Building a Conservative Movement in Mexico
Building a Conservative Movement in Mexico
Two thought leaders on the Mexican right lay out their path to victory.
The American Conservative sat down with Humberto López and Alice Galván, founders of the Mexican conservative think tank Patria Unida, to talk about the challenges and opportunities facing the right in Mexico.
Let’s start by talking about Patria Unida. How was it founded and what is its purpose?
Humberto López: Well, first of all, we’re married. We celebrated six years of marriage last September. We met in law school. We both studied law, and at the time we met, I was fully committed to law. Alice, on the other hand, was fully committed to politics in Mexico. She’s part of the National Action Party (PAN). And for three years, when we were first married, she was the chief of staff for the vice president of the Senate in Mexico.
Alice Galván: I was very concerned about the future of Mexico, because in the Senate, I could see how [left-wing political party] Morena was destroying Mexico’s political and democratic institutions. But at the same time, I didn’t feel comfortable with PAN because they were mostly content with just managing decline, and sometimes they adopted woke ideology. So I was very disappointed with them.
Many times I returned home crying, and one of those times Humberto told me, “I understand what you are feeling, but crying is not going to change the country. If you are not comfortable there, let’s do something different.” So I said, “Okay, but let’s do it together.”
At that time, we didn’t have kids, but we thought, “What Mexico are we going to leave our kids when we have them?” We realized that on the left, they are training people, and indoctrinating people more than training them, in their ideas and worldview. But on the right, we had refused to do that. We were just training people to be the best lawyer or the best politician, but we had lost the whole human ideal. So we thought, “Okay, well, we found the problem… Let’s train the future leaders that Mexico will need.”
What would you consider to be the largest challenge in Mexican politics right now? Certainly the Mexican right doesn’t seem to be in a very good place at the moment.
AG: I think that there are three big issues in Mexico. The first one is that we are not living in a republic anymore, because today Morena controls the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. So, the first big step is that we need to rescue democracy in our country. The second one is insecurity. Organized crime is truly allied with Morena. So we need to fight that. And the third one, I think, is divided into the big issues, poverty and education, that go together. I think that these are the big issues that we’re facing in Mexico.
HL: Also, because of how Mexican politics is, we don’t have a party that represents the conservative movement as a whole. We have great and brave and amazing politicians, especially on the local level, but we don’t have this institution as a whole. They have not always been supported by PAN.
AG: Yeah, as a part of these big issues that we have, one is to make politicians and citizens commit to say “we are conservatives,” and not to be afraid of saying that and working to respect our principles.
You said that PAN doesn’t always do a good job of supporting conservatism. How would you evaluate the political prospects of conservatism on the party level there?
HL: I would say PAN are really comfortable where they are because, today, we have parties from the extreme left to the center, but there’s no one on the right. So PAN believes they have these captive voters that will always vote for them rather than any of the other options. So they are not concerned about appealing to conservatives, because they don’t think they have to.
AG: I think that it is important to say that PAN, on the national level, is extremely progressive, but at the local level, the mayor’s local deputies and city councillors, they really believe in the principles of defending family, God, freedom, and human dignity. In Chihuahua, for example, local deputy Carlos Olson, who was part of our training program, presented a bill to prohibit “inclusive language” in schools; it passed in one week.
HL: To illustrate, a few weeks ago, PAN did a big rebrand, and they promoted this slogan: Patria, familia, libertad—homeland, family, liberty. Everything was great. We were like, okay, they are going where we want them to go. Two days after that, the president of PAN went into an interview, and they asked him about the slogan. The interviewer said, “Well, that means that you are allying with the conservatives, even the ‘ultraconservatives,’” whatever that means. The president responds, “No, no, no, wait. When we say family, we also support men-men families and women-women families.” And we’re like, man, really, you had a good two days!
AG: So, really there are two parties. On the national level they are really lost; they are more woke than the woke. But at the local levels we have really honorable politicians that are working with conservative ideas, and that’s the future. So the hope that PAN actually has for conservatives is with these people who say, “It doesn’t matter what the president of the party says about family. We believe that family is between a man and woman, and we will work to promote that.”
