It Is PossibleIt Is Possible
My vision of the world, the system I propose for Mexico and the 21st century. Law, order, zero impunity.
In 1835 a thirty-year-old French aristocrat wrote a sentence about Mexico that no Mexican government has wanted to read.
He said the Mexicans copied almost the entire Constitution of the United States, yet in transferring the letter of the law they could not transfer the spirit that gives it life.
One hundred ninety-one years later Latin America tested the two great recipes of the twentieth century: the State that decides everything and the market that would resolve everything. Both failed, and for the same reason the Frenchman perceived in 1835.
This is not an essay on left and right. It concerns why we persist in arguing from the wrong map and what theory of development might deliver us from it.
Politics today is simulation. I propose effectiveness.
It is simple: I propose building the ecosystem in which the Mexican who works in the United States and in Europe functions, psychologically and materially, the same way in Mexico.
A powerful nationalism, built not on flags but on effectiveness, order and economic democracy.
Both prescriptions changed the owner of power, but neither returned it to the citizen. What both lacked is the same that Tocqueville found in the towns of New England: liberty practiced from below, in association, in the municipality, and under the law.
We continue to classify the world according to where a French deputy sat two hundred thirty-seven years ago.
In August 1789, in the French National Assembly, those who defended the king's veto sat to the right of the president. Those who wished to limit it sat to the left. No one was founding a political science. They were seeking a place to sit.
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama asked whether history had ended. He did not claim that events would cease. He claimed that liberal democracy joined to the market no longer faced a universal rival. History returned with China, with 2008, with the populisms. Yet part of his thesis remains: since 1991 no serious voice debates whether a market should exist. The debate concerns how much, for whom, and under what rules.
When the argument no longer concerns the system itself, the line that runs from left to right loses its spine. Protectionism, once a union banner, is now led by the American right. In Mexico a government that calls itself left handed customs, ports, and airports to the Army. Labels no longer predict what a government will do.
When a label no longer predicts conduct, it ceases to be a map and becomes a uniform.It serves to distinguish teams, not to understand the game.
To understand it one must return to someone who sat in neither of the two chairs.
In 1831 a young French magistrate traveled nine months through the United States to study its prisons. He returned with the most lucid book ever written on democracy.
Alexis de Tocqueville was neither of the left nor of the right. He was an aristocrat who understood, before anyone else, that equality was inevitable, and that the only question was whether it would arrive with liberty or without it.
In Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, sought why democracy functioned in that young country. He did not find it in the Constitution. He found it in three places that almost no one was looking: in citizens' associations, in the government of the people, and in customs.
And then he wrote, about us, this:
The inhabitants of Mexico, wishing to establish the federal system, took as their model and copied almost entirely the federal Constitution of the Anglo-Americans, their neighbors. But in transferring the letter of the law they could not at the same time transfer the spirit that gives it life.
There lies the diagnosis of two centuries. Mexico has changed its Constitution, its regime, and its economic model many times. What never changed is the method: importing the letter from above and expecting the spirit to appear on its own.
For Tocqueville the spirit is not in the paper. It resides in two habits learned through practice.
It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they place it within reach of the people, make them savor its peaceful use, and accustom them to avail themselves of it.
In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of this one.
Liberty is not something a government grants to a people. It is something a people practices, in its square, with its neighbors, under rules that all respect. That is the sentence that Latin America has gone two centuries without reading.
Tocqueville also saw the danger of democracy. He did not fear the tyrant in uniform. He feared something more comfortable, and harder to see.
Above them rises a immense and tutelary power, which takes it upon itself alone to secure their enjoyments and to watch over their fate. It is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. [...] It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them.
He called it soft despotism. And it is the best description that exists of what Latin America has lived under governments of opposing signs.
A power that distributes, that protects, that decides, and in exchange asks for only one thing: that the citizen cease to organize on his own account. That he not form associations that the State does not control. That he not govern his municipality. That he wait.
Tocqueville warned that this power ends by reducing a nation to "a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd". No repression is needed. Dependence suffices.
That is the key to reading the two failures that follow. They did not fail for being of the left or the right. They failed because both, each in its own way, built from above.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. In 2018, according to its own central bank, inflation was 130,060 percent.
