Jorge G. Castañeda, who was Vicente Fox’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, usually goes through life without filters. Sometimes what he writes and what he says takes the shape of a bullet and hits him in the foot; In others he can serve, roughly speaking, as a guide to what is thought and done in the political groups in which he operates. The self-confidence, however, does not completely expose him. He is a political animal who uses the press, the foreign press in particular, to position ideas. But he is not always transparent about what he is up to. Someone told me, for example, that he has been “our man in Washington” for the opposition, a lobbyist embedded in the United States pressure groups.
Anyone can review his latest texts and there they will find the guide to hitting Andrés Manuel López Obrador with what was announced by ProPublica and The New York Times; or you will find out how the Xóchitl team was convinced to pour all their blood into the grill for the 90 days of the campaign. Perhaps out of arrogance, always with arrogance and of course with large doses of irresponsibility, he usually makes recommendations such as “forget about the nonsense of the Electoral Law” (December 19, 2023, Nexos) or as in 2004, when he asked to stop AMLO regardless how: “I think you have to win the good way, the bad way and in every possible way.”
Just in that text from last December, Castañeda recommends that the opposition use the violence that is experienced in Mexico as an electoral tool, because “the gap between the opposition candidate and the official candidate is wide and remains.”
“The insecurity, the violence, the horror of everything that happens week after week throughout Mexico, constitutes a possibility in this regard,” he says, and then asks to “take advantage of each episode, each tragedy, each misfortune, to hammer home the same issue: “The status quo is a disaster, there is a proposal to change it.”
Last February 27, Castañeda outlined more clearly what we would see at the start of Xóchitl Gálvez’s campaign. He wrote: “The option to modify the status quo is not obvious. But one can imagine a couple of factors. The first consists of a Government disaster, from #NarcoPresidente to a disruptive event in terms of security, health, or finance. It seems unlikely, although not impossible. The second is more viable: a fierce negative campaign, of ripping and tearing, of skate and trumpet, in the mud, of one candidate against the other.” He then says: “If the opposition wants to get closer [a los números que trae la candidata de Morena], it is probably their only alternative, with a very personalized negative campaign against Sheinbaum. It would be logical, but for it to work, all of Xóchitl’s supports on his forehead must pull evenly.”
On Friday it became clear that Xóchitl Gálvez’s strategy will be to focus on blood. In 24 hours of last March 1 he starred in a gloomy march with candles and crying women; he promised a new high security prison (there are several in the country) for criminals; He spoke of a frontal war against violators of the Law and to crown his day, he signed in blood the commitment not to disappear the social programs promoted by López Obrador but that his party, National Action, did not want to endorse in Congress . And in the latter he was literal: he took blood from his finger, showed it to the public while it drained, and then stamped it on a document that, perhaps, I don’t know because I’m not a notary public, was invalidated on the spot. In the Italian mafia culture, plagued by betrayal, the capi or heads of criminal organizations often sign agreements in blood. They appeal to “superior” values like God or all the saints because their own don’t do a damn. Xóchitl’s message was that his word is not enough, but he took the risk because the campaign is based on blood. Blood-blood-blood. Blood, and fear.
Fear. Does the strategy of fear work for elections? Yes, if it helps, and there are many studies and trials about it. The strategy of fear has been a constant campaign by the right against López Obrador. We are societies subjugated by fear. We react immediately to risk; It moves us, we were indoctrinated to do so. Fear of being out of work; fear that foreigners or criminals will appropriate our property; fear of losing life; fear of losing freedom for violating laws that we don’t even know about. Fear has been used to control societies. Threats are invented to validate actions that benefit minorities, as happens with wars. The ultra-conservatives of the United States, for example, tend to feed fear to justify preventive wars and to act, in the name of internal security, against external forces that exist or are created: communism, terrorists, criminals, left-wing governments. , etc. And it is used electorally to build walls and militarize borders, as Donald Trump or Joe Biden do in the campaign. Blood and fear. That will be, as we already saw, Gálvez’s campaign.
