Deja Vu

January 12, 2009

Behind the Velvet Rope

Tags:

bureaucracy,

Carlos Fuentes,

Felipe Calderon,

Mexico

“For Redress of Grievances, Mexicans Turn to Bureaucracy Contest,” The New York Times, Jan. 9, 2009.

[Mexican President] Calderón, like presidents before him, has vowed to battle government inefficiency, which he sees as a serious drag on the economy.

“How many layers of resistance toward citizens, how many layers of insensitivity have built up?” Mr. Calderón asked during a speech he presented to the many bureaucrats who attended the awards ceremony.

The contest, which was organized by the government office that works to stop corruption and inefficiency, attracted 20,000 applications. Federico Reyes Heroles, the president of the contest jury and of Transparency Mexico, an anti-corruption group, said the submissions shared a common complaint: that bureaucrats treated their fellow citizens with disdain.

The layers of bureaucracy do keep hundreds of thousands of people employed, but many Mexicans have lost their patience with red tape that can cause real harm, keeping people from collecting pensions on time, for instance, or delaying the opening of a business.

Mexico is by no means the only country that forces citizens to jump through endless hoops to register a birth, open a business or apply for government aid. But people here swear that their bureaucrats have, over generations, developed a particular brilliance for inventing new ways to drive them to distraction.

“Letter 24, Nicolás Valdivia to María del Rosario Galván,” from The Eagle’s Throne, by Carlos Fuentes (trans. Kristina Cordero), 2006.

Don Cástulo has that tired, dreary look of the classic archivist and, as I said before, he even wears the ubiquitous green eyeshade and arm garters that make him look like the typical minor bureaucrat, straight out of a soap opera. Archives are dark places—perhaps out of fear that the papers might grow faded and illegible if exposed to sunlight, or perhaps simply to allow the documents to fall into oblivion as they lie in their yellow folders in gunmetal gray tombs. Perhaps…so that they may be exorcised of all, shall we say, luminous content. Yes, don Cástulo is the phantom of the archives. Just like the character dreamed up by Gaston Leroux who lived in the subterranean bowels of the Paris Opera, Cástulo Magón lives beneath the offices of the president of the republic.

His face is gray and his eyes, while not tired, convey a sense of resignation. But his fingers…are astonishingly nimble—you should see the speed and precision with which he flips through the different files! At that moment his age, his tired, careworn appearance, and his exhausted body are transfigured and Cástulo becomes something like the alchemist of the public records office. He knows where everything is but even more importantly he also knows where to find everything that shouldn’t be there, those things that he was told to destroy. Cástulo, not out of disobedience, but simply because he’d never really thought about it, you see, archived the unarchivable according to an eccentrically Mexican filing system: He didn’t file by name (Galván, María del Rosario, or Herrera, Bernal), nor by section (Ministry of the Interior, Congress) but by reference.

Arcane references. Where would you think I, for example might be found in the archives at Los Pinos? Under my name, “Valdivia, Nicolás”? Under my position, “Chief of Cabinet, Assistant to”? “Presidency of the Republic, Office of”? No…. As it turns out, I appear in a file entitled “ENA.” Now, what is ENA? you might ask. École Nationale d’ Administration, Paris. In other words, the college I went to. Take note…! If you’re looking for a labyrinth of solitude, this takes the cake. And our friend the archivist Cástulo Magón can find his way around the files using those hands of his, like the hands of a blind pianist, more blind than Hipólito in Santa….

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