La Jornada: Breath, sigh, delirium

This would have been my delivery final of the series that I called “The Rogue State”. Two circumstances, one personal and the other social, make me take a breath.

Óscar Levin Coppel was my best friend from university youth. Together we navigated the student movement of 1968. Three students were elected to the National Strike Council and confirmed in several subsequent assemblies: Valle The OwlSuárez, from the Trotskyist current, and me, from the Juan F. Noyola group. In the first weeks we decided that it was best for me to dedicate myself to consolidating our presence in the National School of Economics because we feared that both the members of the communist youth and a strong PRI current were going to unseat us. For that reason I proposed that Óscar Levin attend in my place, with the agreement of the school assembly, and he did so during the first weeks of the movement. Óscar and I had a lot of personal and political trust in each other. Months later, and before going to the rally called in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, we went to eat at a lunch shop. A completely fortuitous event –Óscar ordered a plate of beans– made us arrive late to Tlatelolco when the army surrounded the place and the shootings began. That’s why I wasn’t arrested. My friend and I spent several weeks hiding together in the homes of various university professors.

Several years later we converged again. He was in the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit as general director of credit, and I was as an advisor to a large group of ejidos endowed in 1976 in Sonora, which formed the Coalition of Ejidos. Óscar’s support was decisive for the coalition to form its own rural financing system and to undertake a vast program of more than 15,000 homes for ejidatarios.

Later, we found painful conditions for him in a private hospital: one of his children was seriously ill. We talked, hugged and remembered our youthful dreams. Oscar, Ossie, as we affectionately called him, has died, his memory has not. Hugs of solidarity to his wife and family.

Another dear friend, Federico Novelo – more or less from my own filming – told me recently that we did not have a future, but rather a past. Our past undoubtedly weighs, but we must also have nostalgia for the future.

The joy, the delirium. What if yes? Why not? Nobody can take away merits from the Mexican team as a whole. No one would dare deny the wonder that Mora or the scorer Quiñones gave us. The phrase that the best defense is the attack is valid, as long as you have a solid defense like with Johan Vásquez and César Montes. This is where Javier Aguirre comes in.

Precisely because I am not a big fan of soccer – and rather, I confess hesitantly, given the magnitude of what the national team has been achieving, my favorite sports are baseball and American football –, I appreciate a non-football angle in Aguirre that could be summarized in his phrase that he did not come to solve the country’s problems but to play. That is the type of leadership that is required: learning from mistakes, as Juan Villoro emphasizes well, and focusing on a central purpose, which in his case is to be a very good coach. His legacy and that of Rafa Márquez will be in the sporting field as captains of the best national team.

Maybe this is as far as we’ve come. Maybe not. Machiavelli said that virtue and fortune were needed; Kahneman concludes by pointing out that for great success you need more talent and much more luck. But, for now, who can take away what we danced?

In my next installment the series “The Rogue State” will culminate, remembering that the concept of rogue state It is a key term in international politics. A rogue state It is a country considered a threat to world peace and stability because it acts outside the international norms, treaties and laws that govern the behavior of the global community.