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• • • There are four conditions for the realization of this program for economic reactivation. In discussing them, I go far beyond my brief. However, I prefer to be all too frank than not to be relentless enough. The first condition is that, following the example of Madero, YOU APPEAR BEFORE THE COUNTRY AS A MAN POSSESSED BY A SENSE OF MISSION AND BY A VISION. The commitment to rekindle economic growth, however powerful its social consequences in jobs and in the alleviation of suffering, is not enough to sustain such a presentation. However, the insistence on using the struggle against recession as an opportunity to change the way Mexico is organized, to bring opportunity and hope to millions of people, and to keep Mexico from sinking into the condition of a hapless protectorate of the United States, is more than enough. Such an appeal to the country suits many aspects of your temperament and of your beliefs. However, it is also incompatible with a desire to be universally liked by the rich and powerful, in and outside Mexico. Like every serious historical project, it conveys a message of defiance, demanding exemplary devotion and sacrifice from its individual proponents as well as from its collective agents. No man should embark on such a course of action without thinking a hundred times and looking deeply into himself. The second condition is that at the center of power YOU ESTABLISH A SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE THAT WORKS. The regime of "comisionados" plainly does not work. It represents the unwarranted importation into the work of the present Mexican administration of methods of business management ill suited to the circumstance. These methods originate in the reaction against a command-and-control style management style, and have proven effective across a broad range of situations. However, the two basic conditions for the appropriateness for such an approach are missing in your system of "comisionados." The first condition is some rough equivalence of power, authority, and resources between the coordinators and the coordinated. Whatever their personal qualities, the "comisionados" are doomed to be unconvincing leaders: they appear before their ministerial constituents as officious meddlers with less weight than those whom they would lead. The exclusion of the most powerful ministers from their purview only increases their misfortune. The second condition is a well defined, shared project. A business does not need one: its project is to make a profit. A government, however, that is without an agenda living in the minds of its officials, constantly renewed and advanced from the center of rule, becomes the plaything of circumstance and the victim of received ideas. You have a vision, and so do some of your collaborators. What I found, however, at the subministerial level was a "porfiriato" of management consultants, with no clear grasp of any central program and with a liking for an empty managerial proceduralism. Guided from the center, by you and by a cohesive core around you, they can do much. Left to their own devices, many of them might as well be working for Merrill Lynch, Alcoa or Arthur D. Little, and many probably have. If you are to execute anything like the program outlined here, you need to replace the "comisionado" regime with a clear system of central direction and supervision. It need not amount to simple command-and-control. It can be compatible with a substantial measure of delegation of power and decentralized teamwork. It does, however, require that a core group around you be committed to the same project, to the same dracononian set of priorities, arranged in the same ranking and sequence, and to working together to advance them in every department of your administration. Where you need to make a set of policies and arrangements take hold quickly, you should not hesitate to create special, parallel structures within the administration, free from some of the restraints, prejudices, and infirmities of the general bureaucracy. None of this can happen unless you make it happen, for it will resisted by many of those who must execute it, and it will be misunderstood by many of those who would benefit from it. The third condition is that YOU FIGHT TO ORGANIZE THE CONSTITUENCY FOR YOUR PROGRAM IN MEXICAN SOCIETY. Every serious and successful transformative project helps form and bring together the constituency that supports it and makes it endure. This proposal for economic reactivation, like the broader program we have discussed so often, has a constituency. You must help this constituency find itself and organize itself. It is the constituency of millions of Mexican who aspire to initiative, advancement, and self-improvement, to a modest prosperity and independence, to dignified, active petty-bourgeois status, whether in small business or as employees. They are far more numerous than the organized industrial working class or any other social base of the traditional left. They exist outside or among the decaying remains of the corporatist structure of the defeated regime. The central problem is that insofar as Mexico is organized today, it is organized around forms, like the traditional unions, that it has ceased to trust. Where Mexico is bursting with inconformity and vitality, it remains largely unorganized. The new organizations of civil society are still isolated social crystals floating in a sea of disordered frustration and ambition. To be their vehicle and agent, to give them a voice, to show them a way, must be your work. You need to speak to them, and help organize them, or, better yet, help them organize themselves, using the conflicts generated by the advancement of your program as triggers for this organizational effort. In this program of economic recovery and reconstruction, there is much to serve the role of such triggers: the development of networks of cooperative competition among small- and medium-sized firms, organization of social groups and of emergent businesses for the purpose of accessing credit and training, the association of actual or would-be home buyers under the mortgage programs, and the call for organized social participation in the framing and implementation of tax incentives and of National Development Vouchers. The fourth condition is TO ESTABLISH, ALONGSIDE THE PAN, A SECOND PARTY-POLITICAL BASE FOR YOUR ADMINISTRATION AND YOUR PROJECT. It is a task of the utmost delicacy, requiring for its successful execution a combination of subtlety and boldness, and the use of political complication for the sake of political direction. You should not and cannot force the PAN to become what it is not. It has already moved a long way toward you and your proposals. It can come to embrace with genuine conviction much of a project like the one I outline here. In this project, it may be repelled by the element of institutional innovation and policy heresy but attracted by the commitment to combine the popularization of the market with the practical defense of the little guy as well as with the deepening of Mexico's associational density. However, the PAN is simply not a sufficient partisan base. It will not gain the allegiance of many who would rise to the defense of the program for which I argue and to which, in its fundamentals, you have already committed yourself. The potential political supporters of such a program who will refuse to enter the PAN are spread among all the other parties. They can be found among the "modernizing" or "social-democratic" wing of the PRD, among the reform elements in the PRI. They include many young, politicized people who disbelieve in all the parties. The submerged "amigos de Fox - amigos de Mexico" represents yet another source of this same indispensable undertaking. Mexico does not need one more party claiming to be center-left and proposing to humanize the inevitable. What Mexico does need is a party committed to a practical program of gradual but cumulative institutional innovation. It needs a party that will help build a resource-rich and capacity-enhanced state that, sustained by a high level of organized domestic saving as well as by a high tax take, can work to empower the ordinary Mexican, to democratize the market and to energize democracy. A party able to use a new decentralized form of partnership between government and business, and between government and the organizations of civil society, to tread a rebellious path of national development. And determined to make this path compatible with monetary stability, fiscal realism, and openness -- psychological as well as economic -- to the world. Such a party would refuse to reproduce the institutional conservatism and the historical fatalism of European social democracy today. It would have the impatience and the boldness appropriate to a country that wants another beginning. You should neither betray the PAN nor acquiesce in its sufficiency. You must encourage and shape a controlled political dialectic that results, step by step, in the creation of another party alongside it. The PAN and this second party would then become the two political columns on which your project would rest. How to encourage some of your collaborators to work in such a direction while ensuring that both you and they evince a genius for dosage is a task I do not envy you but from which your responsibilities will not exempt you. As part of this task, you
must bring the PAN, little by little, to see the legitimacy of such a
construction, its value to the country, and even its utility to the PAN itself,
which must be free to pursue its own vocation as a force within your government
capable of disagreeing with other forces as well as of converging with them.
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