DAVID AGREN

Why the pope is visiting Guanajuato – and during the prelude to an election

2012-01-13T20:44:00.001-06:00

Photo by Steven H. Miller

By David Agren Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- In 1941, the Mexican government -- under the control of a predecessor to the once-dominant and anti-clerical Institutional Revolutionary Party --- and the Catholic Church made peace, sealing their pact in the state of Guanajuato.

Seven decades later, with the Institutional Revolutionary Party favored to regain the presidency in elections later this year, church and government leaders will meet again in Guanajuato, where Pope Benedict XVI will visit March 23-26 -- at a time church-state relations have decidedly improved.

"It's a very emblematic state, where ... there have been the biggest conflicts ... and the biggest pacts between church and state," Ilan Semo, political historian at the Jesuit-run Iberoamerican University, said of Guanajuato.

The 1940s pact ended a quarter-century of strife marked by the Cristero Rebellion -- when fighting flared and churches closed for three years in the late 1920s. But church and state remained estranged for much of the last century, and the Vatican and Mexico only established diplomatic relations 20 years ago.

Relations, however, have warmed to the point that President Felipe Calderon -- whose Catholic-friendly National Action Party has governed since 2000 and draws strong support in Guanajuato -- will personally welcome Pope Benedict March 23 for a four-day visit to a region known for the Cristero Rebellion and conservative Catholic politics.

For church observers such as Semo, the setting and timing speak volumes, especially as Mexico moves into an era of improved church-state relations that promises to lift lingering restrictions on church-sponsored speech and potentially promises to provide prelates with a voice in the nation's political and public-policy arenas. But church officials publicly caution against reading any symbolism into the papal visit.

The visit is scheduled barely three months before state and federal elections -- a time previously unthinkable for a papal tour of Mexico, where references to Our Lady of Guadalupe during campaigns have been enough to annul elections.

Pope Benedict is scheduled to celebrate Mass for more than 300,000 Catholics at the foot of the Cerro del Cubilete, a hill topped by a massive statue of Christ considered emblematic by those remembering the Cristero Rebellion and the martyrs since canonized.

"Symbolically, (this) reinforces the presence of the church in Mexico," said church observer Victor Ramos Cortes, professor at the University of Guadalajara.

The visit to Guanajuato, he added, comes as the church has canonized some and beatified even more martyrs of the Cristero Rebellion.

"(The visit) has to be related to with this (church) attitude ... over the past decade and a half ... of putting the Cristeros at the center of their attention," he said.

The Mexican bishops' conference secretary-general, Auxiliary Bishop Victor Rodriguez Gomez of Texcoco, told reporters Jan. 1 the pontiff would visit Guanajuato because of logistical and health reasons. Silao, site of the Mass, is roughly the geographic center of Mexico, while the pope's physicians ruled out a trip to populous Mexico City due to its high elevation -- more than 7,300 feet.

Additionally, Blessed John Paul never visited the area during his five trips to Mexico. The trip to Mexico -- and later Cuba -- is Pope Benedict's first to the countries since he was elected in 2005.

Pope Benedict arrives in Mexico at a difficult time as violence attributed to warring drug cartels and organized crime has claimed more than 40,000 lives over the past five years.

In a statement, the bishops called the trip, "A motive of hope and confirmation of faith in the Lord."

Others in the church, such as Father Robert Coogan, an American ministering to prisoners in northern Mexico, wondered, "What message will he bring for nation that's suffering?"

For the many Mexican media outlets, the trip's timing and location were the message, especially given Guanajuato's stature as the country's most Catholic state -- 94 percent, according to the 2010 census -- and history of spawning conservative movements with friendly policies toward the church.

The National Action Party, founded in 1939 by those in opposition to revolutionary principles, grew strong in the region, where an especially secretive Catholic faction known as "El Yunque," or "The Anvil," supposedly still holds sway.

At the same time, a Catholic agrarian movement known as "Sinarquismo" surged, even though its leaders were openly anti-Semitic and admired fascist leaders of 1930s Europe, and its handful of followers do so to this day.

Guanajuato Gov. Juan Manuel Oliva -- who makes no secret of his piety -- accompanied Archbishop Jose Martin Robago of Leon in inaugurating a new plaza Jan. 2 near the Leon Cathedral. The plaza was built with public money and features a mural highlighting the massacre of victims protesting 1946 election fraud.

Former President Vicente Fox, who ended one-party rule in 2000, also hails from the state.

Fox's party is not favored to win the upcoming presidential elections, but observers such as Ramos say church-state relations will continue warming in the coming years, and Catholic leaders will exert ever more influence, even if the Institutional Revolutionary Party regains power.

"They (church leaders) want to be active in the direction of the country," the professor said.

Politics and the "pista de hielo" (ice rink)

2012-01-08T16:16:00.001-06:00

The Mexico City ice rink – built by the Federal District government in the middle of the expansive Zócalo – ends another wildly successful run Jan. 7, having attracted thousands of want-to-be skaters daily to what has become unlikely winter attraction and unlikely political prop.

The rink debuted in 2007, thanks to Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard. He also built urban beaches and opened weekend bike baths. The opposition National Action Party (PAN) branded the ice rink and his other projects, "Bread and circuses," given the pressing problems in the Federal District with traffic, water and garbage.