Since 2015, nearly eight million Venezuelans have left their country, according to the United Nations platform that counts them. It is the largest exodus in the modern history of Latin America. More people than the entire population of Costa Rica, Panama or Uruguay.
Cuba has had sixty-seven years of revolution. In August 2026 it approved reforms to open the island to private investment, under pressure from Washington and with blackouts that are already part of the landscape. Nicaragua went from a revolution that promised democracy to a regime that canceled thousands of civil organizations.
Read those three cases through Tocqueville's eyes and the pattern appears on its own.
The three destroyed the same thing: the associations that the State did not control. Independent unions, business chambers, autonomous universities, free press, churches, civil organizations. Everything a citizen could do together with others without asking permission was absorbed by the party or prohibited.
Latin socialism did not fail because it sought equality. It failed because it sought it by eliminating the only school where peoples learn to be free. When the State occupies all the space, the citizen has only two options: obey or leave. Eight million chose to leave.
In 1989, the economist John Williamson summarized in ten measures what Washington recommended to Latin America: fiscal discipline, trade openness, privatizations, deregulation. It was called the Washington Consensus.
One must be fair, because justice is what distinguishes an essay from a pamphlet. Some things worked. The inflation stopped devouring salaries. The central banks gained autonomy; Mexico's has had it since 1994. Trade openness turned the country into an exporting power.
But the core failed. Mexico privatized Teléfonos de México in 1990 and what emerged was not a market, it was a private monopoly. In 2012, the OECD estimated that the lack of competition in telecommunications cost the country 129,200 million dollars between 2005 and 2009, almost two percent of the product each year. The company's consultants disputed that figure. No one disputed that the market was concentrated.
In 1995, after the December crisis, the Mexican economy fell more than six percent. In 2001, Argentina, star pupil of the Consensus, fell into the largest sovereign debt default of its time and froze the savings of its middle class.
Latin neoliberalism did not fail because it believed in the market. It failed because it privatized before building the rules that make a market competition and not capture.
Power passed from the hands of the State into those of a few, never traversing the citizen. A market without functioning tribunals, genuine competition or the rule of law is no free market. It is a market with a master.
Power concentrates in the State and in the party.
Power concentrates in the privatized monopolies.
Absorbs or prohibits independent associations.
Ignores them: the citizen is consumer, not associate.
The municipality obeys the center.
The municipality continues to obey the center.
The law submits to the project.
The law submits to the one who can pay lawyers.
Place the two columns together and what leaps to the eye are not the differences. It is what they have in common.
Both were designed in a capital by elites who knew what suited the people. Both transferred power without returning it to the square. Both left intact the centralism that Tocqueville had already identified as the original evil.
Latin America has no problem of left or right. It has a problem from the top down.
And that is the geometry that matters.
A theory of development for Latin America built from the principles of liberty. Not from the State that decides everything, nor from the market that would resolve everything. From the citizen who organizes under the law.
The thesis fits in one line: a country develops to the extent that its citizens can associate, own, compete and govern themselves locally under rules that also bind power.
It is no whim. It is the convergence of three traditions rarely read together: Tocqueville, who saw liberty in association and the municipality; Hernando de Soto, who showed in 2000 that the poor of Latin America possess assets but lack titles, dead capital they cannot use; and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Nobel laureates in Economics in 2024, who demonstrated that nations prosper when their institutions are inclusive and fail when they are extractive.
From this follow seven principles.
No development policy works where contracts are not honored and judges are for sale. A country first investment is not a train or a refinery. It is a court that functions, even against the powerful.
Where the cartel collects protection money, the merchant does not pay taxes to the State: he pays a fee to a private sovereign. That is not free market. It is feudalism. Economic liberty begins with peace.
Millions of Latin American families hold house, plot or business without title they can use as collateral. Formalizing their property is no subsidy. It grants them access to capital that is already theirs.
Municipalities endowed with real powers, independent revenue and accountability to their neighbors. The citizen learns to govern by governing what lies close at hand: his street, his water, his police.
Cooperatives, chambers, independent unions, foundations, neighborhood boards. Everything citizens accomplish together without seeking permission is development. Everything power distributes in exchange for loyalty is tutelage.
Economic liberty does not shield the powerful. It opens the door to the small. Real competition, independent regulators and punishment of monopolies, public or private.
