Classic political science would hardly come up with a classification that includes what I call a “sombrero party”, that is, a type of party that falls outside the conventional left-right canons, or the so-called nationalist or regionalist cleavages, which would imply that the aforementioned definition is more suited to investigative journalism than to a serious and rigorous political typology.
If we go back to the origin of political parties, what we will not find is that they were built from economic, labor, regional or religious interest groups. And while this world of party affiliation has expanded with new political identities, we also witness the surreptitious incursion of criminal groups into elections with their own candidates or those under their sphere of influence.
In Mexico, these criminal organizations exert a transversal influence on the party system and do so at the margins of party identities, generating a complex system of social and political relations that translate into sui generis forms of power that some authors generically call narcopolitics.
The Dictionary of the Spanish Language defines narcopolitics as: “Political activity in which institutions are strongly influenced by drug trafficking”. This influence evidently has its own routes of appropriation of the public sphere. Even until the nineties of the last century, there were indications that the so-called “drug lords” were at the service of political power. And an unwritten rule is that they shouldn’t get their hands on politics or against politicians.
In this century, the interests of politicians were increasing outside the former tutelage of the PRI, which was diluted with the alternation processes. In this way, they became real factors of power in the regions of the country where the cartels operated. So much so that the narcos became more and more interested in knowing who the candidates for elected office were and, above all, those who had possibilities.
And that’s how narcos interfered in the nomination of candidates according to their interests, which meant they had to “cleanse” political opponents in states, prefectures and districts. It went from the “palomeo” of candidates to the neutralization of certain candidacies, candidates were promoted in line with the violence in the campaigns and, in many cases, in the last federal and local electoral processes, those who did not submit to this subterranean directive were murdered.
In the last local elections of 2021, the “sombrero party” swept the Pacific coast states, which led to the resignation of a large number of candidates who were violated and the placement of more than a hundred party leaders and political operators.
With this type of “parallel campaign”, evidently the outcome of elections in many regions was predictable, as those who had to win won. And if a campaign instrument works at a low political cost, it is very likely that it will continue to be used where it has already been used and that it will expand to the rest of the territory. Let us also remember that from this chain of crimes that took place in 2021, in most cases there are no judicial results on which group committed them and, therefore, they are archived.
This means that if in Mexico we have an impunity rate of 95%, in the case of local political crimes it is around 100%, which represents a serious obstacle for our fragile democracy. And, in this context, it is not excessive to say that if the country does not manage to contain the situation, we will end up being a narcocracy.
However, President López Obrador insists that if his electoral reform initiative, already formally presented, is approved, we would live in an “authentic democracy.” But the absence of public funding that contemplates the initiative would not only compress the party system, but also open the door to the money coming from the factual powers.
The parties could stop being “entities of public interest” and probably become organizations with registration, but at the service of this singular individual. This would technically be the defeat of institutional politics.
I am in favor of the fact that the cost of elections has gone too far and that political consensus is needed to significantly reduce them. Unfortunately, this will not happen due to the scarce incentives of this supposed model of electoral democracy and because the opposition would never vote in its favor.
As sociologist Jorge Zepeda Patterson stated, this is an initiative conceived out of personal interest and not out of a vision of institutional construction. López Obrador, in this matter, is interested in leaving a record that he presented a proposal that was rejected by the opposition.
His narrative is marked by the symbols of the good homeland and by the permanent dispute with his real or fictitious enemies. For this reason, when he is confronted with the day-to-day problems with narcotics, massacres, femicides, violent deaths of young people and a great etc. built in his transforming story: neoliberalism in its most abstract expression and the owners of money in its most pedagogical manifestation. Abstraction as a rhetorical device.
And so, AMLO will seek to go all the way. It has on its side the clientele susceptible to its sovereignist messages, the patriotic and nationalist preaching of the 4T (Fourth Transformation). The rest can wait because organized crime “is also people” and “they are human beings”.
For this reason, the “sombrero party”, the organized crime party, with its regional expressions, acquires greater significance by being in the midst of nationalist preaching that in the long run will continue in its efforts to capture the institutions of the Mexican state. That’s why elections are more important than ever.
In short, the “sombrero party” or any other name given to it, with greater or lesser political value, expresses the Mexican reality. An increasingly worrying reality that is significantly weakening Mexican democracy.
