No matter how much the President tries to look the other way, or attempts escapes forward – like the vaunted Plan Michoacán, an attempt to reappear the State in the region, made of poorly woven pieces and without the minimum institutional foundations to be anything more than a palliative -, and no matter how much the opposition does nothing but hyperventilate, the fact is inescapable: the Mexican State is breaking down. The traditional order, consolidated in the PRI era and then patched, half-reformed and subjected to carnage in the last seven years—when what was required was statesmanlike surgery—is falling apart.
The building of the modern Mexican State was built on the rubble of the viceroyalty, as this, in turn, had been built on the ruins of the Mexica order and other local societies with structures of population control. Its national institutionalization process began in the last third of the 19th century, but it was during the classic stage of the PRI that it reached its most solid and recognizable constructive phase.
Downtown Mexico City is a sensory representation of the institutional missteps of the Mexican State: a motley combination of Aztec vestiges, baroque buildings on the verge of collapsing, an eclectic cathedral—with Renaissance details, a baroque body, and neoclassical bell towers—located on the site that corresponds to the Church, north of the arid plateau of the Zócalo. It is surrounded by buildings disguised as tezontle, in a neo-baroque version of the national identity, within which a bureaucracy operates, supported by networks of loyalty and disciplined clienteles, who have governed by selling particular protections and negotiating disobedience. Behind, the precariously formal market coexists with openly gray commerce. Towards the north, the impenetrable domain of organized crime and the misery that appears on each semi-ruined wall. Fine Arts, on the other hand, functions as the balcony from which the elites appear, from time to time, whose domains begin in Reforma and extend to the west, in walled manors with their own private security.
Many facades barely conceal complete ruins. Some structures are braced; others, semi-sunken, cracked, inclined, although they still resist. There are majestic buildings left, but many more threaten to collapse or survive patched up, converted into areas of misery. Thus the Mexican State: an unequal superposition of institutions where malformations, dysfunctions, and the inability to contain violence or provide quality public services become more visible every day. It has not collapsed, but it works by inertia. Some of their organizations operate thanks to sedimented routines, even if they are deeply inefficient. Many others—particularly those in charge of security, justice, and legality—have lost functionality: amputated, overrun, inane. Meanwhile, competing organizations proliferate in the use of violence and rent capture. The economy has remained stagnant for more than four decades, and both the former president and the current president have chosen to demolish the few institutional developments that were just beginning to open spaces of effective legality, with the same arbitrariness and vision of the State that Trump showed when demolishing the West Wing of the White House.
The Mexican State has never been fully functional. He always provided services in a precarious manner. Even in health, where he managed to build a remarkable organization, the scope was always insufficient. The educational system has been a disaster for half a century; the infrastructure suffers decades of deterioration and backwardness; Formalization barely covers half of the economy. However, during the last three decades, spaces of certainty and legality have opened up. With the arrival of López Obrador, all that was canceled. He labeled him as neoliberal and proposed to reconcentrate power in an arbitrary Presidency. But that power remained in the hands of a mediocre administrator, clinging to a village vision of the country.
Today the threat of collapse is imminent. The economy has stagnated, investment is fleeing, the fiscal system—always precarious—is approaching budget drought, and violence continues its course, with a good part of local income captured by criminal organizations. Instead of stopping the collapse, the President insists on sorcerer’s apprentice experiments. The fiasco of the judicial election was not enough: now he is planning an electoral reform that would dismantle one of the few stable columns of the system. And it also proposes a ratification referendum that would coincide with the legislative and local elections of 2027.
Instead of pausing her counter-reformist imagination and working for governability—which requires broader agreements than those of her coalition—the President perseveres in a political project without clear direction. Not only does it further distance us from building an open social order, but it also threatens to drag down the economy, fifteenth in the world, although as a society we are closer to seventh place in human development.
In front, the opposition remains motionless, without reflexes or spine. Beyond lament for what was lost and empty criticism, it offers nothing. And when it does, it resonates with echoes of Bukele, of the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, of kill them hot. Nobody seems to understand that, if we want to avoid the total collapse of the State, we need a new founding pact based on a widespread commitment to legality. Throughout the 20th century, political elites knew how to build institutional agreements—in 1917, 1929, 1938, 1946, 1996—that implied distributive readjustments and expansion of consensus. On the other hand, today, when the country urgently requires a new, very broad, plural and robust arrangement, the President insists on imposing her model, against diversity and democratic counterweights.