But the rink proved a smash hit with long lines forming in the pre-dawn hours. The reason: It's free – all the skaters and local officials say.

The rink occupies a spot in the Zócalo, the most prominent landmark in the capital and a seat of power dating back to Aztec times. All politicians aim to project power from the square, says local columnist Adrián Rueda, a keen observer of D.F. politics. And in the case of Ebrard, he needed to project power in the hopes of winning the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) presidential nomination in 2012 – something that will once again go to Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Ebrard, political observers say, came to power lacking control of the corporatist groups in the 16 boroughs – many of which were capably managed by René Bejarano (infamous for the cash-in-a-suitcase video scandal and a López Obrador affiliate) and René Arce, the Senator once part of the PRD, but now in the Green Party, who holds enormous influence over Iztapalapa.

To build his own base, Ebrard turned to the "circus" – a tactic learned from his mentor, former Mexico City regent Manuel Camacho Solis. The circus (the ice rink and the such) allowed him to gain favour among the masses and, to some degree, break the power of the client groups. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't enough to win the PRD nomination this time around.

I recently wrote on politics and the ice rink for the Toronto Star. Read it here.

The Russians are coming ... to Mexico?

2012-01-06T03:00:00.001-06:00

At a time U.S. tourists might think twice about vacationing in Mexico, Russians are flocking to destinations like Cancún in ever-growing numbers. Demand is so great that Aeroflot recent inaugurated direct Moscow-Cancún service.

Russians aren't the only ones looking past the negative headlines: Tourist visits from Brazil increased by roughly 60 percent last year.

I recently wrote for the Toronto Star on the trend of non-U.S. tourists flocking to Mexico. Read it here: http://bit.ly/yvsbLx

Interior Minister perishes in helicopter crash

2011-11-11T12:43:00.014-06:00

Mexican Interior Minister Francisco Blake Mora died Friday in a helicopter crash, the second time in three years the most senior member of President Felipe Calderón’s cabinet has perished in an aviation disaster.

Federal government spokeswoman Alejandra Sota confirmed the death shortly after 12:30 p.m. local time. The crash, just to the southeast of Mexico City, claimed the lives of Blake, 45, along with seven passengers and crew. There were no survivors. Calderón was reported en route to the crash site. It's uncertain if he will depart later on Friday for APEC meetings as originally planned.

Blake becomes the second interior minister to suffer an untimely death in barely three years. Former interior Juan Camilo Mouriño perished Nov. 4, 2008, when his small jet plunged into a street in the swank Lomas de Chapultepec neighbourhood. Investigators blamed the crash involving Mouriño – long the domain of conspiracy theories – on pilot error.

Both men were key figures in the country's national security cabinet and coordinating security matters during a time that organized crime violence increasingly spread into previously placid pockets of Mexico.

Aviation crashes involving senior government officials have been distressingly frequent over the past decade. Colima governor Gustavo Vázquez died in a 2005 plane crash. More recently, a helicopter belonging to the Mexico state government crashed last month in the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City, killing two state officials. Billionaire businessman Moisés Saba died in a helicopter crash during bad weather in the western part of the Federal District in January 2010.

It's still uncertain who might replace Blake as interior minister, the most senior cabinet position and one responsible for internal security and overseeing agencies ranging from the National Immigration Institute to civil protection to Cisen, the country's intelligence service. The interior minister also acts as a liaison between the federal government and Congress and the 31 state governments.

Blake Mora was an unlikely choice for interior minister, having previously spent most of his political career in the Baja California state government and serving with Calderón in the federal lower house of Congress.

He sas the fourth interior minister of the Calderón administration and he replaced a political heavyweight: Fernando Gómez-Mont, one of the country's top lawyers and a close associate of none other than Diego Fernández de Cevallos – better known as "Jefe Diego." Gómez-Mont left cabinet after disagreeing with Calderón over the National Action Party's decision to pursue electoral alliances with the Mexican left in order to topple governments in six of the country's most retrograde Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) backwaters, including Oaxaca and Puebla.

A distraught-looking Calderón eulogized Blake during comments to the nation shortly after 2:30 p.m., describing the fathar of two as dedicated to his country and someone who emerged from working class roots in Tijuana to earn a law degree and ascend to top positions in the Baja California and federal governments.

No details on the cause of the crash were given.

More from Michoacán

2011-11-03T13:28:00.002-06:00

A poll published Nov. 3 in the Reforma newspaper gives PAN candidate Luisa María Calderón a six-point advantage in the Michoacán gubernatorial contest. Left unanswered is how the Nov. 2 assassination of La Piedad mayor Ricardo Guzmán Romero as he campaigned for Calderón will impact the Nov. 13 election in Michoacán, where the quasi religious drug cartel La Familia Michoacana and a splinter group, Knights Templar, are disputing the state.

It's probable, as happened in Tamaulipas after the assassination of PRI gubernatorial frontrunner Rodolfo Torre Cantú, voter turnout will plunge – something which favours the PRI (witness the low participation in the State of Mexico) as the party gets its mostly poor "voto duro" to the polls with inducements and coercive tactics and the middle classes stay home.

