Aziz Nassif Closes Out and Sums Up the Year

Here is the finale to today's El Universal column: 

For Mexico, 2008 was a complicated and terrible year. Even compared to other countries, ours reached one of the highest figures of violent murders in the war against drug trafficking. It added up to more than 5,500 deaths. Unless 2009 is more violent, this year will take the record for recent decades. The insecurity, kidnappings, attacks have become the everyday climate to which Mexicans resist becoming too accustomed. 

Nevertheless, each day is worse than the previous (massacres in Creel, La Marquesa, Morelia, Chilpancingo). From that cloth are weaved heart-wrenching stories of innocent victims that we remember because they once again awoke the spirit of social protest with the demand of: "If you can't, quit." Known cases and hundreds of anonymous cases formed an avalanche that undressed a state penetrated by delinquency at the highest levels. That will be the lasting mark of 2008. 

Another event that captured attention was the Pemex reform, which showcased political postures, showed a level of debate that we can have about the important themes relating to the development of the country, and revealed spaces for negotiation, because despite living in a polarized climate, there were agreements. Nevertheless, it's possible that we remember more the taking of the Congress than the debates in the Senate. 

From 2008, we'll remember the images of the crash of the Learjet 45 in which the secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño, and the former anti-drug prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos died. From the political parties, we'll remember the internal election of the PRD, whose litigation lasted more than eight months, the electoral recovery of the PRI, and the multiple defeats of the PAN, which had a very bad electoral year. The Supreme Court decision that upheld the decriminalization of abortion. An inflationary surge also arrived. 

Good-bye to 2008 and good luck in 2009, which we are all going to need...

Needless to say, there was a lot of bad news this year in Mexico.