On leftist party's birthday, two factions, visions, cakes

On leftist party's birthday, two factions, visions, cakes

David Agren
The News

The two candidates contesting the still-undecided Democratic Revolution Party internal vote, Alejandro Encinas and Jesús Ortega, marked the PRD's 19th anniversary by speaking of unity – an elusive objective during the party's oft-contentious leadership campaign and post-election fallout.

"We have problems, but that's not going to overshadow the anniversary of the PRD," Ortega told The News while celebrating at the Revolution Monument.

But the pair made their pronouncements at separate birthday bashes mere blocks from each other in central Mexico City, where card-carrying PRD members – and others simply accepting free junkets to the national capital – spoke ill of their opponents and even disparaged the rival celebrations.

"All of the traitors are over there," said Encinas supporter Rafael Acosta, pointing toward Ortega's celebrations.

Acosta, a self-described "social fighter," objected to the willingness of the Ortega wing of the PRD – known as "Los Chuchos" – to broker deals with the federal government, which many in the party consider illegitimate due to allegations of fraud in the 2006 presidential election.

"They're a bunch of sellouts … and trying to steal the [PRD] election," he added.

Differences over strategy threaten to split the PRD less than two decades after Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas founded the party, which has long been beset by infighting among its disparate currents.

And neither Encinas nor Ortega has been willing to entertain the possibility of stepping aside, even though the election, held March 16, has been plagued by allegations of vote tampering, improper campaigning and favoritism on the part of senior PRD officials.

The pair couldn't even agree on an interim leader as Encinas rejected the appointment of Guadalupe Acosta to the post by the PRD national council over the weekend.

Encinas, who was named the winner by a PRD committee last Tuesday – despite only 84 percent of the votes being counted – held a relatively modest party in the Colonia Juárez complete with birthday cake, yellow balloons and free T-shirts.

Rosalba Carmelita Cruz, who said she was previously offered giveaways of food and household items from the Ortega campaign, objected to the Chuchos' birthday bash.

"They're throwing a bigger party to attract more followers," she said.

"There's more of a party, more food, more giveaways."

Ortega feted the PRD anniversary at the Revolution Monument with bands, clowns and a demonstration by the masked men of the Lucha Libre. He also called for the Left to become more "modern" and "critical."

But many of the attendees, including Nezahualcóyotl resident Faustino López Benitez, appeared more interested in freebies and complimentary taco dinners than left-wing political discourse.

He confessed to boarding a bus earlier in the day at the urging of an organizer known as "the drunk" and after "a friend told me that it was the [PRD] anniversary."

When asked about Ortega and later Encinas, López Benitez responded both times "I have no idea who that is," while waiting for a plate of pastor tacos.

The lack of passionate support at the Ortega event allowed interlopers like Eligio Manuel Hernández to sell an estimated 100 straw hats with the slogan "¡Viva AMLO!" a reference to party stalwart Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who backed Encinas and raised the ire of Ortega by signing campaign propaganda deemed illegal by PRD election officials.

"Ortega's been brought in by [President Felipe] Calderón to trip up Encinas," Hernández alleged.
The elderly weaver also insisted that party members "get along fine" and would emerge united. But he wasn't sure how.

CNDH backs Huichol exiles

David Agren
The News

The National Human Rights Commission, or CNDH, demanded the Jalisco government better protect indigenous Huicholes, who have been expelled from their communities for not following traditional religious practices.

The CNDH also admonished the state attorney general’s office for failing to take action on legal complaints of religious intolerance filed by Dagoberto Cirilo Sánchez, a Guadalajara missionary, on behalf of the expelled residents. The first complaints were lodged in 2003.

“This national organization has no proof that shows the government of Jalisco has taken actions that would restore the victims’ properties or help them purchase other lands,” the CNDH said in a press release issued on April 7.

The CNDH press release added that Huicholes residing in the municipality of Mezquitic in northern Jalisco state were banished by an elders’ council after joining the Seventh Day Adventist church.

Nearly 300 Huicholes departed Mezquitic in August 2005, when they reported having their houses burned down and lives threatened. Many of the converts stopped participating in rituals that involved drinking tejuino – a fermented corn beverage – and consuming peyote, a hallucinogenic plant harvested in San Luis Potosí state by Huicholes fulfilling community obligations.

The expelled Huicholes are now living in Nayarit state near the Agua Milpa dam. The CNDH described their living conditions as “deplorable” due to a lack of basic services and an inability to participate in a local fishery, which an ejido, or communal farm, has the right to exploit.

The Huichol, who are famed for their artwork and colorful clothing, are known to be reclusive and live in the dry sierra of Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas states. Many of their communities are not accessible by roads.