The Reforma poll showed Calderón – a former senator best known for crossing swords with "Jefe Diego" and the sister of President Felipe Calderón – receiving 39 percent support, six points better than PRI candidate Fausto Vallejo. The PRD campaign of Sen. Silvano Aureoles was running a distant third with 28 percent support. More importantly for Calderón the poll showed her campaign gaining ground: Support increased by 10 percentage points from the last Reforma poll in September, while the PRI and PRD campaigns lost ground.

A Calderón victory would bolster the president as he attempts to establish some sort of lasting political legacy for the PAN, which has struggled in local elections during his administration and appears set to be voted from power on the federal level in the July 1, 2012 national elections.

The results could prove disastrous for the PRD. The party has been beset by infighting and its plans to name the 2012 presidential candidate from a poll is expected to generate discontent among the losing side – be it 2006 candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador or Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard. The party already has lost the stronghold states of Baja California Sur and Zacatecas. Michoacán, where the party also has been rife with infighting, appears to be next.

The PRI is running competitive in Michoacán, but its campaign has yet to capture any serious momentum – spare the moments when the party's presidential frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto showed up for a day of campaigning.

One observer, parish priest Jesús Alfredo Gallegos Lara – better known as "Padre Pistolas" – cast some doubt on the Reforma poll, saying the survey was done by telephone in a state where "many of the ranchos don't have phones." The PRD, he told me, draws most of its support from the ranchos.

PAN mayor shot dead

2011-11-02T20:52:00.005-06:00

A sign in the Cherán, Michoacán, town plaza strikes a rebellious note. The town rebelled against illegal loggers clear-cutting the local hills with the help of armed criminal groups earlier this year – and ran off the local mayor, too. Michoacán electoral officials want there to be a vote in Cherán, but locals say they won't allow political parties to participate.

The PAN mayor of La Piedad was shot dead while campaigning Nov. 2, casting doubt on the ability to hold general elections across the oft-violent state of Michoacán in 10 days time – and also casting doubt on the ability to hold federal electoral races next year in the pockets of Mexico where organized crime violence has been rife.

Ricardo Guzmán Romero was fatally shot while campaigning for the PAN candidate in the pork-processing town of La Piedad, PAN officials said via Twitter. The circumstances of the assassination remain uncertain, but PAN youth president Jhonathan García, who was witness to the shooting, said via Twitter that the mayor was shot in the abdomen. Press reports say Guzmán was passing out pamphlets when attacked.

Michoacán Gov. Leonel Godoy scheduled a press conference for 9 p.m. local time. Guzmán became the fourth Michoacán mayor to be assassinated since Godoy took office in early 2008, Michoacán news agency Quadratín reported.

Voters in Michoacán go to the polls Nov. 13 in an election Luisa María Calderón, sister of President Felipe Calderón, hopes to win for the PAN. Public opinion polls vary. An Agencia Mendoza Blanco y Asociados survey shows a tight, three-way PAN-PRI-PRD contest, while Gabinete de Comunicación Estratégica gave Calderón 39-36 lead over PRI candidate Fausto Vallejo. PRD candidate Silvano Aureoles Conejo trailed with 25 percent support, setting up a potential embarrassment for the PRD, which had dominated Michoacán politics for the past decade.

The assassination marked the latest difficulty for Michoacán's electoral process, which will renew the governor's office, local congress and 113 municipal governments. The state electoral institute reports the withdrawal of 51 candidates, according to the newspaper El Universal. The PAN-New Alliance coalition, meanwhile, was unable to find candidates in at least 10 municipalities.

Residents of Cherán, where locals ran off illegal loggers, organized crime, the police and the mayor, refuse to allow political parties to run candidates, even though the electoral institute insists on there being a vote.

Violence, of course, predates the election in Michoacán, where La Familia Michoacana and a splinter group, the quasi-religious Knights Templar, are disputing the state. Michoacán native Felipe Calderón sent troops to Michoacán shortly after taking office – the first such deployment of his administration.

Presidential front-runner declares his intentions

2011-09-20T02:09:00.003-05:00

Former State of Mexico governor Enrique Peña Nieto speaks Sept. 14 to residents of a flooded out neighbourhood in Cuautitlán after distributing pre-paid cards for replacing damaged furniture and appliances. His term as governor ended the next day and he now is pursuing the PRI presidential nomination.

To no one's surprise, former State of Mexico governor Enrique Peña Nieto acknowledged his plans to run for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) presidential nomination. Even less surprising, he did so while appearing on Televisa, the media empire long-accused of providing him with plenty of favourable coverage – and exposing him frequently to a nationwide audience in a country where most people get their news via television broadcasts – during his six-year gubernatorial administration.

Derisively branded "Gel Boy" (pronounced, "hell-boy," in Spanish) by detractors for the copious amounts of gel in his hairstyle, Peña Nieto enters the contest with a massive lead among over any of the probable presidential candidates as the governing National Action Party (PAN) appears spent after 11 years in power and President Felipe Calderón lacks a popular heir-apparent. The left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), meanwhile, has been plagued by infighting since nearly capturing power in 2006 and its nomination process is another civil war waiting to happen.