An autonomous central bank, low inflation and open commerce. That was the finest achievement of the neoliberal period, and no serious theory should discard it.
Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate, published in 1999 Development and Freedom. He argued that freedom is at once the end and the means of development. Associated freedom begins there, yet shifts the ground on which it is sought.
Sen conceived freedom chiefly as capabilities that a state helps to enlarge: health, education, participation. That view is sound yet insufficient for Latin America, where the very state charged with expanding capabilities is the one that seizes them. Associated freedom stresses what citizens build among themselves, prior to and above what the state hands down.
Nor is it the third way of the nineties, which sought a midpoint between state and market along the same line. Here there is no midpoint because the line itself is different. Friedrich Hayek glimpsed this in 1960 when he wrote that the liberal stands not between the socialist and the conservative but at the third corner of a triangle. Associated freedom occupies that corner and supplies what Hayek lacked: the municipality and the association as the practical form of freedom.
The question is no longer how much state or how much market. It is how much power remains in the hands of the citizen organized under law.
The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio maintained in 1994 that the distinction endures because it rests on an attitude toward inequality. He is right that the tension is permanent. Yet associated freedom does not deny it: it relocates it. The equality that matters is equality of rules, of titles, and of access to association, and that is precisely the equality neither Latin American socialism nor neoliberalism ever built.
It is true and must be said. According to INEGI, poverty fell from 41.9 percent in 2018 to 29.6 percent in 2024. Yet academic analysis itself estimates that transfers account for roughly two and a half points of that decline; the rest came chiefly from labor income. In the same period the population without access to health services rose from 16.2 to 34.2 percent. The money arrived. The institutions did not.
Denmark and Sweden levy high taxes, yes. They do so on the most Tocquevillian foundation in the world: towering trust, municipalities with vast autonomy, dense associations and an impeccable rule of law. Their large state is the result of that foundation, not its cause. To copy the size without the foundation is to transfer the letter once more without the spirit.
Philosopher Chantal Mouffe warns that when politics becomes pure administration without adversaries, conflict migrates to the extremes. Associated freedom does not suppress conflict. It lowers conflict to the municipality and the association, where it can be processed among neighbors rather than left concentrated in a single presidential chair.
Are we condemned to speak forever of left and right?
We are condemned to possess some map. No political community can order its disagreements without an axis. Yet we are not condemned to this one.
The axis that runs from left to right forced us for two centuries to choose between the state that decides everything and the market that would resolve everything. Latin America chose both, one after the other, and both failed for the same reason: they were built from above.
The axis now emerging runs from top to bottom. On one side stand projects that concentrate power, whether in a party, a caudillo or a monopoly. On the other stand those that return power to the citizen organized under law.
That is what common sense, free markets and liberty mean when spoken in earnest. Not a slogan. A method: law that binds the powerful, property that can be used, municipality that governs itself, association that needs no permission and market that has no owner.
Tocqueville wrote it in 1835. Mexicans copied the letter of the law yet could not transmit the spirit.
The spirit is not copied. It is practiced.
And it begins in the square.
Thus far the diagnosis and the theory. This is what I propose for Mexico, and in good measure for the world.
My vision of politics rests on a strict order of law. Zero tolerance for impunity. Immediate consequences for corruption.
I start from a diagnosis that admits no euphemisms: beyond left and right, in too many territories of Mexico today drug trafficking rules. A captured State is not corrected by a change of party. It is corrected by changing the rules of the game and ensuring they bind the powerful as well.
That is why my proposal rests on two axes. The first restores the law. The second clears the State from the path of those who wish to work, invest, and grow.
Impunity is not defeated by speeches or shortcuts. It is defeated by institutions other countries have tested and proven effective against elites once thought untouchable.
International investigators, backed by the United Nations, working alongside the national prosecutor's office with real powers. In Guatemala that commission secured the resignation and prosecution of a sitting president in 2015. Mexico needs an arbiter that crime cannot buy.
Individual review of the assets, connections, and capacity of each judge and each prosecutor, under international oversight. In Albania hundreds were removed or resigned. This is the lawful way to secure, in short order, a judiciary worthy of trust.
In 1990 a student movement advanced the so-called seventh ballot, which produced the Constituent Assembly of 1991. A new national pact, yes, yet one born at the ballot box so that no one may question its legitimacy.