Another left-wing party engulfed in turmoil

David Agren
The News

The Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, staged a contentious and yet-undecided internal election on March 16 that threatens to fracture the left-wing party.

Mexico’s other left-wing party, the Social Democratic Alternative, or Alternativa, also faces a similar fate on Sunday, when it selects a new slate of national leaders.

Even worse for Alternativa is the distinct possibility that the three-year-old party could disappear entirely after the 2009 midterm elections if its official status is rescinded by the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE.

“How it [breaks up] is problematic because it’s not big enough to split successfully [since] neither side could actually survive,” said Jeffrey Weldon, a political science professor at ITAM.

The outcome could also see Alternativa lose its best-known figure, Patricia Mercado, a prominent women’s rights crusader whose maverick 2006 presidential campaign garnered attention by highlighting controversial social issues like drug legalization, gay rights and access to abortion.

Mercado’s campaign won the Alternativa five seats in the Chamber of Deputies and enough votes to remain registered with the IFE. But her success – becoming Alternativa's public face – and agenda-driven approach to party-building sparked disquiet in the party's senior ranks.

Luciano Pascoe, the Alternativa's IFE representative described Mercado as “gold” for the party, but accused her of claiming too much credit for past successes.

“We invested every penny this party had in her image,” he said.

“She's gold because she has a team behind her.”

Mercado is vying for the Alternativa presidency against incumbent Alberto Begné, a former IFE official. Mercado accuses Begné of selling out the party’s original social democratic agenda by forging alliances with political rivals that guarantee money and legislative seats rather than pushing her social agenda forward.

Her supporters also accuse Begné of employing thug tactics at local-level conventions – six of which have resulted in complaints to the electoral tribunal, or Trife, that were dismissed on Friday.

Mercado told The News that “hired goons” from the National Polytechnic Institute were unleashed on her supporters at Alternativa’s Mexico City convention on March 16.

She also accused party leadership of swelling her opponents’ ranks with PRD supporters.

Pascoe denied Mercado's allegations. He also defended the Alternativa's party-building strategies and said Mercado was running her side of the party like a “caudilla,” or strong woman.

“We can't afford to build a party that's focused on one person,” he said, describing that strategy as the principal weakness of Mexican political parties.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PARTY

The party was founded in 2005 with the idea of providing a “modern left” that would promote individual rights and break from the tendencies of some PRD and PRI leaders to form patronage alliances, said Alternativa Deputy Aida Marina Arvizu Rivas.

But it got off to an awkward start as a coalition of social activists pushing for minority rights, intellectuals who were previously affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and several campesino groups.

Tensions surfaced almost immediately as the campesino wing advanced the presidential nomination of Víctor González Torres, a discount drug baron famous for womanizing.

González Torres, a self-described populist better known as Dr. Simi, promised to bring a war chest to the Alternativa campaign, but the IFE quashed his bid by ruling in favor of Mercado. The campesino wing later crawled back to the PRI in the waning days of the campaign.

“It was oil and water. A bunch of city intellectuals that dress well and speak fancy and a bunch of rowdy [campesinos],” said Federico Estévez, also a political science professor at ITAM. “Of course they split apart.”

Mercado went on to lead a shoestring campaign that caught fire after she performed strongly in the first presidential debate. She gained further notoriety by attending a rally promoting marijuana legalization in Mexico City’s hip Condesa neighborhood.

In the end, Alternativa wound up with slightly less than 3 percent of the presidential ballots – enough to deny López Obrador the presidency.

MONEY TROUBLE

The result also allowed the Alternativa to exist as a registered political party that receives public funding from the IFE – 130 million pesos in 2008.

But spending irregularities from 2006 resulted in a 15 million-peso fine last year, forcing the party to depend on a 60-million-peso line of credit that is still being repaid, according to the El Universal newspaper.

Mercado said the party was being run as a “franchise” – a factor driving the current leadership to forge alliances with larger parties that can guarantee continued funding for the Alternativa.

Estévez attributed much of the Alternativa’s discord to money rather than ideological and strategic differences.

He also noted that Mercado has a history of being involved with upstart political parties in search of public financing and she mortgaged her house during an unsuccessful candidacy in 2000.

Estévez predicted the ongoing Alternativa row – and the turmoil engulfing the PRD – would persist due to the high stakes involved.

“National party leaders have enormous power in this country, legal power as well as financial support, so it’s worth fighting practically to the death,” he said.

Mexican left on verge of splitting

David Agren
The News

Members of the Democratic Revolution Party select a new national president on Sunday, concluding an oft-contentious internal election.

And while the national race officially features five candidates, representing disparate factions in the center-left party, the vote is shaping up as more of a referendum on competing visions for the center-left party instead of a traditional leadership contest.

Voters will decide if the 19-year-old PRD should mature and become more institutional or whether it should continue in a perpetual anti-establishment role.