The 45-year-old Peña Nieto puts a young face on an old-school PRI, which has recovered from losing the presidency in 2000 and being decimated in 2006 (after vicious infighting) and has gone on to dominate politics on the local level – and become a party of powerful state governors, who preside over jurisdictions with little transparency and weak autonomous institutions.

He hails from a political clan known as "Grupo Atlacomulco," which has wielded power in the State of Mexico for decades and grew rich from the largess of generous government concessions. Its most famous patriarch, former State of Mexico governor and Mexico City regent, Carlos Hank Gónzalez, coined the infamous Mexican political maxim, "A politician who is poor, is a poor politician." Peña Nieto appears to have the backing of the church hierarchy, too – something unthinkable a generation ago for a PRI politician.

Peña Nieto will likely face PRI Senate leader Manlio Fabio Beltrones in the nomination battle – and emerge the victor: The State of Mexico carries enormous weight in PRI matters. Additionally, his reputation has been burnished by having presided over an administration savvy in public relations and which focused heavily on the completion of public works projects. He also survived fiascoes unscathed, such as the botched Paulette investigation in 2010 – in which a four-year-old girl was found dead in her own bed nine days after investigators supposedly had searched her room – or his fumbling for answers during a television interview when explaining the circumstances of his first wife's death.

His current wife, soap opera star Angelica Rivera, draws no shortage of favourable coverage, too – and their union was made possible after the Archdiocese of Mexico City annulled her first marriage because it took place on a beach in Acapulco. Even his teenage daughter was named one of the 10 hottest girls in Mexico by Quién, a society magazine.

The former governor has outlined no specific plans for a PRI administration, although the behaviour of the PRI delegation in the lower house of Congress – which he heavily influences – might offer hints at what to expect. The PRI delegation has thwarted attempts at labour reform, failed to pass money laundering and national security laws, steadfastly opposed the reelection of politicians and has fought every year during the budget process to devolve ever more money to opaque state governments,

Even details of his accomplishments seem vague – such as the claim made in his final informe (state of the state address) that the homicide rate dropped by half in the State of Mexico during his administration and doubled in the rest of the country. This all at a time when at least four cartels have battled for territory in the suburbs of Mexico City and the neighbouring Federal District has remained relatively free of organized crime nonsense.

During recent reporting trips to the State of Mexico, people have carried on enthusiastically in interviews about how Peña Nieto has kept his word and improved life in the state. When asked to provide examples, the conversation usually turns to some distant project, which quite possible included federal funding, or highways charging tolls far beyond what an ordinary motorist might be able to afford.

When posed with questions about security, everyone says it has worsened – especially for anyone riding the over-priced public transit network in the State of Mexico, which has been a target for armed thugs in recent years. But, again, they seem willing to give Peña Nieto the benefit of the doubt, proving that voters overwhelmingly view security as a federal matter and seldom will hold a local mayor or governor responsible. Some interviewees even figured the arrival of a priísta in Los Pinos would somehow bring the crime problem under control – just like during the "golden age" of PRI rule that so many in Mexico now have fond memories of recalling (when narcos were kept in check) and hope to see come to pass once again.

The presidential election goes down July 1, 2012, leaving time for the frontrunner to be reeled in – just like Calderón did with Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006. But how that might happen remains a mystery, especially when many voters appear apathetic about the political process (witness the low turnout in the July 2011 State of Mexico gubernatorial election,) young voters with more bad memories about the PAN in power than the PRI are actually opting for the PRI, and so many people, like one participant leaving comments on the Reforma website, gush enthusiastically, "Finally a primary candidate with a project and real proposals. Enrique Peña Nieto, President of Mexico!!"

Padre Pistolas

2011-08-28T13:21:00.001-05:00

Father Jesús Alfredo Gallegos Lara is better know as Padre Pistolas, a Michoacán priest famed throughout the region for packing heat and singing ranchera and mariachi music. He also has become famous for promoting public works projects - all to the dismay of his superior, the Archbishop of Morelia. The archbishop once suspended Father Gallegos, but politicians from all sides - who regularly seek out his endorsement, including PAN gubernatorial candidate Luisa Calderón, the president's sister - have urged Padre Pistolas to run for public office, knowing his popularity, moral authority and pull with the local population surpasses that of anyone else in church.

I visited with Padre Pistolas recently - hoping, course, he wouldn't pull out his Colt 45 and, say, "Vaya con Dios, muchacho!" He's folkloric, but also very dedicated to his work - and has done more to improve life in the rundown pueblos he serves than any other public figure. The story ran in The Globe and Mail (click the title of this post to read it.)

'Acapulco is both heaven and hell'

2011-01-29T11:45:00.000-06:00

A campaign launched by Acapulco night club owners encourages people to speak well of Acapulco. It comes as the granddaddy of Mexican tourist destinations suffers through a wave of organized crime bloodshed that has involved beheadings and mass abductions. Tourist officials say the violence takes place far away from tourist areas and doesn't impact visitors. They complain, too, that violence in other parts of Guerrero often is erroneously reported as somehow involving or being near Acapulco. I went to Acapulco recently to report on the situation for USA TODAY; read my dispatch by clicking on the headline for this blog post.

