The most recent book by Héctor Aguilar Camín (HAC), The Germinal Dictatorship, is, as the author himself calls it, a “diary of the destruction of Mexican democracy.” It is made up of a selection of the daily column published by HAC in Milenio, covering from June 2018 to December 2024. HAC is one of the most acute and serious critics of political reality, and with this book he wanted to capture an account in the form of a “diary” of what was the demolition of many aspects carried out by the whim of a single man. The book follows a chronological order; Perhaps a thematic structure would have been more useful for easier location of the themes. However, reading the chronology drags us to the gradual evolution of the destruction. With HAC’s discipline of writing a daily column, surely in the next five or six years he will have enough material to make up a second volume.
HAC’s main thesis is found in the harsh title of the book: Mexico is a germinal dictatorship. Like many, he maintains that the 4T built little by little, between 2019 and 2024, a constitutional dictatorship, a legal autocracy. But that is just a transition, because as HAC mentions: “the dictatorship is not finished, it is in full gestation, it is a regime that is in germination.”
With barely a year in office, Sheinbaum is determined to encourage germination, with the rotten reform of the judicial system, the reform of the Amparo Law that will cancel a citizen protection instrument and the very worrying approval of the Single Identity Platform, whose main tool will be the biometric CURP. With this alleged law, the personal, banking and other relevant information of citizens will remain in the hands of a government entity with the false argument of “guaranteeing security.”
With the presence of organized crime so entrenched in the government and politicians, imagine how profitable it would be for those organizations to take over those databases. Unfortunately, citizens do not have the confidence to give their information to the government. The objective is the totalitarian control of the State over its citizens, as China and North Korea do, among others.
A wonderful book, as a complement to the one by HAC, is the one published last year by María Amparo Casar (MAC), The Points on the Is. Its subtitle is “the legacy of a government that lied, stole and betrayed.” It is an accurate account of how the 4T proceeded to destroy institutions, promote illegality and impunity, promote misinformation and incompetently manage economic policy. All of this, leading to the destruction of democracy as a legacy.
It is very useful that there are books like that of HAC and MAC to capture a useful record for posterity of how Mexico’s incipient democracy, its citizen rights, its ethical values, and how rampant corruption was eroding the ruling class. Above all, so that we do not forget that the germinal dictatorship is a deliberate, planned, well-calculated strategy by a group of autocrats whose last goal is the prosperity of Mexico. They are driven by a thirst for power and personal benefit.