Chambers dedicated to organized crime and corruption, with short and mandatory deadlines. Slow justice is impunity by another name. Justice without guarantees is vengeance. I demand the speed of the former and the solidity of a process that no one can nullify.
Assets acquired with illicit money pass to the State, with agile and transparent procedures. The narco-politician fears prison less than losing his fortune. I will strike at both.
Full cooperation with the United States and with any jurisdiction that pursues those who laundered money, protected a cartel, or betrayed their country. Immunity cannot remain a border.
Restoring the law is the condition. Development is carried out by citizens. The State I propose is small, operational, and demanding of itself. Not the false austerity that cuts hospitals to fund whimsical projects, but a State sized to what it truly must do.
Each agency justified by measurable results. Fewer offices, more service. Savings are not presumed: they are measured.
The State forges the continent's finest fiscal and economic incentives, then steps aside. Legal certainty, swift permits, and rules that endure beyond each six-year term.
Dismantle public and private monopolies through genuine competition, and deregulate markets that today shield only the entrenched insiders.
A social policy judged by what it builds, not by what it distributes. Accessible housing through private credit at the best interest rates, so every family gains an asset rather than a dependency.
Business credit for industrial and economic development, especially for the small and medium enterprises that today find no lender.
Executive arbitrations and effective alternative justice centers, so that a contract, a debt, or a neighborly dispute settles quickly and without corruption.
High-quality education designed together with business leaders, so every young person leaves school with a trade, a profession, or an enterprise in mind.
That is the difference between a strong State and an authoritarian State. The strong State also submits to the law.
Zero impunity and economic freedom are not two separate programs. They are the same program seen from two sides. Without law there is no market, only extortion. And without freedom to work and invest, the law becomes an end in itself that no one has reason to defend.
Tocqueville wrote that the letter of the law is not enough without the spirit that gives it life. This is my proposal to give Mexico both: a law that binds everyone, and a free people to build.
This is the Mexico I propose. And I believe, with adjustments suited to each locale, that it is also what a great part of the world requires.
Every week they ask me the same questions on social media, in interviews and on the street. These are my answers, without beating around the bush.
Neither one nor the other. That geometry was born in 1789 and no longer explains the world.
The line that matters today does not go from left to right. It goes from top to bottom: on one side, those who concentrate power; on the other, those who subject it to the law. I am on the side of the law, of order and of freedom. If that puts me on the right for some and in the center for others, I do not care. What matters is what a government does when a judge tells it no.
That we are all equal before the law. All. Without exception.
No one should be persecuted, discriminated against or attacked for who they love or how they live their private life. That is not up for discussion. A rule of law protects each person equally, and the private life of an adult is not the government's business.
But equality means equality. Rights belong to individuals, not to groups. No minority should be persecuted, and none should have privileges that the rest of the citizens do not have.
No. And vice versa, neither.
A gay has the same right to be a politician as a Catholic, an evangelical or a Jew. A believer has the same right to express his faith in the public square as any other citizen to express his convictions. A sexual minority cannot have more privileges than a religious majority, and a religious majority cannot impose its faith on anyone by law.
That is not half tolerance. It is the definition of a republic: the same rule for all.
They are not enemies. They are the two hands of the same body.
There is no worker without a company, nor a company without a worker. The old idea that one wins what the other loses is what has kept Latin America poor. Wages rise for real when productivity rises, and productivity rises when there is investment, credit, training and stable rules.
That is why I propose credit for those who want to start a business, education designed together with companies and swift justice so that a labor or commercial contract is resolved in weeks.A prosperous country is one where the worker of today can be the entrepreneur of tomorrow.
The middle class is the heart of a democracy. And no, it is not forbidden to be rich.
Tocqueville saw it in 1835: a free society rests on citizens with their own assets, who do not depend on government favor. The middle class is the one that pays taxes, the one that starts businesses, the one that educates its children so they do better. It is the one that populism always punishes, because it does not depend on it.
Being rich is not a crime.What must be forbidden is getting rich with power.Whoever creates wealth with work, talent and investment within the law deserves recognition. Whoever gets rich with a rigged contract, a protected monopoly or narco money deserves prison. That is the only line that matters.
Israel is not an empire. It is a small nation with the right to exist and to defend itself.
