The Incoherence Of Elite Policy

On Saturday, I asked in part whether elite environmental policies, which call for systematic reduction of agriculture due to climate change, will be applied to Ukraine once the current war is settled. In that case, Ukraine will have a dilemma. Historically it's faced reductionist threats from both east and west; Putin's current goal is to eliminate Ukraine as a national entity and, as a practial matter, to exterminate some proportion of its population. This is no different from Stalin's and Hitler's agendas. Will the agenda of the elitist West be little different, just driven in the name of environmentalism instead of nationalism?

Another question in a different part of the world suggests elite agendas are running up against legitimate national interests elsewhere. A trend that's been taking place since the 1990s has been the corporate integration of the Canadian, US, and Mexican rail network, which has been to the most direct advantage of Mexico and its poorer areas. Part of this has been a project of Mexican President López Obrador, the so-called "Mayan Train".

Environmentalists and defenders of the country's indigenous communities and archeological heritage have opposed the Mayan train project, claiming that the works in the Mayan jungle are detrimental to the forest balance in the Yucatan peninsula.

However, López Obrador has said, "These are public works, and we cannot accept that the interests of groups and factions be placed above the general interest, which corresponded to the neoliberalism era," noting that the Executive's decision to resume the works was made in defense of the national public interest.

Wikipedia characterizes López Obrador as "center-left, progressive, populist, and economic nationalist" and says, "Supporters have praised him for promoting institutional renewal after decades of high inequality and corruption, and for refocusing the country's neoliberal consensus towards improving the station of the working class." According to a 2020 CNN story,

If you're not a close follower of US-Mexico relations, you might be forgiven for assuming President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wouldn't get along.

. . . Trump said last month that López Obrador was "a really great guy," and López Obrador said he was going to Washington, DC, "to thank Trump for his support and solidarity." They still have plenty to disagree over, but there also seems to be a lot of common ground -- not the least of which could be their similar governing styles as two populists who've built political brands on a cult of personality.

The Mayan Train project is an indication of how, outside the conventional US political paradigm, a trend of populism is rising in opposition to leftist factions that have been hijacked by elitist interests. For instance,

On March 22, several Mexican artists and activists appeared in a video uploaded on social media asking the president to stop the construction of the line’s fifth stretch, which will run 121km from tourism hub Cancún to Tulum in Quintana Roo state.

Along with the video, the movement, dubbed Selvame del Tren, launched a petition via change.org that claims the project will have four major environmental impacts, namely deforestation, destruction of the region’s aquifers, the extinction of flora and fauna and over-urbanization.

López Obrador has gone so far as to accuse the opponwents of being US-funded.

In response, the president, who is known as AMLO, unleashed a campaign of his own to discredit what he calls “pseudo-environmentalists.”

Although this is not the first time the government is accused of violating environmental norms with the project, the feud has gathered national attention due to the parties involved – including well-known actors and artists.

Other controversies over Mayan ruins in neighboring Guatemala have raised the issue that as LIDAR surveys expose large numbers of previously undiscovered Mayan ruins and tourist development popularizes Mayan sites, the jungles will no longer be under the control of tight groups of US-based archaeologists, as well as global environmentalists who claim to have the interest of indigenous people in mind as well as threatened species:

The railway line threatens to cut through biosphere reserves of the Selva Maya, home of the jaguar, tapir and howler monkey. These species need large contiguous forest areas to be able to move, feed and reproduce, and the construction of a few tunnels and bridges will not be enough to allow the wildlife to migrate.

The indigenous Maya communities on Yucatan peninsula are also affected by the project and have spoken out against it.

“The Mayan Train has nothing to do with the indigenous Maya, nor does mass tourism benefit the Maya population. We don’t want to be a new Cancún or Riviera Maya, where international hotel chains, travel companies and restaurant chains are the only beneficiaries,” the communities wrote to Mexican President Lopez Obrador.

Here's the problem. How does prosperity not benefit people? At the moment, there's no shortage of Mexicans who aren't satisfied with their standard of living and see no reason not to take their chances migrating north to get prosperity if they can't find it in Mexico. At this stage, though, global elites on one hand see no reason to allow Mexico to bring prosperity to its poorest areas, while the solution they tacitly propose is to allow Mexicans to migrate north to the US without interference.

This isn't good for Mexico, which loses population in a diaspora, and it isn't good for the US, which struggles to integrate the new arrivals. Yet the elites have no coherent way of transitioning out of old-fashioned neoliberalism, a term that was briefly adopted in the US a few years ago to describe Hillary Clinton's politics, but which López Obrador is now using profitably in Mexico. My guess is that Ukraine will soon find itself up against this dilemma just as Mexico is now.