Analysts say that differences over strategy could jeopardize the future of the party, which is the second-leading force on the federal level.

“It’s very possible that after the internal elections the party will split into a current composed of [PRD moderates] and a current for those following [former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel] López Obrador,” said Aldo Muñoz, political science professor at Universidad Iberoamericana.

“The losers will almost certainly form a new party.”Both of the leading candidates – Alejandro Encinas and Jesús Ortega – often speak of unifying the PRD and downplay talk of abandoning the party. But their methods and proposals for vaulting the PRD into power and unifying the Mexican left differ radically.

Encinas, an economist by training and former American football player, represents a combative current known as the United Left, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of President Felipe Calderón and eschews brokering deals with rival political parties.

The former Mexico City mayor kicked off his campaign by blasting the pragmatic actions of party moderates, whom he described as “nothing more than conservatives, only more desperate.”

He most notably objected to the PRD courting former members of the right-leaning National Action Party, or PAN, as potential candidates in Yucatán and Guanajuato, warning the party risked losing its identity as a left-wing party.Encinas also picked up the backing of López Obrador, an anti-establishment figure, who once commented, “To hell with their institutions,” after the nation’s electoral tribunal rejected his allegations of fraud after the 2006 election. López Obrador presently heads an alternative government that is separate from the PRD.

Jesús Ortega, Encinas’ main rival, also views the 2006 election as rigged, but many in his New Left current of the PRD – also known as Los Chuchos – have shown a willingness to work with the federal government and want the party to participate more in the country’s political institutions. They also have expressed some interest in reforming the government-controlled energy sector – a proposal that López Obrador has been tirelessly campaigning against.

Ortega recently warned that the PRD risked being viewed as “immature and violent” if it continued fomenting protests and failed to fully participate in the nation’s political life.

“Los Chuchos doesn't think the [PRD] can win power unless it cooperates more with the government,” Muñoz explained.

But members cooperating with the government and participating in legislative bargaining – most notably Ruth Zavaleta, PRD speaker of the Chamber of Deputies – have drawn intense fire from some quarters of the PRD.

Zavaleta, a member of the New Left, said she wants the PRD to “mature” and become more “institutional” – and stop excluding itself during key legislative debates.

“The PRD should become an institution … and mature within the existing structures,” she told The News.

“It should be a party based in rules, in statutes [and] in principles.”

But becoming more institutional might prove difficult given the party’s origins as a coalition of diverse groups pursuing their own agendas that initially were seeking to topple to long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

DIVERSE ORIGINS

The PRD was founded in 1989 by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas – a former PRI governor of Michoacán and the son of a revered former president – just one year after nearly winning the presidency.

He had bolted from the PRI earlier in the decade due to ideological differences and after being passed over for the party’s presidential nomination in favor of future President Carlos Salinas.

Cárdenas formed the National Democratic Front, which quickly attracted an unlikely assortment of groups the PRI’s old corporatist structure was unable to co-opt.

The coalition ranged from social activists working on behalf of earthquake victims in the capital to guerrillas that were previously hunted by the military in the hills of Guerrero state to small left-wing political parties with socialist and communist ideologies. It also gained support from former PRI members – like López Obrador – who were dissatisfied with the party’s shift to pro-market policies and the advent of technocrats like Salinas.

“The PRD is very pluralistic. It ranges from former guerrillas to people that used to be involved heavily with the PRI,” Zavaleta explained.

Zavaleta jumped into the political arena at the age of 21 after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake destroyed her home in the Centro Historico. She was moved to a temporary camp for displaced residents near the airport, where she began agitating for better services like garbage collection and drainage and pressing the local government for credit to rebuilt damages homes.

But she and her colleagues began drifting into local politics by capturing low-level positions – like jefe de la manzana, or block captain – and eventually found themselves organizing in boroughs on the eastern side of Mexico City for the National Democratic Front.

“We started to be a different kind of struggle: The struggle for democracy in the country,” Zavaleta recalled.

“All of the groups ... decided to back Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas so he could win power and depose the old [PRI] regime.”

The movement almost succeeded in 1988 as Cárdenas, an uncharismatic figure known for his stern facial expressions, staged a popular presidential campaign.

But a mysterious computer crash in the Interior Secretariat wiped out the early voting results favoring the National Democratic Front.

Cárdenas would never recapture the same magic – although he became Mexico City’s first elected mayor in 1997 – as he ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency in 1994 and 2000, placing third in both races.

Support for the party subsequently diminished with his poor electoral performances.

Zavaleta cited the perpetual caciquismo, or dependence on a strong figurehead like Cárdenas, as one of the PRD’s main weaknesses.

“[The party] can’t be sustained in caciquismo,” she said.