Bulletproofing goes big time

2010-11-16T22:39:00.001-06:00

A shot-up windshield from a Honda Accord sits under a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the garage of Protecto Glass International in Mexico City. The firm is one of the oldest armouring companies in Mexico and has experienced a boom in demand for bulletproof vehicles as perceptions of insecurity increase in Mexico.

The Mexican bulletproofing business has exploded with the crackdown on organized crime, moving from an industry protecting politicians, executives and the über wealthy to one armoring increasingly more modest vehicles for ever less important government functionaries, small business owners and professionals wanting to ward off carjackings and kidnapping attempts.

One industry group values the Mexican bulletproofing business at US $80 million, but that figure might be low since many armoring companies are not registered with the Public Security Secretariat, U.S. firms are capitalizing on the demand from Mexico and the bad guys - according to some - have their own people protecting vehicles.

Brazil still leads the hemisphere in armoring, says Esteban Hernández of Auto Safe in Mexico City. Mexico leads in the demand for Level 5 armoring, however - a level protecting against attacks with assault weapons and grenades. Hernández, ironically, came from Colombia in the mid 1990s to promote bulletproofing. Nowadays, he says of the armoring companies in his home country, "They're on the brink of collapse."

Read the full story in the Nov. 15 edition of USA Today.

Chicharito

2010-09-14T16:14:00.001-05:00

A billboard in Guadalajara features local soccer star Javier "Chicharito" Hernández and the warning, "The future of a whole country, today is at your feet." The admonishment reflects the pressure on Hernández, who now plays for Manchester United.

Mexican soccer phenom Javier Hernández - better known by the handle, "Chicharito," or Little Pea - made his debut Sept. 14 in the Champions League as his club Manchester United took on Rangers. The debut, like everything he does with Manchester United, received major press attention back in Mexico, where the 22-year-old striker is fast becoming a living legend - especially in his native Guadalajara.

Chicharito faces enormous expections in Mexico, where international soccer success has been elusive and players have generally preferred to earn solid livings in a domistic league flush with cash from the nation's broadcasting duopoly instead of challenging themselves in tougher European leagues.

The lad appears ready. He comes from a solid, middle-class family, never indulges in vices such as smoking and drinking, according to his granddad, and never gets caught up in any scandals - unlike, say, aging striker and current Mexican soccer demigod Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who showed up for World Cup camp overweight and out of shape. He also speaks excellent English and was pursuing a university degree at UNIVA in suburban Guadalajara as he rocketed to soccer stardom last year with Chivas, the legendary Mexican franchise that doesn't field foreign-born players. His family has even moved to England with him.

I tracked down Chicharito's graddad - a former Mexican international and Chivas player - in late July, when Manchester United passed through Guadalajara, for story that ran in The Sun. Read it here, or click on the title.

Yet another Jefe Diego letter surfaces

2010-09-13T15:10:00.002-05:00

Yet another letter purportedly authored by the kidnappers of former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos surfaced Sept. 13, more than three months after the political insider and legal bigwig better known as "Jefe Diego" disappeared from his ranch in the state of Querétaro.

A photo, showing a blindfolded Fernández de Cevallos holding a copy of the magazine Proceso with him and former president Carlos Salinas posing in a photo, also surfaced with the letter, which, in a mocking tone, alleges that Jefe Diego has been abandoned by his friends and family and leaves uncertain who exactly is responsible for his apprehension.

"Thanks to the personal and public trajectory of 'Jefe Diego' many things continue to be said and perhaps all the lines of investigation fit since his family has abandoned him and his own friends don't care about his fate," the letter read.

The letter was signed by the, “Misteriosos Desaparecedores,” made mention of various theories that Jefe Diego might have been grabbed by everyone ranging from narcos to rebels to "defrauded individuals." And its surfacing promised to deepen the mystery of his disappearance and foment even more conspiracies on how a figure closely linked to the most senior officials in the country's internal security apparatus could suddenly vanish without a trace and how investigators would so willingly remove themselves almost immediately from the case at the behest of his family.

It was no secret that the cigar chomping Fernández de Cevallos cut a controversial path through Mexican political and legal circles. He became notorious for his moonlighting as an attorney for some of the country's most powerful companies suing the federal government to win injunction in tax cases while he served as a National Action Party (PAN) senator.

He also clashed with President Felipe Calderón, who, in 2008, buried the hatchet with the Diego faction of the PAN by appointing a Fernández de Cevallos protegé, Fernando Gómez-Mont, as interior minister and later a former legal associate, Arturo Chávez Chávez, as attorney general. (Gómez-Mont left cabinet after objecting to the PAN-Democratic Revolution Party alliances formed in five states for the July 4 elections.)

The perils of investing in paradise

2010-08-29T19:23:00.001-05:00

A road sign points the way to Tenacatita Bay in Jalisco state, where a titling dispute jeopardizes the investments of at least 40 foreign property owners. The owners bought deeds over the past five years that had been issued by the federal government and validated by the president of Mexico. But a Guadalajara-area businessman recently won a court injunction saying his company holds a valid deed to the same area - which was purchased in 1991 from the widow of a former Jalisco state governor and upheld in 1977 by the Mexican Supreme Court.

