Lousy Deadbeat Copper

The film Sarafina!, starring Whoopi Goldberg, takes place in the South Africa of the Apartheid. Whoopi plays a teacher who attempts to instill a sense of dignity and a spirit of freedom in some children who suffer from an impenetrable climate of discrimination. Although this was a remote and distant place, radically different from ours in history and characteristics, I left the movie theater profoundly upset: I remember having thought that if Mexico had colors as in that African nation, we would have to recognize that our country is not very distinct.
In Mexico the main problem perhaps is not racial discrimination or flagrant racism, but it is indeed that of classism. Nothing exemplifies this better that the recent altercation that could be observed on YouTube (the ladies of Polanco) when one lady shrieked “shitty deadbeat cop” at a police officer. In addition to the insult to the personification (at least in theory) of the authority, the terms employed and the tone of these reveals a whole way of understanding the world.
The episode encapsulates, in exceedingly unequivocal fashion, several of the problems that bar Mexico from prospering: disdain for authority; impunity; classism in our society, and the nonexistence of a police service that is relevant to, competent for our reality and circumstance.
Without doubt, one of our great ills is that of classism. I have here two examples that illustrate this clearly. The hotel and restaurant industry in the U.S. employs hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Mexican migrants. Anyone who has observed the relationship between these Mexicans and their peers or bosses would attest to that the communication is respectful and conducted in the same terms as it is among Americans themselves. What’s interesting is how this changes when a Mexican arrives as a client of the establishment: the Mexican usually speaks to the Mexican worker in Spanish and in the familiar second-person “tú” mode of address, expecting that the migrant worker will answer him with the third-person “Usted”, the more formal pronoun. That is, the customer expects to be treated as somebody superior, i.e. as if he were in Mexico. Although the communication in the US is between peers, when we travel we carry along with us our cultural and classist-structured baggage and immediately reproduce it in another context.
I observed a more comical, but similarly revealing, case on one occasion on a beach abroad. A prominent Mexican businessman was enjoying the sun in a recliner when, suddenly, a severe electrical storm came up. Quickly, the police officer in charge of the place warned everyone who was swimming or sunbathing there to go to the adjacent building immediately. All the Americans ran without a peep. The Mexicans took it calmly but eventually did the proper thing. But the businessman refused to budge. The police officer approached him and, politely, asked him to get moving. Offended, the businessman responded in his best Harvard English: “me boss, you cat”. Of course, fortunately for the Mexican, the police officer understood absolutely nothing. However, the officer took him by the arm and without further ado, made him move. There was no doubt of the personification of authority. Nor was there any doubt of the nature of the expression of the businessman: they weren’t from the same class.
Contempt for authority is as old as, at least, the era of the Spanish Conquest. The old “I obey but I don’t comply” sums up our legacy, although, of course, this has nothing to do with the reality of an absolutely first-world police system in Spain. Raymundo Riva-Palacio says it best: “We despise the police. We aren’t afraid of them anymore, we challenge them. When that does not work, we bribe them. They are the weakest part of the institutions, the most fragile link in the chain of society, where their discredit is so great…”. And the mix could not be worse: incompetent police officers, with no proper instruction; a society that holds them in contempt and that recognizes no authority at all; and, to top it all off, a virtual caste system in which a police officer could never be acceptable because he is from an lower class. We’ve got to dance the dance with this situation because there’s no choice…
The old system worked because the vertical control structure kept the police and the society in separate compartments, while it managed crime according to a patrimonial criterion in which the sole relevant objective consisted of preserving the revolutionary mafia in power. This system died (something that took place, little by little, prior to the defeat of PRI in the presidency in 2000) because the society grew, it became more and more complex and diverse, to the point that central control became impossible, unsustainable. The opening, which materialized emblematically with the PRI defeat in the presidency, resolved, at least in part, the issue of electoral legitimacy, but left undefiled others of an institutional character that continue to haunt us. Regarding the question of classicism in our society, the opening opened a proverbial Pandora’s box.
The paradox is that, as the screaming ladies illustrate, those of the upper classes demand that the authority comply with its duty (presumably maintaining the social peace, impeding the existence of criminals, and protecting the citizenry) but mock those responsible for making these stick: the policemen on the corner (and how degrading it would be for them if their children were cops). Different from developed societies, in which there evidently is also economic inequality, in Mexico this manifests itself in the form of social inequality. The old system kept under wraps, or maintained in contention, our society’s classism. Now it has become irrepressible.
Public insecurity and violence counterpoises us directly in confrontation with inequality: if we are not willing to recognize the authority of a police officer or a soldier and if these assume that they are inferior due to ancestral cultural and social reasons, who will maintain the social peace? In other words: Why should a police officer protect the citizenry if they know that they are despised by it? At least hypothetically, it could be thought that many of the criminals who have joined organized crime do so because it liberates them from an ungrateful social structure that maintains them under the heel. It is easy to imagine a narco flaunting his also being a magnate, like those of the financial sector.
Reality has caught up with us one more time: because we have been incapable of transforming the economy and constructing a modern and stable political system, we continue living under the yoke of social inequality and classism that anchors us in a world that can’t give any more. Matthew Arnold, a XIX-century English poet, said that “a system founded on inequality is against nature and, in the long run, breaks down”. We are already there.