multi_regime_enjoyer

The New York Times December 26, 1991, front page. Source: National Security Archive, “The End of the Soviet Union 1991”

While I work on a new original posting that I believe readers will find fascinating, I’m sending out this important article I’ve adapted from my archives. Originally published in January 2009 at my old Blogspot blog, Invictus, and updated in 2021, the article concerns the holocaust that ensued from the overthrow of the Soviet state and its replacement by capitalist restorationists. Its reposting is important, I believe, as it concerns the truth behind the overthrow of the Soviet Union, and the terrible human cost that the West’s “liberal democratic” campaign against communism entailed. This is not emphasized in Western media, or even most alternative media, for reasons that seem to me obvious.

The defeat of the Soviet workers state was engineered from within the Soviet Communist Party bureaucracy itself, in league with or with covert support of U.S. intelligence services, the Pentagon and the State Department, all of which had conducted a concerted campaign aimed at undermining the Soviet state since the late 1940s. There is much that one can criticize about the leadership of the old Soviet Union, but this article was not written as an analysis of the dissolution of the USSR. It is about the cost of disassembling the socialist superstructure of the society and replacing it with capitalist market forces.

It is interesting to consider that one of the chief architects of capitalist restoration within the Soviet Union, Anatoly Chubais, was until 2022 one of Vladimir Putin’s advisors and government-appointed officials. Chubais fled to Israel after opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, itself a response to the ever-Westward press of U.S./NATO militarism.

A now-classic 1998 article by Janine R. Wedel at The Nation, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” described Chubais’s influence:

The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.

“Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development [HIID],” Wedel added.

Chubais, committed to “radical reform,” vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D….

The full article is very much worth reading, as it goes into great detail. It also describes the contributions of other important figures in this debacle, including Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs; “Yegor Gaidar, [Boris] Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform”; Clinton’s Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, Lawrence Summers (who was yet another Harvard professor); and “billionaire speculator George Soros,” among others.

“Anatoly Borisovich Chubais (born 1955) is a Russian politician” [translated from Russian] — Source: Council.gov.ru, 1917, CC BY 4.0, via Wikipedia

Wedel’s article began: “After seven years of economic ‘reform’ financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.”

The wealth was plundered. Socialism was destroyed. And the cost? Beyond anything experienced in any Western society this side of World War Two.

For this repost I have quietly fixed some broken links and corrected some small errors or typos. One broken link could not be fixed and necessitated a bit of discussion in this latest version of the article. A few other small edits have been made for readability’s sake, including the addition of subheads. I have added some commentary, including an interesting quote by Masha Gessen. I also tweaked the article’s conclusion, without hopefully doing too much damage to what I wrote in the original. The link to the 2009 article is at the beginning of this introduction.

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“The White House, the then-Russian Supreme Council building in Moscow, the capital of Russia, is seen just after it was set ablaze by tank shelling during the Moscow Riots.” — The “riots” were a civil conflict between those who opposed the dissolution of Soviet Communism and the new capitalist state run by Boris Yeltsin, backed by the United States and internal counter-revolutionary forces. The picture was taken on October 4, 1993, by “Bergmann at Japanese Wikipedia - Own work (original source on jawp: ja:File:ベールイドーム.jpg)” — Linked at Wikipedia.— CC BY 3.0

With Israel’s genocide in Gaza and murderous assault on Lebanon, perhaps the world has become so inured to mass death that the following story will merit little comment or outrage, even if the story did make the back pages of the New York Times some years ago. An important January 2009 Lancet study, "Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis," confirmed what has been known but little discussed in recent years: millions of people, mostly men of employment age, died as a result of the effects of the "shock therapy" transition from a collectivized to a privatized economy in Russia and other formerly "communist" states in East Europe.

According to the *Times *article, by 2007 "the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985." Back in 2001, a UNICEF study had already claimed 3.2 million unnecessary deaths due to capitalist restoration. The Lancet study, authored by David Stuckler, MPH, Lawrence King, PhD, and Martin McKee, MD, cited other figures, with up to "10 million missing men because of system change." As a result, adult mortality rates soared, up almost 13% in Russia, with much of the increase attributable to the mass unemployment that followed the collapse in state enterprises.

The study noted, "the Russian population lost nearly 5 years of life expectancy between 1991 and 1994." Other factors affecting the disastrous increase in the death rate included poor health care, rising HIV rates, higher alcoholism and drug addiction rates, as well as the effects of acute psychosocial stress, massive corruption, impoverishment, rising social inequalities, and social disorganization.

