“The ultraconservative US elite that governs that divided country” engages in “fierce belittling and devaluation of the Mexican,” warns Linares Zapata.

This article by Luis Linares Zapata originally appeared in the September 23, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

The incessant presidential call to defend one’s own independence and sovereign will does not falter, it heightens its urgency. It is renewed with growing passion and rhetorical force. No matter what kind of audience she finds herself before, the President, like her predecessor, insists on a similar or identical vision. Seven long years reviving words and concepts that had fallen into disuse and even into disdained oblivion. The urgency of making room for interests, purportedly more important, had cast them aside. That dignity, which is now being rescued, demands a preponderant place and effective presence. It refused to remain as something out of date or out of fashion. Sovereignty, like independence, followed it in an order of reference that relegated them to a slow, sad rearguard. The neoliberal model presented another sort of values. They were matters of efficiency, not of human vision. They were, during those cruel times, ideas that could not be monetized with the haste that efficiency posed and required.

With such a conservative approach, little by little the opportunity to nuance the horizon that humanity needed was lost. It was a direct trend toward dehumanization and toward the people’s meager dignity and anguish. It was, in truth, a global dominion that came to hold entire nations subjugated. Overcoming its mandates meant fighting against a crushing slab of multiple repercussions, each one more rigid and severe than the last. Overcoming such a widespread way of thinking and acting has not been an easy task, nor one without consequences. Each step in a different direction implies serious, growing costs. It meant, in the Mexican case, starting and continuing along a route riddled with confrontations and concomitant punishments that have not ceased. On the contrary, its oppositional capacity increases to the extent that it affects already well-consolidated and massive interests. The defenses that must be overcome have been tested and refined over time. The volume of interests they mobilize –above all media interests– is not, by any means, negligible. On the contrary, it is necessary to weigh them in all their magnitude and power. Opposing them in order to subdue them can be set down as a watchword.

In that struggle the dignity of each citizen is bound up, where, once socialized, it acquires its full and great value. An unworthy criticism still circulates that insists on pointing out how little significance such an ethereal value carries. From the current opposition, they brand as simple foolishness aspiring to an independence that turns out to be impossible and to a dignity that, as soon as it is formulated, disappears. Striving in that direction amounts to ignoring the capabilities of the opponent, both those of the country and individual ones.

That way of thinking and of moving to action of conservatism implies accepting continued dependence and disdain for personal worth. Such a critical argument, in these days of reconstructive efforts, is considered unacceptable. There is an imperative need to assist the individual, the people of conscious citizens, with a clear identity, extensive freedom and firm independence. There, in that way of guiding the collective spirit, lies the invaluable dignity.

Many of the attacks received from abroad, in particular from the ultraconservative US elite that governs that divided country, imply fierce belittling and devaluation of the Mexican. To be intolerant of such a vile and arrogant posture is to defend the present of the nation and respect for each person in particular, today and tomorrow. The ramifications of emphasizing what is our own are vast, they involve the citizen, the engine of the transformations underway. Whether it refers to the athlete or the migrant, the opponent, investor, businessperson, reader or simple studious citizen. Each and every one of the facets encompassed by the individual’s daily and professional performance carries that obligatory, indispensable appreciation.

Just a few years ago, a famous cartoonist asked who that people was. No one knew it, he was not the reference point, they replied, even with irate flair. A dramatic consequence of its belittlement by the local power itself of those times. For countless decades the concept of the people was only an ethereal word, without content. Without precise public policies directed at it. Only an empty discursive reference. Without benefits or attention, without the primordial dignity, dispossessed and subjected to misery and marginality, exclusion in growing numbers of millions.

Now, instead, it is necessary to work, arduously, so that to that concrete Mexican all the corresponding dignity is restored, with rights. To force their valuation and free will in a long-haul struggle, tied to development, culture and innovation. Threaded onto the hard and persistent daily effort of consciousness. With the meticulous and continued constructive work of the entire nation. To demand, in short, that each citizen of that heterogeneous people obtain the respect of being free and independent.

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