We are talking about a country with a territory approximately the size of the Mexican state of Hidalgo, surrounded since its founding by those who have openly proclaimed its destruction. Calling imperialism the defense of a small State against those who want to erase it from the map is inverting reality.
I defend Israel and its right to exist. And I defend its right to fight its enemies, as any nation that takes the lives of its citizens seriously would do.
Zionism is the right of Israel to exist and to fight its enemies. And a Palestinian State can exist, based on the recognition of Israel.
There is no contradiction. Peace does not start with the disappearance of one of the two. It starts when the Palestinians, and those who claim to speak for them, recognize that Israel exists and is going to continue existing.On that recognition a Palestinian State can be built. Without it, nothing can be built.
No. And to speak seriously one must examine the full numbers, not only those that suit.
First, the scale in Gaza, without gloss.According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, between October 2023 and August 2026, 73,389 people died, including 21,638 children. It is about 3.3 percent of the population that existed before the war, and around 2 percent of its children. That figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but no serious analysis denies that the majority of the dead were civilians. It is an enormous tragedy, and whoever minimizes it loses the argument before starting it.
| Israeli soldiers and security agents fallen since 1860Israel Ministry of Defense, 2026 | 25,650 |
| Israeli civilians killed in attacks since 1948Israel National Insurance Institute, 2026 | 4,587 |
| Killed on October 7, 2023, in a single day828 civilians, 36 of them children | 1,195 |
| Jews killed in the HolocaustOne third of all Jews in the world | 6,000,000 |
| Palestinians killed in the 1948 warHistorians' estimate | ~15,000 |
| Palestinians killed between 2008 and September 2023United Nations, OCHA | 6,407 |
| Dead in Gaza since October 2023Gaza Ministry of Health, as of August 2026 | 73,389 |
Second, the proportion.Genocide seeks to destroy a people, and in the genocides history recognizes that destruction was carried out against an enormous part of the group:
And there is a fact no critic mentions: in 1948 there were about 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs. Today there are nearly 15 million Palestinians in the world, and Gaza's population rose from about 300,000 to 2.2 million. Meanwhile, after 1948 about 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from the Arab countries where they had lived for centuries. A people subjected to genocide does not multiply by ten.
Third, what the numbers do not decide.It would be dishonest to stop there. In Srebrenica, in 1995, about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered, and two international courts declared it genocide.Genocide is not defined by the number of dead, but by the intent to destroy a people.That is why the accusation against Israel rests on statements by officials and on restrictions on humanitarian aid, and that is why it is the International Court of Justice that must decide. In January 2024 it ordered measures to prevent genocide, but it did not order the war stopped. The case remains open, with deadlines until 2029.
My answer, with all that in view: no. What the facts show is a brutal war against an organization that hides among civilians, begun by the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with a human cost that must be faced directly. They do not show intent to exterminate a people, and the scale does not resemble that of the genocides humanity already knows.Until there is a ruling, accusing genocide is a political position, not a legal fact.
I defend life. And precisely because I defend it, I accept abortion in three cases.
When the pregnancy is the product of rape. When there is a terminal illness. And when a woman, for whatever reason, does not want or cannot care for her child.
Forcing a rape victim to carry her attacker's child inside her is not defending life. And bringing into the world a child that no one will be able to care for is not either. Defending life is guaranteeing that every child who is born has someone to care for them.
That religion is one of the great schools of freedom, and that the State must be secular without being an enemy of faith.
Tocqueville wrote that in the United States religion, without ever mixing directly in government, should be considered the first of its political institutions. Because it forms consciences, creates community and teaches people to associate to help their neighbor without expecting anything from the government.
Churches, parishes, temples and synagogues are associations of free citizens. Many times they are where the State does not reach. The State must not impose any faith, nor persecute any. Separation between Church and State, yes. Hostility of the State against faith, never.
Take them to trial. Quickly, with evidence and without exceptions.
Specialized courts with short deadlines, asset forfeiture on every peso they stole and extradition without exceptions to wherever they are claimed. And all with due process, because a conviction that no one can overturn is worth more than ten that fall on appeal.
The narcopolitician does not fear rhetoric. He fears losing his fortune and a judge he cannot buy. That is what I propose to give him.
Essays, research and each microsite with its audio, before it reaches social media.