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n spectrum tours our country. It is the specter of the playwright Henrik Ibsen and that of his doctor Thomas Stockmann, the humanist scientist who in An enemy of the people (1882) he is defamed and stoned for revealing and defending the truth and eventually called an enemy of the people.
In this five-act play, the self-proclaimed “liberal press” appears as an ally of the interests that act against Dr. Stockmann. They want to silence him and defame him for the consequences that his discovery (that the waters of the municipal healing spa are actually a source of disease) entails: the closure of the spa, the main economic activity of his city. Thomas is stoned in a public assembly when he also denounces his other discovery, more radical and significant than the first: that, analogously to the spa, bourgeois social life rises above a putrid peat bog of lies.
The specters of Ibsen and Dr. Stockmann haunt the storm of lies that has spread in the contemporary “liberal press” against Dr. María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces, former head of the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt), now the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti). With rhetorical devices, the ventriloquists of the “liberal press” have attempted to establish the notion that during the administration led by Álvarez-Buylla Roces there was mismanagement or diversion of public resources for private purposes. The whole is “stoned” for the part: Elena Álvarez-Buylla as the leader of a project to establish in common sense the notion – fallacious – that if she deserves blemish, so does the project she led.
It is clear that this campaign has a strategic purpose: it is a blow to national sovereignty, through the attack on a project whose scientific policy revolved around the reconstruction and defense of scientific sovereignty, supporting in this way the reconstruction and defense of national sovereignty.
To the extent that the scientific-technical development of a nation defines the possibilities of social, economic, industrial and cultural development of a country, the scientific policy of a nation is a strategic front for the construction and defense of national sovereignty, or it can also be a strategic front for its destruction. Furthermore, other forms of sovereignty that are tributary to national sovereignty depend on scientific sovereignty.
In Mexico, scientific policy has tended to comply with the guidelines imposed by supranational bodies such as the United Nations and its agencies, the OECD or even by the NAFTA/T-MEC, either directly by the specific provisions of the treaties or indirectly as a consequence of them. Its strong influence resulted, during neoliberalism, in a very serious weakening of scientific sovereignty with the consequent impact on all fronts that depend on it.
Last six-year term (2018-2024), Conahcyt assumed the very necessary task of reconstruction and defense of scientific sovereignty, which had been long and irresponsibly abandoned. Its renewed scientific, humanist and sovereign policy promoted attention to the most pressing problems of our country through a series of actions, such as the creation of National Strategic Programs (Pronaces) aimed at ensuring that scientific activity had an impact on the solution of urgent national and regional, economic, social and environmental problems, problems all brutally exacerbated (if not caused) by the widespread criminal negligence of the authorities of previous administrations.
The General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation, approved in May 2023, consolidated this scientific policy, and in the report one year after its promulgation (https://bit.ly/48NWyTg) a redistribution of resources for research is confirmed, with the main criterion being the strengthening of national sovereignty and technological autonomy, prioritizing research to solve strategic and urgent problems of the country, as well as guaranteeing the human right to science, both in the enjoyment of its benefits and in participation in scientific activity.
The logic focused on the scientific and national sovereignty of Conahcyt also translated into a criticism and denunciation of the behaviors that had characterized neoliberal scientific policy, such as the distribution criteria of the public budget, which was concentrated on an elite of scientists and was intended to subsidize research by private companies. For example, through the mixed fund scheme, Conacyt financed transnational and national private companies such as PepsiCo, Kimberly Clark, Bosch, Bimbo and Lala (among others).
The redistributive policy, the punctual criticism and denunciation that the administration led by Álvarez-Buylla was making indigestible to those who saw themselves in a mirror that did not favor them and, as much or more, to the national and transnational private companies that stopped receiving public financing. They are the ones who now, dyspeptic, regurgitate poison analogous to that circulating in the basins of Mexican rivers due to environmental deregulation that for six years favored the accumulation of toxins that persist in the ecosystem and are amplified in the food chain.
The season is conducive to resurrecting the work of the humanist Henrik Ibsen. The admirable Norwegian, like his Dr. Stockmann and Dr. Álvarez-Buylla, defended passionately – and in his case, also artistically – the truth, as well as the possibility and duty of forming free human beings.
