But it wasn’t just choreography. Behind this ritual of acclamation there was also submission to the presidential will. There was no limit to whim. For six years, the president in Mexico was master and lord.
Ending all of this was part of the task of the transition in Mexico. The emerging democracy that culminated part of its task in 2000 was charged with desacralizing the presidential figure, an essential step for the consolidation of a culture of democratic freedom.
Many things can be said about the governments from 2000 to 2018, but one thing is clear: neither Fox, nor Calderón, nor Peña Nieto (despite their eminently PRI forms) received imperial treatment. That has changed with Andrés Manuel López Obrador. What we saw in the Zócalo yesterday is a painful regression that is not convenient for anyone. Nobody, of course, other than the man in the center of the stage, the one with the voice in the Zócalo Square, a symbolic place like no other.
