Several times, the concepts analyzed in theory and the ‘how should it be’ don’t really happen in reality, for social scientists like me it’s a constant struggle to analyze reality and society and try to come up with proposals to improve the situation and the life quality of people, and sometimes they don’t happen to be quite as real as we would want.
But in politics everything could happen, because the human being is unpredictable, that the main reason that makes hard to predict situations and behaviors for social scientists.
The concept, for which I’m developing this piece, is citizen participation, that has overcome this limbo between theory and reality and has proven to be an useful tool to empower the people and to make their rights, human rights, respected by governments and businesses.
Citizen participation refers to the process in which citizens interact with governments, not only in the decision-making process but also in the making of public policies and programs at the local and national level.
The fact that citizens participate in public decisions and acts is a politic act, the media and education have made wrong in binding politics only referring to political parties and elections, politics is far more than that, politic refers to the public issues, not restricted to elections; that means that there are several ways to do politics and be an active part of the political scenario of your community and country than only voting.
Citizen participation, that is in essence, political participation, empowers people to make them capable of demanding government and corporations to respect their rights, to make policies, actions and programs that benefit the development of the population and to protest against those that just benefit the elite or that harm a part of the population and community.
It is well known that developing countries have problems with their politicians and political scenario, but this is not restrictive to developing countries, developed countries also share this problem, a clear example of this is the election of Donald Trump in US, that shows clearly the decay of politics in that country.
Therefore, considering the difficult situation we have to live referring to politics, should we stay still and suffer the consequences? Are the citizens incapable of doing a change? Is this a burden that we have to hold indefinitely? Well, let me tell you something, the answer for these three questions is NO.
To illustrate what I’ve stated I will put the example of Mexico, my country.
For decades, the government and politicians in Mexico abused their power, stole unbelievable quantities of money from peoples taxes, committed elections fraud, took decisions that only benefitted themselves and the elites and the people did nothing, our society just continued their lives without even knowing, in some cases, what was going on. But luckily, this is changing.
In the past weeks, several protest have risen all over the country as a consequence of the widespread discontent of the population exacerbated by the rise of the gas price of 25% in one day and in some places of Mexico this rise went over 50%, along with local unpopular measures un some states, like Baja California, where a new ‘local law’ was emitted to raise the price of water by 20% in 2017 and to rise each year, rise that wouldn’t need the approval of the local congress and another local edict that would make mandatory to pay for new license plates in 2017.
The core problem of these measures isn’t the rise of the prices, it is the fact that the local and national governments take decisions without consulting the population, where there is supposedly a democratic regime, along with the corruption scandals that revolve around the president, governors and legislators that have awaken the anger and discontent of the people.
Beginning in the second week of January, people in different cities across Mexico, with more intensity in Mexicali, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Chihuahua and Mexico City went to the streets; the people marched and protested with messages against the rise of taxes and prices in general, against the government corruption, the exorbitant salaries of legislators and others.
Along the rallies and protests, people in Mexicali and Tijuana blocked the gas deposit of
“PEMEX” the State gas company of Mexico and blocked highways, as well as the international border crossing between US and Mexico to make the government listen to the demands of the population.
On January 15th more than 50,000 people in Mexicali protested; they marched to the city hall, never before, that much people went to the streets in the city to stand up against the government decisions. In 21 of 32 of the mexican states hundreds of thousands of people woke up.
2 days after the impressive protest in Mexicali and Tijuana, the governor of the state of Baja California emitted an edict to cancel the state law and the new license plates payment. A political event that never happened before in Baja California, and most important: a direct result of the citizen participation of the populations.
With a record-low approval of 12%, Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president is in trouble, especially with the corruption scandals surrounding him and his cabinet, along with the unpopular measures that harm the life quality of the population. Furthermore, legislators including local and federal, approved for themselves a Christmas bonus of more than 100,000 peso that is approx. 5,000 USD and another 4,000 USD bonus for the gas, considering that their monthly salary is more than 5,000 USD, a mount that is not necessary.
In a democratic system, the people should have the right to express, to demand and to be consulted in public decisions, the new focuses of modern States are the management by results focus, the governance focus, that include more transparency, accountability and citizen participation.
