National dilemmas stay unsolved because people prefer moral posturing to resolution.
“What part of illegal don’t you understand?” signals righteousness; the flexibility needed for actually fixing the undocumented immigrant situation in the United States doesn’t.
Pro-war patriots wanted U.S. troops to stay in Vietnam so that tens of thousands of Americans would not have died in vain — thereby assuring that tens of thousands more would die in vain.
A more recent instance is Mexico’s intractable crime and violence, fed by the drug-trafficking organizations that co-govern the nation. Since Felipe Calderón pulled on his oversized army fatigues in 2006 and sent the military out against the narcos, the death toll has reached the hundreds of thousands. (I’ve given up trying to get consistent numbers, let alone clarification on who’s killing whom.)
All we have to show for it is a lot of corpses, an intimidated populace, depleted state government coffers, and an unhelpful attitude from across the northern border that sees average Mexicans not as victims of, but accomplices in, the crime wave.
A dozen years on, the drug war is an abject failure and everybody knows it. So one might think that a proposed new approach would at least be mulled over, if not embraced.
Fat chance.
A proposal in December by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the frontrunner in this year’s presidential election, calling for a national dialogue to “explore all possibilities, including decreeing an amnesty, while listening to the victims . . .,” succeeded mainly in unleashing the bluenoses with responses as predictable as they were disappointing.
The hysteria blew in from all directions. AMLO, his election opponents tell us, cares more about the perpetrators than the victims. His amnesty subverts the legal process, said José Antonio Meade. It’s “true insanity,” said Ricardo Anaya. “He’s proposing a country of impunity,” said Margarita Zavala.
To state the obvious, Meade (PRI) and Anaya (PAN) represent the parties that got us into this mess. Zavala (ex-PAN) is married to the man who started it (Calderón). “A country of impunity” is what we have now. As for “true insanity,” it’s been famously defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Two of the men leading the drug war, Navy Secretary Francisco Soberón and Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, dropped their apolitical masks to jump all over the amnesty idea. “There’s no way it can happen,” Soberón said, probably accurately. “It’s to be taken as an electoral ploy more than a real goal.”
That last jab is interesting, because the opposite is more likely true. One of the reasons the amnesty proposal isn’t gaining traction is because it comes from AMLO. The 40 percent or more of the electorate that despises the ground he stands on won’t support anything that comes out of his mouth.
A more legitimate problem is that the proposal was unveiled casually, and either floated in an intentionally vague guise or left simply half-baked. An idea as counterintuitive as pardoning some of the nastiest people on the planet needs explanation and context, not to mention some reassuring scenarios.
Without those things, you’re asking for negative emotional responses, such as the following from Javier Sicilia, the poet/activist who lost a son to the drug war:
“Tell us, Andrés Manuel, can you in good conscience ask us to forget the victims?”
He’s asking nothing of the kind, of course, and Sicilia surely knows that. What is being asked is to shift the primary goal from justice to peace. I have no idea whether amnesty will help achieve that. But I do know that it needs to be explored.
Just not with an election looming. The electorate will respond as Javier Sicilia has, not as a think tank would. That’s why Admiral Soberón's election ploy theory is wrong. The idea, worthwhile or not, will probably end up costing AMLO votes.
Hypocrisy is rewarded at the polls. Innovation is punished.
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