The United States in 2020—and Mexico in 1988

The mural decorating the bedroom wall in Mexico City featuring Che and Pancho.

As we bid farewell to 2020, a year overloaded with the ridiculous and the outrageous, full of comfortable lies and unacceptable truths, I find myself pondering death. Not so much the death of 350,000 who, we are told, succumbed to a plague unleashed from China, but the otherwise unheralded death of our dear Uncle Sam. 

Admittedly, the patient had been declining for some time. Since the 1960s, the elderly gentleman had ceased making the really hard decisions in his deliberative centers. In the early stages of his dementia, he devolved all of the truly difficult, unpopular, and detrimental decisions onto an unaccountable committee made up of black-robed trustees who cared not a whit for his best interests. 

More recently, Uncle Sam found that he could no longer manage his finances. Instead of making a budget and sticking to it, his dereliction had progressed to the point where he could only pay his bills by taking on more debt. Yet, despite his economic straits, his list of dependents, heirs and hangers-on grew longer. It seemed that every verminous bloodsucker on earth wished to attach itself to the old man as he fumbled confusedly with his checkbook.

Over the past twelve years, we have watched the pitiable old man's executive functions fail him. Foreign pathogens were introduced into his system which spread corruption throughout his central command pathways. One by one, he lost control of even his most vital organs.

During the past four years, the patient was placed on life support with little hope of survival. In private, his heirs gathered around him like vultures, anxiously awaiting his coming demise while upholding the public fiction that he was still perfectly healthy. They recorded the time of his death in secret: 2:00 AM on November 4, 2020. Some say that he died peacefully in his sleep. I, however, think that the old man was snuffed by his unscrupulous heirs while those meant to stand guard were bribed or drugged.

Rather than continue on with this somewhat maudlin metaphor, let us return to reality wherein we find that the American Republic has ceased to function as it was meant to. For how can a republic built on the bedrock of free elections of representatives by a free and virtuous people, continue on in a circumstance where that foundation has been drilled away by individual corruption and corporate vote fraud on an unimaginably galling scale? 

Blatant, widespread electoral fraud on the scale needed to overturn a national election, as we have witnessed in 2020, is the hallmark not of a free republic, but of a banana republic. We are presented with a situation where the the chosen candidate of the DC oligarchy (Uncle Sam's corrupt heirs mentioned above) said overtly before the election that they had, "put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." Some maintained that Mr. Biden's words have been taken out of context or that he simply misspoke. Personally, I think we witnessed in that instant the demon speaking through him, forcing his pride-addled brain to say the quiet part out loud, much like the way he had previously bragged about bribing Ukraine to stop investigating Burisma. 

Mr. Biden's stolen victory has wakened many Americans to the fact that the free republic represented in our traditional schooling is now largely a fiction, much as the Roman republic under Lucius Domitus Ahenobarbus, though maintaining the forms and offices, was a fiction. 

As of 2021, we must face the fact that we are not a shining city on a hill. We have no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We are Venezuela. We are Argentina. We are Mexico. 

I was in Mexico City when the PRI stole the Mexican presidential election in 1988. At that time, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Revolutionary Institutional Party) made up most of the Mexican federal government, having ruled Mexico for 59 uninterrupted years. By 1988, the PRI were entrenched, unaccountable and disconnected from the average Mexican—much like the the DC oligarchy is in the US. Hence, they were deeply unpopular with the people who nonetheless felt powerless to change things. Like the American oligarchs, the PRI controlled most of the institutions along with the broadcast media.

In the immediate aftermath of the election of 1988, there were mass protests. I distinctly remember lying in a bedroom decorated with murals of Pancho Villa and Che Guevara and hearing fireworks or gunfire go off outside in the early evening. One of my roommates said, somewhat nervously, "Let's hope they're not coming for the gringos."

Our Lord or Rambo? You decide. 

The people I was staying with were middle-class Mexican Catholics but with a distinct tilt toward the radical left. In their dining room was a picture of Jesus well-equipped with bandoleras. These folks insisted that there was clear evidence of fraud and were furious that the government had cheated them out of their victory. The official results had been withheld, with the Secretary of the Interior blaming the delay on a computer system failure. The opposition party candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, claimed that the computer failure was caused by a manipulation of the system used to count votes. It turned out that he was right.

Cardenas was kept out of the presidency, despite maintaining that he had won. In the end, the election was upheld by the PRI-dominated media and institutions, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI became president of Mexico. Three years later, all of the ballots from the 1988 election were burned. 

Then, in 2004, Miguel de la Madrid, Mexico's PRI president at the time of the 1988 election, admitted in his autobiography that, on the evening of the election, he received news that the PRI was going to lose. That same year, the New York Times published this article:

Ex-President in Mexico Casts New Light on Rigged 1988 Election. 

The article read in part as follows:

Initial results from areas around the capital showed that Salinas was losing badly to the opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. “I felt like a bucket of ice water had fallen on me,” de la Madrid recalled. “I became afraid that the results were similar across the country and that the PRI would lose the presidency.” 

Thus began the frantic staging of a fraudulent victory. In his writing of the event, the all-powerful former president chooses his words carefully and describes himself more like a supporting actor than the lead strategist. If he did anything wrong, it was on the advice of his staff, and for the stability of the nation. 

On election night 1988, de la Madrid said, the secretary of the interior advised him that the initial results were running heavily against the PRI. The public demanded returns, de la Madrid wrote. And rather than giving them, the government lied and said that the computer system tabulating the votes had crashed.

What was Mexico in 1988 is now America in 2020.

Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in the suburbs of Mexico City, 1988.

It should be recalled that Mexico under the PRI was described by leftist Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as "the perfect dictatorship."

"The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba, but Mexico, because it is a camouflaged dictatorship. It may not seem to be a dictatorship, but it has all of the characteristics of a dictatorship; the perpetuation, not of one person, but of an irremovable party, a party that allows sufficient space for criticism, provided such criticism serves to maintain the appearance of a democratic party, but which suppresses by all means, including the worst, whatever criticism may threaten its perpetuation in power." [Mario Vargas Llosa]

The United States enters 2021 as a one-party system under even deeper cover than Mexico in 1988. The Kabuki-style conflicts between Republicans and Democrats are merely part of the costume. If nothing else, the rigged election of this past November, which removed the outsider Trump and replaced him with the ultimate corrupt DC uniparty insider, with the consent and tacit support of both political parties, has helped the average American peek through the disguise.

It is worth remembering that the 1988 election was a watershed moment for Mexico and marked a period of sharp decline for the PRI which would ultimately lose the presidency to Vincente Fox in 2000. It remains to be seen if the 2020 elections will signal the ultimate downfall of the DC oligarchy, the renewal of the American Republic, and a general national recovery, or serve simply as a way-station on the road to terminal decay and decline.

A dim photo of the tilma of St. Juan Diego from 1988.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for the US and for Mexico.