This was a disaster with an epic scope, yet it hardly ever factors into discussions of Russia in the mainstream press or academia. This kind of silence feels like something more than uncaring. It feels like a deliberate “forgetting.” Moreover, the guilt of the U.S. and its allies in helping bring about this tragedy is great, and sooner or later, there will be some kind of reckoning for it.

“People kept dying”

A 2014 New York Review of Books article by Masha Gessen captured the awful reality of post-Soviet Russia to a visitor who knew Russia from its communist past.

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t….

The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.

The effects of neo-liberal "shock therapy" on Russia and other East European countries (Russia being the hardest hit) were also felt by the children of the region. According to the UNICEF study noted above, tuberculosis rates rose by 50%; 150,000 children were added to the public care rolls (while overall population was dropping by millions); there were high levels of child malnutrition, and the number of children under age 5 fell by one-third. This was not just a jolt of "shock therapy," it was a social tsunami that devastated the region.

“Shock Therapy”

According to The Lancet, the more rapid the rate of privatization, the higher the death rate.

Radical free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed policy was called shock therapy, with three major elements: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause an irreversible shift to a market-based economy.... Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.

Of some interest is economist Jeffrey Sachs' own critique of the privatization programs and the changes he helped bring about with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As early as 1994, Sachs wrote defensively, “Contrary to recent commentary, ‘shock therapy’ did not fail in Russia. It was never tried.” From Sachs’ point of view, the necessary Western financial aid never arrived, which could have made the “shock therapy” some kind of success. Sachs seems to have not understood that it was the policy of the United States to truly strangle the former Soviet Union, in an effort to snuff out any embers of revolution or socialism that might remain. The goal was untrammeled exploitation of the vast riches of the Russian state. Sachs was the capitalist version of the “useful idiot.”

As the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of free-fall [as it seemed to me in 2009, when I was originally writing this], due to the unbridled policies of financial deregulation, and an evisceration of the tax base through so-called "trickle-down" economics with its massive tax cuts to the very rich, we should all ponder, with awe and great sadness, the final denouement of the Cold War, with its frenzy of capitalist restorationist policies in the old Soviet Union, and the tremendous human cost it involved.

It is also important in understanding where Russia is politically today, i.e., what were the social circumstances that produced the Putin regime. Ever since the contrived Georgia-South Ossetia conflict in 2008, it has appeared that the military-industrial complex of the U.S. is looking to find new "enemies," should the public taste for the "Global War on Terror" lessen, and fatigue increase over the crimes and disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [As we can see, subsequent to 2009, the U.S. developed its anti-Russia efforts into a full-scale proxy war over Ukraine.]

Perhaps most of all, the sheer horror of the loss of life, the human tragedy of the return of "democracy" (in its free enterprise garb) to the former Soviet Union, is what we need to ponder. The truth behind the privatization policies of economists like Harvard-educated Jeffrey Sachs — who according to his own website is now “the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor, the university’s highest academic rank” — has been hidden for years now behind glibly optimistic statements of economic progress in now-capitalist Russia.

Take for example this summary of a 1997 article in the Journal of Comparative Economics on "Bank privatization in post-communist Russia," [broken link] which is typical of the way the changes in Russia have been reported by the dominant social and educational Western elite:

The privatization of Zhilsotsbank of Russia demonstrates that the process of privatization can contribute to the eradication of the government's role in the corporate governance of banks. Incumbent bank managers obtained control rights over new private banks following Zhilsotsbank's decentralized privatization. The swift eradication of government from direct ownership of numerous banks, combined with broad licensing rules, has enabled the Russian banking industry to be over 75% private. Mosbusinessbank, a big commercial bank formed from 26 Zhilsotsbank branches, is one of the most profitable banks the old state banking system has produced.

Screenshot of a bank card for Mosbusinessbank. Source: Colnect.com

At least, that’s what the summary said back in 2009. Today, the link is broken (I’ve left it in for documentary purposes; sadly, there was no backup at Internet Archive.) But the abstract of the article is available online today and makes much the same point, with perhaps an embarrassed tip of the hat to something untoward (“instability”) in the post-communist Russian banking sector.

The rapid removal of government from direct ownership of many banks, in combination with liberal licensing policies, has created a Russian banking sector that is more than 75% private. The banking environment that has evolved has fostered innovation and increased efficiency, along with significant instability in the system.