State police now block access to the land the foreigners purchased along with the beach at Tenacatita, which had been popular with working-class Mexican sunseekers. The businessman, Andrés Villalobos, told reporters last week he would not offer the foreigners any compensation since, he said, they were most likely deceived in making their purchases. He promised, however, to help prosecute anyone tricking them into purchasing land that he said was always private property and not for the federal government to title and sell.

The foreign buyers insist they did their due diligence and hold titles validated by one of either President Felipe Calderón or former president Vicente Fox. At least one buyer put her title into a bank trust, suggesting her purchase was considered proper by some institutions.

I recently travelled to the Jalisco coast to write on the issue for Postmedia News. Click on the headline to read the full story.

Mexicana suspends ticket sales

2010-08-03T15:58:00.008-05:00

SECOND UPDATE: Mexicana suspended all flights Aug. 28, including domestic runs flown by its subsidiaries, Mexicana Click and Mexicana Link. The new owners, Tenedora K, failed to adequately slash costs, which it reportedly tried to do by firing the unionized flight attendants and pilots and then rehiring some of the staff at reduced salaries. The federal government rejected the plan and refused to bail out Mexicana, which was privatized in 2005 and run up more than $1 billion in debt.

What becomes of Mexicana remains uncertain. I always preferred Mexicana to its domestic competitor AeroMéxico, which, in my experience, hired less-friendly and less-resourceful staff who were always anxious to pass the buck and neglect customer service problems. Other airlines such as Interjet, Volaris and Vivaaerobus - all of which are less than five years old and have lower cost structures than Mexicana - will fill some of the void on domestic runs and AeroMéxico and other competitors will no doubt add international flights. I'll definitely miss the direct runs back to Canada, though. It's possible some airlines such as Air Canada or Westjet will expand service, but the Canadian government's visa requirement for Mexican travelers dampened enthusiasm for flights to Canada and AeroMéxico abandoned its Canadian runs earlier this year due to a lack of demand.

UPDATE:

Mexicana has stopped selling tickets effective 6 p.m. Aug. 4 for travel on its mainline carrier, which flys international runs and many of the high-volume domestic routes such as Mexico City-Monterrey, Mexico City-Cancún and Mexico City-Tijuana. The company said in a statement that it will continue selling tickets for domestic travel on its subsidiaries Mexicana Click and Mexicana Link as the operations of those airlines is unaffected by the financial and labour woes of Compañía Mexicana de Aviación.

Mexicana employees about to get a haircut

Compañia Mexicana de Aviación has filed for bankruptcy protection in both Mexico and the United States, in a move the Wall Street Journey said in a cheeky headline, "Wards off the repo man."

Mexicana de Aviación wants its pilots and flight attendants to take pay cuts of roughly 40 percent in order to keep the company from going broke. The Mexicana employees rejected the proposed paycuts on Aug. 2 - along with an offer to buy the mainline part of the airline for just 1 peso.

Financial problems and subsequent labour unrest are just the latest patches of turbulence for Mexicana, an 87-year-old airline that company officials say has lost more than four billion pesos since being re-privatized in 2005.

The airline on Aug. 2 canceled service on three runs, reduced frequencies on others and altered routing on many flights, which will now make a stop in Mexico City. Creditors had its planes held in Calgary, Montreal and Chicago. Mexicana says its operations will carry on as scheduled and its employees' unions say their members won't stop working.

Mexicana management says cuts need to made immediately for the carrier to survive. It's subsidiaries Mexicana Click, which operates many domestic runs, and Mexicana Link - a commuter-jet airline - are unaffected by the turbulence.

Pilots at Mexicana earn US $216,000 per year, while flight attendants earn US $52,000 per year. Under the management plan, pilots would earn US $127,000 per year. Flight attendants would earn $32,000 per year.

The company outlined plans to slash its labour force by 40 percent, too. The pilots' union said the company was distributing "inexact" statistics. It also said, "It's a shame they value it for one peso."

The federal government has declined to become involved in Mexicana's problems.

Is Mexicana de Aviación about to go broke?

2010-08-02T09:47:00.003-05:00

A jet from the defunct carrier Avolar sits by the terminal at the Oaxaca airport

Airline pilots and staff marched through Terminal 1 of the Mexico City airport on Sunday, demanding that money-losing carrier Mexicana de Aviación leave its employees' generous salary and benefit packages intact and stating emphatically that they're not to blame for the company's problems.

In short, Mexicana is going broke and is asking pilots and flight attendants to take cuts to their salaries and benefits. The airline also proposed job cuts and asked that its pilots buy the airline for one peso (less than 10 cents.) The pilots rejected those offers.

The pilots and flight attendants at Mexicana are very well paid - and their salaries are among the most lavish in the industry. The Mural newspaper reported Mexicana pilots earn more than $220,000 per year - far more than their counterparts in the U.S., who earn an average of $150,000 per year. Mexicana is asking its pilots to take a 41 percent pay cut. Flight attendants were asked to take a similar pay cut from their wages of $52,000 per year.

Mexicana is deeply in debt and a Canadian creditor recently had two Mexican carriers planes ordered held while at airports in Calgary and Montreal, forcing the cancellation of flights. Any problems at Mexican only impact the mainline operations, which is responsible foreign flights and many of the runs between Mexico City and the destinations of Tijuana, Monterrey and Cancún. Domestic operations on Mexicana subsidiaries Mexicana Click and Mexicana Link are unaffected and employee costs on those fleets are substantially less than on the mainline carrier.

