Spit into the sky 2023/10/19 | Excelsior

Since the beginning of the current escalation of the conflict between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has established a personal position on the matter – which has fallen short of that expressed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – through phrases that do not exceed a dozen words each.

Some of them are the following: “We are supporters of peace”; “Mexico is against wars”; “The most important thing is that there is no loss of life”; “We don't want confrontation, we don't want violence”; “We must think about guaranteeing the right to life”; “That peace agreements be sought at the UN,” and “We do not want victims from wars.”

Obviously, it is not wrong to condemn war and wish for peace. No one who makes such an approach public can get into trouble. It is a common place, worthy of a beauty pageant.

Furthermore, it is much easier to propose peace when one comes from a place that suffers little from the ravages of violence, because the society in which one lives has built the conditions to live in peace. For this reason, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo. It would be a contradiction to do it in Cali, Cape Town, New Orleans or Zacatecas.

I don't know if the best place to talk about peace is Mexico. Judging only by the number of victims, it would be more logical for the prime minister of Israel and the president of the Palestinian Authority to express their desire that Mexico one day catch up, rather than for the Mexican president to wish the same for the nations of the Middle East.

And more people have been murdered in our country in the last five years than in a century of conflicts between Arabs and Israelis. According to data from the Jewish Virtual Library – compiled from sources such as the Palestinian Human Rights Monitor, the Wars of the World site and the British newspaper Guardian– In the conflicts between Arabs and Israelis that have existed since 1920, long before the founding of the State of Israel, 116,342 people (24,981 Israelis and 91,361 Arabs) have died due to the violence of the other side. During the government of the president Lopez Obrador As of October 12, 168,175 people have been victims of intentional murder (source: T-Research), without considering the missing who are probably not going to be found alive (about 44,000).

It is true, Mexico's population is much higher than that of the countries in the region (Israel has 9.2 million inhabitants; the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, 5.4 million; Lebanon, 5.1 million, and Syria, 23.2 million. The thing It is only matched if we add Egypt to the equation, as a country that fought the wars of 1967 and 1973). However, the period in which Mexico accumulated those 168 thousand murders is twenty times shorter than the period in which the Arab-Israeli conflict accumulated its 116 thousand victims.

With this reality, the call for peace in the Middle East that the Mexican President has been making runs the risk of those involved and observers asking him “what is Mexico doing to achieve peace and what results has its strategy given?” ”. The government may convince itself that it is on the right path, and it may try to deceive others, but the numbers do not lie: more than 80 people are still murdered in this country every day.

Not only that: although in the last 12 days we have seen terrible images coming from the Middle East – such as Israelis murdered after being mutilated and burned, and Palestinians crushed by the rubble of bombed buildings – we have not yet heard of situations in that the parties in conflict force their victims to murder each other, as happened two months ago in Lagos de Moreno.

With what is happening in Michoacán, Zacatecas, Chiapas, Guerrero, Jalisco and Guanajuato, among other states, Mexico cannot call for peace without launching a viscous and smelly spit into the sky.

Or in those places should the right to life not be guaranteed?