In the original summary, there is not a word on the social cost of this increased profitability. It’s not clear what the published abstract means by “significant instability in the system.” The article is under paywall, and I don’t feel like paying to see what the authors mean by such instability. The point is, they are fans of private enterprise, and praise the "innovation and increased efficiency” that comes with capitalist control of the banking sector. I still detect no understanding of the massive social and human cost to all this.

World Historical Truths

In fact, the social disaster in Russia due to privatization and the restoration of capitalism in Russia is barely known or understood in the U.S., outside a sense that gangsterism was increased thereby. Indeed, Russian mafia types play an outsized role in the spy dramas of modern U.S. television.

The truth about world history since the end of World War II has largely been kept from the U.S. population, e.g. the recruitment of Nazi war criminals into U.S. government research programs, including the intelligence agencies; the mass murders in the 100,000s by U.S. allies in Korea (with U.S. connivance); the secret budget of U.S. intelligence agencies and the extent of the latter's covert actions around the globe; and the CIA's mind control project with its enlistment of top levels of social, medical and psychological personnel throughout the 1950s-1970s, and the secret medical experiments upon these programs involved.

My own work has in recent years concentrated on exposing the U.S. covert use of biological weapons during the Korean War, and the cover-up of that crime.

The level of trust in what the U.S. government says is very low right now, thanks to the crimes of recent administrations. The Biden administration was the inheritor of the policies of the Obama administration. The latter sent mixed messages about what it how it wished to handle the checkered past record of the United States.

On one hand, the Obama people promised an open government and transparency, even as they censored pictures of U.S. torture and refused to release the full Senate report on the CIA’s rendition and torture program. Openness is still the unreliable mantra of the Biden administration, and I assume would be the same for a Harris administration. Today, “openness” and “transparency” are considered by many to be code-words for government hypocrisy and lies.

For all his bluster about the “deep state,” Donald Trump did very little to enhance governmental transparency. For his part, Obama determined that his administration would “look forward” and not backwards when it came to former administration crimes.

As we consider the pressing need to hold the U.S. to account, no matter what administration is in power, we might reflect upon the famous words of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Shakespeare made essentially the same point hundreds of years earlier: "What’s past is prologue."

**Reflecting on the mass protests that recently shook Kenyan society from top to bottom, Joel Mukisa argues that we must go much further than a choiceless democracy to find answers. A systematic questioning of the underlining political and economic structures underpinning the choices on offer must be undertaken.  **

By Joel Mukisa

If you asked a think-tank team leader, a social sciences Professor at Nairobi University if they anticipated the scale and popularity of the protests that rocked East Africa’s economic powerhouse Kenya, only a few months ago many honest people would simply retort, NO! 

The protests that rather appeared spontaneous characterized mainly by a young generation of Kenyans known as Gen Z protesting the Finance Bill (an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy) that would introduce a cocktail of new taxes on essential and basic commodities. This comes on the heels of an economy recuperating from the COVID-19, Ukraine War, the decpreciation of the Kenyan shilling, massive unemployement, massive debt and a divisive election.

The protests were characterized by incidents of violence among the deaths, shootings by Kenya’s Police, deployment of the Armed Forces, looting, plunder and the most dramatic, setting the national parliament ablaze. This all came as a surprise especially to Africanists that have viewed or tounted Kenya as a radical break with what it stereotypically labelled African.

Kenya is characterized as democratically stable and having strong democratic institutions. So the force meted out by Kenya’s police or even such rabid dissent with a leader of William Ruto’s stature and credentials can seem to be confusing. These tribeless protests can not be understood under the banal templates of “ethnic madness.” This is why I argue we must understand this protest movement as merely examples of something broader than even the protestors were saying which is characteristic of contemporary social movements.

Nomeclature

It may sound bourgeoisbut before we begin to understand the systemic shifts and questions the protest generated, we should understand it by the name under which it moves. The protests begun under the #OccupyParliament. Which was symbolic of the need to take a sovereign democratic institution and its symbolic power into the hands of the majority. This was after and slightly before parliament debated and passed the Finance Bill.

Despite objections raised and wide mass distemper against the law, parliamentarians of the Kenya Kwanza (the main party of governement) hurriedly passed the law with amendments from the minority. Government claimed that it had listened and hence the amendments. The tone shifted with Gen Z clarifying that they wanted: “Reject Not Amend.” The Amendment signalled the state’s ability to offer more if push came to shove and many urged those protesting to up the ante, and their gamble paid when Kenya’s President William Ruto declined to ratify the impugned Bill sending it back to Parliament.