All of the Mexicana action comes as the FAA downgrades Mexico's air safety rating. It launched the review following the November 2008 crash of a private jet in the swank Lomas de Chaputepec neighbourhood that claimed the life of the then interior minister Juan Camilo Mouriño.

The Mexican aviation has long been financially troubled as Mexicana and rival AeroMéxico were government-owned, but operated as separate units, from the mid 1990s - following the peso crisis - until Mexicana was sold in 2005. AeroMéxico was sold in 2007. Other airlines to go bust in recent years include AeroCalifornia - famed for flying old planes and providing tardy service - Aerolineas Azteca, Aviacsa, Alma de México and Avolar.

Two lower-cost airlines have flourished, however: Interjet and Volaris - both of whose costs are much lower than those at Mexicana or AeroMéxico. Carlos Slim recently sold his share of Volaris, prompting questions about the state of the industry. (Slim's not known to abandon a good investment.)

Or perhaps aviation is just too competitive. Slim, of course, has become fabulously wealthy operating in the competition free - at least it was for decades - domestic telecommunications market. (Slim likes to boast how his companies face stiff competition in other markets and is facing growing competition in Mexico.) But while the government abides businessmen like Slim and monopolistic companies in sectors such as broadcasting, brewing and cement, it steadfastly refuses to allow consolidation in the aviation sector and permit the creation of a flag carrier.

With Interjet and Volaris on the scene, the new flag carrier would face at least some competition from companies being operated much more efficiently than either AeroMéxico or Mexicana. But for mysterious reasons, aviation remains the one industry in which the government refuses to allow consolidation.

Supposed "Jefe Diego" letter and photo surface

2010-07-26T21:35:00.008-05:00

A supposed photo of missing former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos surfaced online, suggesting the National Action Party (PAN) politician and Mexican legal bigwig is alive - if not well.

The photo, made public by journalist José Cárdenas of Raido Formula, shows a blindfolded, shirtless and disheveled Fernández de Cevallos, 69, holding a copy of the muckraking news weekly, Proceso, which features his image on the cover. That image ran with the headline, "Diego's dark history," and contained an unflattering account of the political, business and legal dealings of a figure deeply despised by the Mexican left and unpopular in some circles of the governing PAN.

Cárdenas also produced a letter supposedly written by Fernández de Cevallos to his family. The letter - which lacks any sort of polish or the prose for which Fernández de Cevallos, a gifted orator, is known - begins with an admonishment to quit penny pinching and to pay any ransom as quickly as possible. It reads:

"I can't describe the hell that your father is living and I don't know much longer I'll hold on. Therefore, I ask that you make your best effort as quickly as possible. They have all the time in the world.

"... They tell me that they made you a concrete proposal and that you haven't answered them with a reasonable counter offer. You have to do it now, immediately.

" ... Any advice that you're poor is absurd and will be fatal."

Diego then supposedly writes of his poor health, saying:

"I've fainted various times and have chest pains despite [taking] a lot of 'Tenormin' and Aspirin. You know that I've not hot had good heart health since the operation.

"I have lost weight and my fatigue is each day worse. Therefore, time if of the essence."

He ends the letter with an urgent plea:

"Don't try to diminish the amount that is attributed to my net worth. That's irrelevant. What's urgently needed is that you make a counter proposal that's as high as you are able [to make] and I'm sure that they will negotiate. What is urgently needed are serious negotiations to manage the delivery of money and my freedom."

The admonishment to pay follows reports of the supposed kidnappers demanding a ransom of $50 million and the family offering $30 million in exchange. Negotiations reportedly went cold afterward.

Fernández de Cevallos - known as "El Jefe Diego," or "Diego the Boss" - disappeared more than two months ago from his ranch in the state of Querétaro, several hours to the northwest of Mexico City. His family has kept quiet, except to ask that federal and state officials withdraw from any investigations - this, in spite of the fact that close legal and political associates of Fernández de Cevallos - Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez and the recently replaced interior minister, Fernando Gómez-Mont - occupied top positions in the federal cabinet at the time of his disappearance.

Speculation has been rife about who might have abducted Fernández de Cevallos and for what motives. The EPR rebels denied any involvement, although security analyst have mentioned a supposed EPR splinter group as the kidnappers. A supposed email from the kidnappers - read by Cárdenas on his radio show - says much of what has been reported is false and that they have not lowered their demands.

If the photo is real, it should come as no surprise that it shows "El Jefe Diego - or, "Diego the Boss" - holding a Proceso issue suggesting he has amassed a fortune and wields influence over Mexican political and legal affairs.

The Proceso editorial line tilts left and Fernández de Cevallos is loathed by many on the Mexican left for his history of brokering deals with former president Carlos Salinas and later, while serving as a PAN senator from 2000 - 2006, winning big claims for corporate clients taking legal action against the federal government - often in a bid to win "amparos" (injunctions) against taxation measures.

Many reports falsely refer to Fernández de Cevallos as friends with Calderón, whose sister, then a Senator, promoted a bill known as the "Ley Anti-Diego" to curb Jefe Diego's moonlighting as a lawyer while he served in the Senate.

