfiguration and organized-crime fighting strategies essential to any pacification strategy.
Amnesties are a mechanism that has been employed in many political transition processes in various parts of the world, and we can learn a lot from the experiences of other countries that have gone through such a process, even though not all those experiences apply to the current situation in Mexico. More troublingly, the future government has yet to clearly convey the purpose of offering such an amnesty and how it would be implemented, a lack of clarity that has been meet by outrage on the part of many victims.
And if the next government fails to expand the forums to include discussions of how best to reduce violence, as well as the crimes being committed against society (all manner of extortion, kidnappings, and theft) and the emergence of highly profitable criminal markets (such as illegally siphoning fuels from Pemex pipelines and storage facilities; human trafficking, and the trafficking of undocumented Central Americans seeking to enter the United States), López Obrador risks reaching his December 1 inauguration without a clear, comprehensive and pertinent public security policy. Even in the best of cases and with a clear plan, it will take at least a full six-year presidential term to tackle the most essential security-related matters.
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