It is in this context of democracy’s  failure that #OcuppyParliament must be understood.

#OccupyParliament is not a fresh lexicon in the Antropocene. It first emerged in 2011 with the #OccupyWallStreet as a left-wing anarchist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics that had begun in Zuccotti Park, in New York City’s financial district, and lasted from September 17 to November 15, 2011.

How can we better situate #OcuppyParliament without reducing it to an analogous analysis but rather steeping it within both its national, regional and international histriocity.

We can glean from the foregoing that from the onset #OcuppyMovements are mobilized online, overcoming differences emanating from historical injuries such as race, tribe (in the African context) and class, gender (not so much) as bodies assemble on the streets to make the point that life is nolonger liveable.

These protests made known a hard truth that unity does not precede political praxis; it is produced through political struggle. They bypass established democratic institutions that they think are part of the mess. They are leaderless hence less prone to compromise and represent a shift in ways of political organization.

This spectre started in 1978 with the Soweto uprising that  changed the conventional understanding of struggle from armed to popular struggle. Ordinary people stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, armed guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, it continued to Tahrir square in Cairo in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign. Little wonder the protesters hope that for their mission to be complete, Ruto too, must resign and that’s why after him ceding to their demands and refusing to sign the law, they continued to protest insisting that he too resign under the hashtag #RutoMustGo.

The Metaphor

CNN journalist Larry Madowo interviewed two people who have been subject of humor and caricature. He asked them why they were on the streets. What particular  grievances they had against the state that perhaps prompted them to come to the streets? The  answers shifted from incoherent and incomphrensible to muffled and inarticulate hinting at a systemic problem from which the Finance Bill is the starting blocks through which mass hysteria could be immediately articulated. 

Kenya is part of what has been termed as the African crisis or African Tragedy. The foregoing are adjectives for endemic poverty, high unemployement rates, inflation, corruption, deterioting terms of trade, cronynism and debt dependence. These were in recent times compounded by the Corona Virus pandemic, a war in Ukraine, among an array of other international factors. In such a fix with a near financial crunch just pending, the Kenyan leadership was forced onto the IMF who imposed the usual straitjacket.

The IMF insists that the crises are budgetary, i.e, that government expendintures have excedded  revenues and the demand for foreign exchange outstripped supply. The short term antidote is to freeze wages, cut social programs and subsidies. Secondly, increase production from the supply side by transfering resources from the classes which have a tendency to consume to those that have a tendecy to invest. The recommendations at times include regressive tax regimes on the middle class. A middle class that  been vanishing since 2008 during the Kibaki administration. It’s the same middle class on whom the new taxes would be imposed – joined by their dependant subaltern kith and kin on the streets in protests that were reminiscent of the 20th  century bread riots that too, opposed IMF and World Bank Austerity.

Kenya’s path on this neo-liberal financing model must be one of the most ambitious on the continent and has been sustained across decades without proper scrutiny of its nefarious, cataclysmic implications such as the wide and dispropriate levels of inome inequality that has been an enabler in the reproduction of a political caste or aristocracy from which “alternatives” in the multi-party dispensations are to be chosen. The political economist Thandika Mkandwire refered to this as choiceless democracy given that it restricted sets of policy options available to African states, which find themselves strangled by a skewed international economic structure, the neoliberal economic and security demands of donors, and the pervasive presence of foreign NGOs and development agencies.

Therefore the inarticulate protesters referred to above speak against this context of an all powerful elite and under an ever contracted political landscape that benefits a few. The concrete example should be how the opposition had fielded amendments to this regressive bill in parliament that it later withdrew under the auspieces of a protest gaining momentum.

If the current state of democracy is limited in its scope to tackle the pervasive issues that bedevil us today and institutions of the global economy such as IMF and World Bank remain unfazed as we stand in the hot African sun to elect leaders, then democracy as it has been sold to us has failed.

So do we do as part of the  #OcuppyParliament movement? Do we continue reforming the political system to which this mess is greatly attributable.  As Zizek reminds us here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory and their bosses. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy –  say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control.

The democractic illusion may thus be the real impediment to real time transformation of the social relations of production and the start of a conversation on the politics of redistribution that has been supplanted by the discourse of recognition that has atomized emanicipatory struggles.

Ruto is not the problem, the problem is sytemic and Kenyans should use this moment as an opportunity to seach for a new mode of democracy that is emancipatory. To return to the start of this blogpost, the answer as to why no one could have predicted this kind of event is simple, it required imagination, a break with the past for which most social sciences are totally incapable.