“As soon as the cacique disappears, the party then divides.”

Cárdenas’ fading from the national scene created the conditions for another leader to emerge: López Obrador, who as Mexico City mayor championed social programs like stipends for seniors and single mothers and big public works projects, which included restoring the Centro Historico and constructing a second level on the Periferico expressway.

López Obrador and Cárdenas have been estranged in recent years.

The PRD nearly captured the presidency in 2006, when López Obrador fell short by less than one percentage point in an election he branded “fraudulent.” But the PRD, riding López Obrador’s coattails, won a record number of congressional seats in 2006 and supplanted the PRI as the second-leading party in Congress.

The results reaffirmed López Obrador as the face of the party – even though his tactics of belittling Calderón as the “spurious president” and chiding members for working with other political groups irritated many in the PRD. But even López Obrador’s critics recognized the benefits of having an influential front man.

“The problem we have is that Andrés Manuel needs to continue being a strong leader and we need to strengthen our [movement] and his leadership,” Camilo Valenzuela, one of the five aspirants for the PRD presidency, told The News.

“But [he] also needs a strong party,” Valenzuela added.

The candidate also expressed concern that López Obrador was positioning himself as the unofficial PRD president by endorsing Encinas, who succeeded López Obrador as Mexico City mayor in 2005.

Columnist Sergio Sarmiento noted the same thing in a recent Grupo Reforma column.

“There’s not much difference between what López Obrador is doing and what President Felipe Calderón did by placing a close confidant at the head of the [National Action Party],” he wrote.

Many analysts give Encinas an advantage in the race due to López Obrador’s support, even though Ortega’s PRD faction controls the majority of the party’s state and national leadership positions.

“The grassroots came because of López Obrador so I still expect the grassroots to follow López Obrador whatever the organizations do in the states,” said Federico Estévez, political science professor at ITAM.

Jeffrey Weldon, a political science professor at ITAM, also predicted an Encinas victory due to fears that López Obrador’s backers might break away from the PRD.

“This threat of defections is going to actually weigh pretty heavily on a lot of people,” he said.

“They all know that without López Obrador the party is going to be a lot weaker."

Contentious judicial reform provision dropped

Contentious judicial reform provision dropped

David Agren
The News

The Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday discarded a controversial provision from its wide-ranging judicial reform package that would have allowed for police searches of private homes without the officers first obtaining a warrant.

Members of all eight parties approved dropping the measure, which had been bitterly opposed by the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, the Convergence Party and the Labor Party over concerns the provision would provide a pretext for persecuting social and political groups and foment corruption by unscrupulous police officials.

The legislation, which the Chamber of Deputies had been expected to approve on Tuesday, now goes back to the Senate, where debate on judicial reform will begin on Thursday.

Judicial reform would overhaul the nation's oft-maligned criminal justice system by introducing oral trials, providing speedier access to the courts and bringing improved transparency to a process that's largely carried out on paper and behind closed doors.

But the reforms provoked disquiet among opposition political parties, social movements and human rights groups due to the provisions allowing for police searches without a warrant.

The groups also objected to provisions for fighting organized crime, which included proposals that would permit authorities to detain suspects for up to 80 days without charges being laid and better facilitate the extradition of suspects to foreign countries.

National Human Rights Commission President José Luis Soberanes said over the weekend that the judicial reform package "constituted a step backwards for individual rights."

Ruth Zavaleta, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, told The News that "80 percent" of the reforms were excellent, but added that the parts allowing for police searches could be used by ruling politicians seeking revenge against their ousted rivals.

The Chamber of Deputies originally approved the judicial reform package in December, but the Senate modified the legislation by taking out a provision allowing investigators to search financial records without first obtaining legal permission and removing four words from the clause permitting police searches. The Senate is expected to pass judicial reform promptly and sources in the Chamber of Deputies said the package would pass before the current legislative session ends in late April.

Sayulita dispatch

I decamped Mexico City last month for a few days and jetted to Sayulita, a Nayarit beach town 40 kilometers north of Puerto Vallarta. The town is kind of grungy with many unpaved roads and packs of stray dogs roaming the streets, but it also attracts an eclectic mix of expats, fashionistas and hippies. The influx of the latter groups produces a bizarre mix of upscale delights - great wood-oven pizzas, lychee martinis and a shop selling Tahitian black pearls - and down-market charms like beach vendors, locals igniting pre-dawn fireworks and one of the best fish tacos on the Pacific Coast. (I'm still partial to Happy Fish by my old place in suburban Guadalajara, though.)

The Globe and Mail ran my dispatch last Saturday.

The Hanson Brothers

What better way to celebrate the New Year than with the thuggery of the Hanson Brothers and the Charlestown Chiefs?