So, how does the Mexican right proceed? Obviously there are problems with Morena, but among the Mexican populace, Morena is overwhelmingly the favorite party and has majority support. So, as far as moving forward politically, winning over the hearts of the Mexican public, where does the conservative movement in Mexico go from here?
HL: Good question. It’s not the easiest idea, but I will try to summarize 200 years, from the independence of Mexico when we became a country, and state the truth. And nobody will repeat this, but it’s the truth. We were not prepared to govern Mexico. We didn’t know what we wanted to do. And the proof of that is that we spent the next 60 years in a civil war. No one in Mexico is going to say there was a civil war, but when you have emperors, dictators, presidents, and you kill 24 of them and you send them to other countries, and only four of them end their constitutional period, that’s what it is.
After that, we had a dictatorship—one that the history books are also not going to call a dictatorship— the dictatorship of Benito Juarez, who persecuted the conservatives and the Catholic Church. After him, we had another dictatorship, under Porfirio Díaz. And after that, people representing the politicians, the businessmen, the military, and the unions in Mexico got together and said, “We have been dependent for 100 years, we have been at war for these last 100 years. We need to do something.” So they said, “Okay, let’s make a dictatorship, but an institutional dictatorship in which we can change the president, but the institution is still the same.” And that’s how the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] worked for the last century.
We only achieved real democracy in the year 2000, almost 180 years after our independence. And so, to your question, what is the next step for the conservative movement in Mexico? With this in mind, the reality is that Mexican civil society was not driven by a conservative movement or a liberal movement. Until 25 years ago, the objective was just to have real democracy. The movement in Mexico was, let’s take out PRI. Let’s make changes to the government. It was not an ideological movement.
Once we got democracy, we started having these kinds of movements, but specifically focused on two subjects—and they are major subjects, I’m in no way trying to say that they are not—but they focused only on abortion and family. There was almost no one trying to promote the conservative idea as a whole. That’s something that we now see in some parts is maybe starting to happen. Patria Unida is certainly trying to do that, trying to say, being a conservative is not just these two things. These are major things, these are pillars of our thinking, but also we need to see all these other ideas.
So where are we going? I think we’re starting here. We’re building a Mexican conservative idea. We’re not yet there, but that’s what we’re trying to do.
AG: I want to add that, after the Cristero War in Mexico, people began to believe that being a conservative or a Catholic or a Christian is only for your private life, and you don’t express that in public life. That’s the reason why we really don’t have a conservative idea at the political level. So, the first thing that we need to do in Mexico is to make people understand that you are the same person in public and in political life as in private life. If you are a conservative, you are a conservative in your house and outside your house.
HL: As an example, I’m always impressed that here in the U.S., you have this phrase, “In God we trust.” The President is sworn in on a Bible. If you did that in Mexico, a huge part of the political infrastructure in the country would be after your head. That’s something that, in Mexico, we are not yet ready for. And I’m not saying that you’re going to take out the principle of laicism in the state, but you should be able to be a Catholic, a Christian, in public life, and we’re not there.
We’ve talked about some of the challenges for Mexico generally and for the right. On a more positive note, what do you view as the biggest opportunities for the right in Mexico?
AG: Our biggest advantage is that this is common sense. We are talking about common sense and natural law. People want to be professionals, sure, and do whatever they decide to do. But they also want to have a family, have children, go outside, and feel comfortable saying “I’m Catholic.” They want freedom. And I think that’s a big opportunity. We are facing an authoritarian regime that is against freedom, and we have the opportunity to be the ones that respect the most valuable thing that we have, which is freedom.
HL: In the beginning, all these woke and progressive ideas, they sound really sweet—we’re defending women and whatever. But today, these ideas are showing themselves for what they are, and people are starting to say, okay, it is one thing to defend women, and it is another thing to kill babies. It is one thing to defend the ecosystem, and that’s amazing. And it’s another thing to say that people should die because you are destroying the rainforest. People are starting to see that, and they are waking up and saying, that’s not the truth.
And also, and this is something that we saw with our generation: They are starting to have families and kids. All these ideas from the progressives and the left seem fine when they are alone and they are rebels and they are the resistance, but now that they have a family and they see what they are doing to the kids, they say, “Okay, that’s not going to happen to my kids. I don’t want gender ideology for my kids.” So they are starting to push back on that. I think that’s a huge, huge opportunity that we have.
This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
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