A version of this blogpost appeared as ‘Kenya’s protests as metaphors’ on 17 July 2024 in The Independent (Uganda).

Joel Mukisa is a** radical researcher with interests in political economy, agrarian question, human rights, philosophy and psycho-analysis****.**

October 1, 2024 was a historic day for Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum became the first female president in the history of Mexico, a country politically dominated by men who have historically tried to display an archetypal image of rugged masculinity. But Sheinbaum’s election invites us to think about a series of factors that are not solely circumscribed to her gender.

First of all, we must consider that MORENA (“National Regeneration Movement”), just over a decade since it was founded, has managed to become a political party that demonstrates a great capacity to remain in power despite the great political wear and tear that a six-year term implies (in Mexico, presidential terms last six years). While this seems to be a common occurrence in the Mesoamerican country, if we take into account that the PRI governed for more than 70 consecutive years (albeit committing electoral fraud on several occasions) and PAN managed to win two consecutive elections with Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, MORENA’s reelection is significant if we consider the enormous campaign deployed by mainstream media against the progressive government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Fear campaigns predicted a national catastrophe that never happened, and somehow the majority of Mexicans opted instead to disregard the media machine and trust their reality on the ground. Sheinbaum’s cultivation of a strong public political communication strategy will be crucial to maintain this trend.

Indeed, it was already historic for a progressive or center-left candidate to have won the presidential elections in Mexico. But for this party to repeat the victory six years later is even more extraordinary. This shows the enormous popularity not only of AMLO but also of the political project he leads. Since his militancy in the PRD, AMLO has managed to unite a series of aspirations and desires of the most impoverished sectors of the country around his figure, but he has also managed to transcend his individual figure in favor of a political process that has been called “the Fourth Transformation” (4T). Even as president, Sheinbaum will have to continue demonstrating that she is the most capable heir in this path of collective institutional transformation.

Claudia Sheinbaum managed to establish herself as a political figure that was able to galvanize the support and trust of the majority of the Mexican people, as seen in the electoral results. There was indeed a large vote of confidence in favor of MORENA, and it is obvious that those who voted for Sheinbaum expect continuity in terms of the works and legal reforms undertaken by AMLO. But the current president has also demonstrated in her position as Head of Government of Mexico City, an enormous capacity for public management and administration of the institutions under her charge. Great expectations

For now, beyond the speculations of some political commentators, it remains to be seen if Sheinbaum will remain as the protégé of AMLO or if she will manage to become a more relevant political figure than her predecessor. What we can say is that expectations about her administration can be considered even higher than those that appeared at the beginning of AMLO’s administration. She will have to demonstrate, contrary to the opinions of the ideologues of the Mexican and Latin American right wing, if it is possible to sustain a social democratic project in the medium term in a developing country, and even more if such a project is beneficial for the great majorities, as well as for public finances.

As she stated in her address, one of the biggest unresolved debts that the Mexican state has with the people is with the victims of state crimes and paramilitary crimes, especially Ayotzinapa. The security situation and countering the power of narco trafficking groups in the country remains a huge challenge and one that is difficult to tackle and dangerous to ignore.

In addition, Sheinbaum will have to face an opposition that has learned better how to confront progressive administrations and their political communication mechanisms, as well as external enemies that will actively seek to make her government fail. To a large extent, this will be important to know which countries she approaches and which she distances herself from, as well as the capacity or inability of her government to dissociate itself from the great international powers that hegemonize international politics today.

It will also be seen if she will seek to radicalize the public policies of her predecessor, if she maintains the same tone, or if her government acquires a more demure and conciliatory drift with the large Mexican economic groups.

In any case, it will also depend on this whether MORENA’s second administration tilts a tinge closer to a progressivism that seeks to become part of the political establishment or whether it opts for breaking (to the extent of its possibilities) certain historical social relations that have allowed for the greatest inequality between rich and poor in Mexico’s history, the systematic oppression of Indigenous peoples, among other unfavorable socioeconomic indicators.

As always happens in politics, there is no crystal ball, and the future remains to be seen. Although in this first week, from the presidential office in Mexico, Sheinbaum has surely been wondering what to do first, with whom to negotiate, what forces she will have to face, and what may be her first obstacles. Yet, probably most importantly, how to plan, geopolitically speaking, a government in a world that is rapidly moving towards war, and in which Mexico, because of its economic and geopolitical importance, has much to say, especially because of the historical, migratory, economic and cultural relationship it has with the giant that is stirring to the north: the United States.