Castañeda has been one of the main and most open promoters of the idea of using fear to move the polls, which disfavor Xóchitl, his candidate. And perhaps, from what he himself says, he is one of ProPublica’s hidden sources against López Obrador. Shortly after Tim Golden’s text came out, the former chancellor wrote: “In 2009 [seis años después de haber dejado la Cancillería], a senior official at the United States Embassy in Mexico confided in me that his Government knew that López Obrador’s sit-in had been partially financed by organized crime, but that they would not do or say anything about it” (About drug trafficking and Peje in 2006, February 2, 2024, Nexos). Just as Golden says. Castañeda writes in his text #Narcopresident? (February 9, 2024, Nexos): “It is perfectly possible that said investigation at some point will be reopened, or that additional information will be leaked by the DEA, due to its own reaction to what it considers the grievances of the Mexican Government.” Not for nothing is he one of the promoters of that hashtag against the President.
Two necessary considerations. The first is that Jorge G. Castañeda does not win elections, not even his own: he wanted to be a presidential candidate and his project foundered, resoundingly; and he was coordinator of the campaign of Ricardo Anaya, who obtained fewer votes in 2018 (12,610,120) than Josefina Vázquez Mota (12,732,630) six years earlier, when Felipe Calderón and the PAN movement blocked her to make way for Enrique Peña Nieto.
The second consideration is that the former chancellor is not the only one, within Gálvez’s war room, who was going to lean towards a campaign based on bloodshed. Maximiliano Cortázar was one of those who participated in the fear strategy of the 2006 elections and then operated Social Communication of the Presidency when Felipe Calderón’s war broke out; He knows about the subject. And many more. In fact, what is left over within the right are “specialists” in “security” issues who are not capable of generating public policies against violence, but are good at using it as a campaign resource.
I do not doubt that Max Cortázar advised Xóchitl to cut himself in public with a razor and show his bloody finger before signing; and surely he decided on the “ferocious negative campaign, of ripping and tearing, of skate and trumpet, in the mud”, based on fear, of which Jorge G. Castañeda writes. But I think that, as in his other “spectacular” actions, he is entering a gelatinous terrain from which it will not be easy for him to get out. Guanajuato has been governed for three decades by his party, the PAN; Mexico City has been in the hands of the left for 30 years, too. And it turns out that in recent years, the Mexican capital has become a center of attraction for millions of foreign vacationers, as violence indicators have decreased. Meanwhile, cities and towns in Guanajuato live (here they do) terrorized by criminals who no longer wait for night to kill, collect money or disappear.
What’s next for the right-wing candidate? Pay attention to Germán Martínez and offer that he is going to “guanajuatize” all of Mexico? Nobody rules it out. In his first speech he said that “all of Mexico is afraid,” that is, that all of Mexico is Guanajuato. But no, not all of Mexico is Guanajuato. Thank God. And thanks, also, to the fact that a good part of the population does not allow itself to be scared so easily because it has already known, firsthand, what “guanajuatizar” means; What happens when he listens to his fears and leans towards heavy-handed governments, with bullets and cancellation of rights; governments of terror like that of Felipe Calderón, who has taken over Xóchitl Gálvez’s campaign to countervail it with bloodshed and to, most likely, accompany it in defeat. But this time it will not just be an electoral defeat. It will also be an ethical and moral defeat: the defeat of the model of fear.
Alejandro Páez Varela
Journalist, writer. He is the author of the novels Corazón de Kaláshnikov (Alfaguara 2014, Planeta 2008), Música para Perros (Alfaguara 2013), El Reino de las Moscas (Alfaguara 2012) and Oriundo Laredo (Alfaguara 2017). He also wrote the story books No Includes Batteries (Cal y Arena 2009) and Paracaídas que no Abierto (2007). He wrote President in Waiting (Planeta 2011) and is co-author of other journalism books such as La Guerra por Juárez (Planeta, 2008), Los Suspirantes 2006 (Planeta 2005), Los Suspirantes 2012 (Planeta 2011), Los Amos de México (2007), Los Intocables (2008) and Los Suspirantes 2018 (Planeta 2017). He was deputy editorial director of El Universal, deputy director of Día Siete magazine and editor at Reforma and El Economista. He is currently general director of SinEmbargo.mx
