By Luis Manuel Arce Isaac
Chief Correspondent in Mexico
It’s an acknowledgment from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in calculating how the country fares in this area, which, despite having valuable natural resources that serve to soften the blow of high prices, is feeling the brunt.
Even though the peso, its national currency, is appreciating like no other in the world, foreign investment continues to rise, and with it employment, and remittances from its compatriots abroad are breaking records every year.
However, this rosy panorama turns purple in bodega and supermarkets when the Mexican goes in search of his tortilla, meat, egg or tomato and has to pay more money at the checkout today for the same quantity of products than yesterday. The stomach is the first to feel the negative effects of bloating.
It’s even worse in pharmacies and labs keep winning like they did in the Covid-19 phase when revenue soared like never before. The difference with the Super is that inflation becomes a deadly weapon on these.
And it is this daily sequence in the markets and pharmacies of a film whose beginning is not remembered and whose end does not appear that worried President López Obrador and prompted him to repeat his sermon for humanism or an appeal for human dignity to express.
“This is our challenge, inflation, although falling, but slowly, 7.91 in January and in the Concert of Nations, that is in comparison: Colombia, 13.3; Chile, March 12; Russia, 11.8; United Kingdom, 10.1; Germany, 8.7; Mexico, 7.9; United States, 6.4; France, 6.0; Canada, 5.9; Spain, 5.9; Brazil, 5.8”.
At that moment, the Mexican President unveiled an initiative that had already matured since his meeting in Campeche with the President of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
He joined those who see that the world is in a changing times and not in a time of change, that life itself gives globalization a significant twist, which is why he offers his partners in North America a sensible integration with the South proposed but was not heard, notably by the President of the United States, Joe Biden.
Aside from the pros and cons of this frustrated proposition and all the debate a supposed continental integration with the United States—unaccustomed to hegemonism and coercion—has sparked, the current inflation has its roots in a criminally unequal distribution of wealth .
There is an unprecedented concentration of capital in a few hands, which acts like a magnet on those most affected and unites them in the search for solutions.
Undeniable fact
It is an indisputable fact: given the greed of the centers of power who are using the current recessionary and systemic economic crisis revealed by the Covid-19 pandemic as a political weapon by exposing the bankruptcy of neoliberalism – and not by the war in Ukraine being a consequence, not a cause, Latin American and Caribbean integration becomes an imperative.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms the region has in its hands to achieve this have not worked in this sense:
Neither their own, like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System (SELA), nor those established in the United Nations, more foreign or flawed and venal, like those of the inter-American systems, especially the Organization of the American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
In this complicated and even contradictory context, this initiative by López Obrador to agree on wills is more openly known, initially to a small group of countries, but of important weight for the regional economic balance, some and political others, as a counterweight to the progressive ones Integrationists in the northern zone of the continent with the T-MEC.
It is important that Mexico is the promoter of what López Obrador called the anti-inflation plan of mutual aid for growth and economic-commercial exchanges with Latin American countries.
At the same time, even more so than Canada, it is a very important cog in the North’s tripartite free trade agreement, which is mistakenly considered the world’s largest trading center, but whose international influence is undeniable by no one.
As a hinge country between North and South America, Mexico can achieve a reciprocal insertion into the economically productive programs of both sides of the continent within the framework of a time change to which the United States cannot remain closed for a long time.
Acknowledging this results in the roots of their current Monroe Doctrine being removed from America for them.
The uncertain war in Ukraine, which, as always, is being waged by the United States as the main player outside its borders and from which its military industry benefits most, should become the latest expression of the regime of capital concentration and the dawn of the new that is already perges
It is also very important that due to the situation in a key country, López Obrador decided to make public his telephone conversations with his colleagues in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Cuba.
FOR AN ANTI-INFLATION SUMMIT IN LATIN AMERICA
And also that the Mexican President even gave tentative dates for a Latin American anti-inflation summit, like those historic meetings promoted by the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, in Havana on the foreign debt.
These meetings produced very good results, raising awareness of the origins and the great plunder of America that is still ongoing, with key players at the time including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
López Obrador published a video with excerpts from his conversations with Alberto Fernández, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Miguel Díaz-Canel and Gustavo Petro, in which he expressed his interest in inviting the rulers of Chile and Bolivia in this first phase.
It will start with a conference call on April 5, and perhaps in May the presidential summit will take place with the leaders in attendance and Mexico as the venue.
There is much to be done and ground has already been fertilized with Celac and other institutions, but it is also a politically good and humanly sound time to work together to try to put Latin America and the Caribbean in the right place in international trade.
It is a large market and a major producer, particularly of staple foods and commodities including lithium, oil and gas, and many strategic minerals.
In the video of the talks with the four presidents, López Obrador mentioned some of these products to indicate that one of the first steps towards coordination would be to improve intra-regional trade conditions.
As an example, he cited the elimination of tariff barriers on some products in order to reduce inflation, taking advantage of, for example, the fact that Brazil has significant poultry production; Argentina, meat; Colombia and Cuba, cement, besides, Mexico has a lot to offer.
The idea, very well received by those convened, is to start an exchange of views, “to unite and help each other and tackle the inflation problem,” explained López Obrador, since there are many opportunities for commercial economic exchanges.
This major and quasi-mandatory action, according to the projection, would begin with an immediate exchange already emerging between ministers of finance, trade and others in the economic sphere to advance the analyzes and proposals for the virtual meeting.
Then the face-to-face meeting will be conducted as an anti-inflation summit, which already has to be processed by the registries of the governments involved, and the whole process will have an additional but important element:
Invite producers, distributors, dealers, importers and exporters to join the project as well.
It remains to be seen how the United States will react after being detached from this initiative, preparing for media bombardment and even the intensification of waning hegemonism.
Parodying Publio Terencio Africano, with the thing that nothing human is alien to me, Washington would also be no stranger to Latin America’s attempt to break the chains.
This idea of integration and coordination can go beyond the urgent survival needs of Latin America and the Caribbean in the face of inflation exported from the centers of power.
It could become a more far-reaching strategy to embark fully on the path of irreversible changes and, as the poet Machado said, to walk the path.
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