you
I am very I highly appreciate my friendship with José Woldenberg, from now on Pepe
, as many of his friends call him. I value it and cultivate it because I think that thanks to it, what he and his friends have is an empathy, as Adam Smith would say, superior to the simple and daily relationship that brings us all closer and further away without remedy.
I know his trajectory and along with many I am proud of what he has done. From his sensible and courageous forays into university unionism to the hopeful days aimed at expanding the avenues of our democracy that, as a plural and open system, was just emerging.
In the 1970s, apart from his open commitment to university unionism, which we saw as an efficient route to rebuild our community and defend it from the attacks unleashed by President Díaz Ordaz, he proudly marched alongside Don Rafael Galván and the electricians of the Democratic Tendency to give the social claim that was emerging a broader and more ambitious dimension that, together with Galván, several of us insisted on calling a national vision and rescue of the revolutionary State suffocated by its bureaucracies and distortions.
In the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, which we helped build in the heat of Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo’s presidential candidacy, Pepe was an outstanding leader and willful secretary of the press and social communication. We had to live and suffer the absurd, but criminal kidnapping of Arnoldo, which not a few of his co-religionists seemed better to forget, as one more anecdote from the history of his party, the Mexican Communist Party. Pepe was there, in the anguished meetings of the Political Commission of the PSUM, in the various meetings with the government officials responsible for the state attention to the kidnapping and with us, his companions of yesteryear and of that moment, who had created the Movimiento de Acción Popular to participate in the political reform that was barely taking off, but which had already led Arnaldo Córdova to see it as a political revolution
which, at that time, we did not quite appreciate.
Pepe experienced in his own flesh and soul the vileness of the so-called internal struggle and it was in the heat of these pettiness that he was deprived of what he undoubtedly deserved, a party candidacy for federal deputy. Then came the great PRI schism that led Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas to the FDN presidential candidacy, with which Cuauhtémoc and his comrades responded to the irrationality that had become the form of government.
Pepe, along with Pablo Pascual and Adolfo Sánchez Rebolledo, formed ranks in the PRD until abuses and frivolities from the groups that saw themselves as owners of the party and of the project of democracy that many of us cultivated, led him to leave it. He always in and left.
We then formed the Institute of Studies for the Democratic Transition (IETD), of which Pepe was its first president. From there we wanted to give way to discontent, but, above all, to the confusion and lack of vision that accompanied this enormous popular and political turnaround that demonstrated the urgency of processing a political change consistent with our desires and principles, but also and above all with what was demanded by a society affected by the economic crises and the carelessness and abuses of the State in its constitutional commitments.
Pepe’s was a memorable leadership of the IETD that landed in his appointment as citizen advisor in the first plural and autonomous IFE of the government. Later, he was taken to the presidency of the brand new institute where he had an exemplary performance that has earned the recognition of locals and strangers.
At the end of his tenure at the IFE, Pepe honored his principles and convictions and returned to the classrooms of his faculty, that of Political Science at UNAM, where today he works as a full-time research professor in the highest category of the Statute. and in charge of classes and seminars that are a privilege for the young people who enroll in them.
His journalistic and essay work is vast and well-known and recognized; in a mixture of electoral political sociology that collects his valuable career as a public servant and rigorous thinker of politics, democracy and society.
It is for this and much more that I cannot but regret that it has been in the pages of the daymy newspaper that bears his name thanks to a proposal from none other than Pepe, when we were discussing the name of the future newspaper, that a poor devil, now chanted by ancient followers, has unsuccessfully wanted to defame and defame Pepe and his trajectory.
What a shame, what a futility of those who for the sake of unreasonable loyalty have forgotten their values and aspirations. If they were still cultivating them, they would not have dared.
