Liberty in Mexico. Группа авторов
and a representative government could consider legal provisions that oppose these important ends. On the contrary, the social guarantees demanded in the name of the principles would be constantly violated or evaded, thanks to its exceptions; and this continual battle would make the fate of a nation more unfortunate than if it had remained subject to the arbitrariness of the absolute power, which, deprived of all the appearances of philanthropy in its principles and regularity in its action, would present a thousand flanks and weak points that could be attacked with success.
The endeavor, then, to legalize these acts, although quite natural to their perpetrators, can never be carried out or have a lasting and durable effect. The fraud in the long run cannot be hidden from anybody, and the contradiction and opposition that exist between the fundamental law and those that have as their goal undermining it, making it illusory, reveal naturally, and make clear even to the least sharp-eyed view, this fraudulent system. We cannot give another name to declarations, always repeated, of respect for individual rights, accompanied by the most insidious attacks that reduce these rights to absolute nothingness. This behavior would not be believable if it were not so well known in public officials, entrusted in a special way with the depository of public liberties. They proclaim and talk constantly about the most liberal principles, but in the excessive use of their powers they sometimes maintain, and other times prescribe and issue, decrees so barbarous that they could not pass even in governments branded as absolute. The inquisitorial system
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reestablishes itself from the moment when it suits their ambitious goals to outlaw a faction. Through acts they call laws, all those who make up the faction are delivered to military commissions; it compels them to be judged by people who have already irrevocably decided their sentence; and it subjects them to a barbaric and absolute code that permits prolonging arrests and solitary confinement indefinitely and delaying carrying out the verdict. It is true that all this is always in opposition to the fundamental law, but as it emanates from the legislative body, it is called law, and as the circumstances demand, it cannot be other than legal.
In this way the people and the laws are mocked by those whose position it is to sustain the laws and protect the people. This is how, through acts that they call circumstantial laws, they perpetuate the arbitrary regime and with it the germ of disturbances and riots, and thus they overpower social guarantees, seeking to deceive the people with a language that is fraudulent.
And will it be said of this behavior that it is wise? Inasmuch as it is not legal, does it offer security to the freedoms of the patria? Will it calm public disorders? Not in the least. It places institutions in danger, the spirit of persecution is perpetuated and takes root in nations, it destroys confidence in one’s own security and provokes revolutions.
It is difficult to find a means less suitable for strengthening the institutions of a nation than that of violating them, and it would seem impossible that it might have occurred to anyone to use this means for the attainment of this end, if experience did not prove that the delusions of men can reach even this point. The simple explanation of the expressions will be sufficient to convince us that laws of exception are directed to this and nothing else. If one asks what is sought with them, it will be said that it is the salvation of the patria. As this is not distinct from the salvation of the fundamental laws, in the end we will come to deduce that putting these laws out of danger is what is intended. But if one asks again what a law of exception is, the only response can be that it is the deprivation of either a right or a means of sustaining it, both set out in the constitutional charter, and from this can be deduced, as in the last analysis, that what is sought is to save this charter by its own destruction. Once one constitutional article is violated, the rest are not safe. The guarantee of one is the guarantee of all the others, and no matter how pressing one might assume the reasons presented to demolish the first article, there will be no lack of other reasons that, in their turn, are considered
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pressing enough to attack the others. If the legislative body manages to provide this pernicious example, the government, the tribunals, and even individuals themselves will not be long in imitating it, and as everyone is prohibited from doing so, no one will have the right to reprimand the rest.
A constitution violated by the legislative body offers no security whatsoever, for as the transgressor is the supreme authority, it cannot be legally reprimanded, nor are there means to stop this aggression by punishing the guilty. The alarm, then, which lack of confidence follows is more lasting and permanent. As if individual security can have protection when the attack comes from the laws themselves. Men become inflamed in such cases upon seeing that they do not gain in society the equivalent of what they lose, for if one counts the value of the sacrifices, on the one hand, and the persecution that the laws cause them or the protection they do not provide them, on the other hand, the sum of woes comes out greater than that of the goods, or, better said, the latter disappear completely, and the former remain entirely.
But the effects of these abusive laws in the judicial order are worth closer scrutiny. When one wants to reduce to words empty of meaning the rights set down in a constitution, before corrupting ordinary judges put in place to defend those rights, one attempts to create special tribunals, whose very name is enough to imagine what must be expected from them. No one is unaware that such manner of administering justice does not have as its purpose the protection of innocence. Those who requested or dictated such laws hasten to make use of them to get rid of their enemies through the verdict of judges who are all at the disposal of whoever appointed them. Their decisions will be repeated and confirmed as if by an echo wherever they are brought. But public opinion censures them with a firm and unanimous voice that only their authors will have the misfortune not to hear, because lending an ear only to the voice of the man on whom they depend or of those he has at his service, they are concerned only with supporting a faction that might have disappeared much earlier from the heart of society. This regime, whatever might be the guise under which it attempts to present itself, is at its heart one of deception, shamelessness, and cruelty. In it, without any exception, all questions are decided, not by examining the facts, but rather on the basis of the views that they have regarding the political opinions of the accused. And when the most atrocious and entirely established
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abuses of authority remain unpunished, if the perpetrators belong to the faction classified as sound, the opinions contrary to it are considered unpardonable crimes. But the least of all the ills that laws of circumstance cause is the obstinacy that their authors show toward leaving the tortuous path down which they have begun, giving dangerous circumstances as their pretext, without wishing to understand that these dangerous circumstances become critical only when a constitution struggles with an arbitrary regime and when the securities promised by fundamental laws are evaded and remain without effect because of special laws. This is how the very principle of the ill that foments and perpetuates the sickness is applied as remedy.
Any moderately reflective man will be able to anticipate the conclusion of this fraudulent regime. It must end either in the total loss of individual security or in political fluctuations that do not offer individual security until too late. What is astonishing, says a celebrated publicist3 in public law, is that such laws can reestablish themselves and that people enlightened enough to reclaim individual rights and strong enough to gain recognition for them take thoughtlessness and negligence to the point of allowing these rights to be reduced to puerile illusions. But who does not recognize the sway that words, formulas, and appearances exercise at the outset? Constitutional articles in which these rights are proclaimed, bodies constituted to defend them, representatives, voters, the apparatus, finally, of a representative system appear visible to everyone, calm the spirits, and discredit the first alarms of the small number of citizens it has not been able to seduce. The time required for public opinion to develop is used to employ all the means of usurpation and imposture in corrupting public agents, in depriving those who resist them of all influence, and in forming those habits and customs advantageous to a system of this kind among the various classes, until indiscretions and, what is worse, excesses bring setbacks that upset this system and storms that tear it from its moorings. Then its fall is as rapid as certain, because the first symptoms that announce it dissipate the illusions and return