Mr Enrique Sada
Mexican historian Enrique Sada, a regular contributor to the Royal European Academy of Doctors (RAED), shares with the academic community the articles “The Cry of Palenque”, “What Nobody Asked For”, “From Cheese to Worms: Farewell to Carlo Ginzburg”, “One Hundred Years of an Absurdity: the Calles Law”, “99 Years Since Captain Emilio Carranza” and “Censorship in Mexico: Audience Rights”, published between June and July on the digital portal Código Libre and in the newspaper El Siglo de Torreón, in which he addresses various episodes in Mexico’s recent history and their parallels with the present.
In “The Cry of Palenque”, the expert analyses Mexico’s long tradition of proclamations through which rulers have justified their accession to or continuation in power, from Antonio López de Santa Anna and Benito Juárez to the manifestos of the Revolution and the Grito de Guadalajara of Plutarco Elías Calles in 1934, linking them to the present day. “The history of the Mexican Republic and its endless shipwreck has provided specimens worthy of study in terms of sociopathy and narcissism in the political sphere for a little over two centuries,” he states.
In “What Nobody Asked For”, Sada describes a recent episode that calls into question the reliability of the Mexican Executive, which had boasted of unveiling what was supposed to be the first one-hundred-per-cent Mexican electric car. However, a journalistic investigation and internet searches by users revealed that the vehicle is not a national development but has technical links to Chinese companies. “No more than 30 minutes had passed after the President drove the Olinia into the Santa Lucía hangar amid applause and an ovation from her own public officials when a brief internet search managed to find the same vehicle under another name on Alibaba’s product platform,” he recalls with irony.
In “From Cheese to Worms: Farewell to Carlo Ginzburg”, the Mexican historian pays a posthumous tribute to Carlo Ginzburg, the recently deceased Italian intellectual whom he regards as the father of microhistory. Born in Turin in 1939, the son of writer Natalia Ginzburg and intellectual Leone Ginzburg, he taught at prestigious universities. “Eight years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, another singular work would appear, linked to the Mexican work, by Carlo Ginzburg, who with The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller would contribute, as few others did, both to the teaching and to the importance of microhistory, thanks to the trial of a singular figure such as Domenico Scandella and his highly particular conception of the creation of the universe itself.”
In “One Hundred Years of an Absurdity: the Calles Law”, the RAED contributor recalls how the Law on Crimes and Offences in Matters of Religious Worship and External Discipline intensified the anti-clericalism of the Mexican Republic by limiting the number of priests, imposing compulsory registration with the civil authorities, prohibiting the wearing of cassocks and religious symbols in public, discriminating against foreign priests and declaring Catholic churches to be property of the nation. “On 2 July 1926, a decree turned into law shook the calm of a country that had still not recovered from the aftershocks of several military uprisings, the anti-religious persecution initiated by Álvaro Obregón and the murder of the caudillo at the hands of the very regime he himself had helped to build,” he summarises.
In “99 Years Since Captain Emilio Carranza”, Sada recalls the Mexican aviator Emilio Carranza, who in 1928 was given a government mission to make a goodwill flight to the United States, in reciprocation for the flight Charles Lindbergh had made to Mexico City. After being acclaimed in Washington and New York, on 12 July 1928 he prepared to return non-stop to Mexico. Despite a severe storm and weather warnings, a telegram containing a military order forced him to take off from Roosevelt Field. His aircraft crashed in New Jersey and he was killed. “Everything went well for a short period of time, until, over the pine country of southern New Jersey, a violent electrical storm appeared and his silver wings descended for the last time. Out of sight of the thousands of people who had welcomed and honoured him, the gallant Captain Carranza crashed and died,” he explains.
Finally, in “Censorship in Mexico: Audience Rights”, the expert warns of a new threat to freedom of expression in Mexico through a new initiative by the Government of Claudia Sheinbaum, which seeks to guarantee audience rights in relation to information broadcast on radio and television, but which has in fact been regarded by broad social and professional sectors as disguised censorship. “In addition to the forced telephone registration, after which the small part of the population that accepted it has complained of more attempted telephone extortion and offers from dubious universities, another shadow is looming over the country with the latest harmful idea, the so-called audience rights,” he concludes.