Xóchitl Gálvez gives it the "old college try"

2010-07-22T09:29:00.005-05:00

Xóchitl Gálvez, the PAN-PRD gubernatorial candidate in Hidalgo, awarded 10,000 pesos yesterday to the video best purporting to show irregularities in the July 4 state election, which the PRI won by a five-point margin - much closer than expected and especially close given the state government's backing of the PRI campaign. The Gálvez campaign has raised allegations of irregularities that range from vote buying to the police raiding one of her campaign buildings on election day to the PRI governor of the neighbouring State of Mexico sending in trailer-loads of giveaways for plying voters.

The award stunt was the latest action in her attempt to have the election overturned - something that hasn't happened on the state level since the electoral tribunal (Trife) overturned the 2003 election in Colima state. (Ironically, a 2008 municipal election was overturned in Zimapán, Hidalgo, site of a proposed toxic waste dump after the pro-dump PRI complained that the local priest had preached politics by the pulpit by voicing opposition to the project in his election day homily.)

Her odds of success in overturning the election are uncertain, but Gálvez has emerged from the July 4 elections as one of the nation's rising political stars.

The Gálvez campaign confronted an electoral machine operated by one of the most retrograde PRI state governments in the country - a place where the governor went so far as to change the state anthem to something glorifying the PRI and state media outlets, which are considered friendly to the PRI and, no doubt, dependent on state government advertising, gave the PRI campaign five times the coverage it gave her. She received less support and publicity from her own party backers than was given to similar coalitions running in Oaxaca and Puebla. Gálvez went so far as to remove her family from the state on the eve of the elections and mentioned having some campaign members threatened by Los Zetas.

She even had to deal with a scorned Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who demand the Labour Party (PT) pull out of any coalitions in Hidalgo because of her presumed closeness with former president Vicente Fox (in whose administration she served as commissioner of the Indigenous Communities Development Commission).

"She gave it the old college try," said ITAM political science professor Federico Estévez.

Whether or not she wins in the tribunals, Gálvez - who is not a member of any political party - has emerged as one of the political stars of the July 4 elections and should be factor in Mexican politics over the coming years.

The job nobody wants

2010-07-20T21:27:00.007-05:00

Former PAN president Germán Martínez and Dep. Josefina Vázquez Mota speak at a spring 2009 press conference.

Proponents of the suddenly popular and surprisingly cohesive PAN-PRD alliances have set their sights on taking the State of Mexico next year - and subsequently derailing the presidential aspirations of the outgoing PRI governor, Enrique Peña Nieto. But the proponents continue encountering a decided lacked of enthusiasm from any of the potential candidates, some of whom would prefer running for the presidency in 2012 instead of being relegated to a provincial backwater in Toluca.

Writing in the newspaper El Universal, columnist Salvador García Soto mentioned former UNAM rector Juan Ramón de la Fuente as the latest big name to demur on the possibility of running next year in the State of Mexico. The former rector, García Soto writes, is being courted by the coalition, but would prefer to run on the federal level as a "citizen candidate." (Mexico doesn't allow independent candidacies so "citizen candidates" are considered party candidates who lack party membership cards.)

García mentioned sporting goods retail mogul-turned-anti-crime fighter Alejandro Martí as another potential "citizen candidate" in the State of Mexico. Martí became prominent in the summer of 2008, when public outrage surged after it was revealed his teenage son Fernando Martí was kidnapped and murdered, even though a ransom had been paid.

PAN leader in the Chamber of Deputies, Josefina Vázquez Mota, has frequently been mentioned as a possible candidate, too. She recently let it be known she has no interest in running for governor of the State of Mexico, however - even though she is perhaps the best-known panísta in the state, which is the most populous in the country and surrounds Mexico City on three sides.

De la Fuente presided over the UNAM for much of the last decade. He took office in the wake of a student strike over a proposed tuition increase - which was unreasonably lengthened by the obstructionism of a small band of resident radicals, who tarnished the school's reputation - and led it back to reasonable levels of respect in national and international circles. (UNAM still charges no tuition.)

A psychiatrist by training, de la Fuente has been promoted as a possible unity candidate for Mexico City mayor in 2012 or president in the same year by some in the oft-disparate and oft-dysfunctional Mexican left.

Vázquez Mota has showed an equal lack of enthusiasm for running in the State of Mexico, even though the PAN's central leadership and operatives in the presidency - who are known to dislike her and have aspirations for other potential 2012 presidential candidates - have encouraged her to move to the state level.

The former education and social development secretary could buck that pressure, however. Vazquez Mota draws relatively favourable poll numbers and is running just behind Sen. Santiago Creel - another Los Pinos enemy - for the PAN presidential nomination. PRD leader in the Chamber and for Mexico City mayor Alejandro Encinas has also been mentioned as another possible State of Mexico candidate.

All of the potential opposition candidates poll far below Peña Nieto the 2012 race - and none seems to want his current job.

Peña Nieto, meanwhile, continued with the public works narrative of his administration by inaugurating a hospital Monday in Chalco, a sprawling metropolis founded by squatters on the southeastern outskirts of Mexico City. The hospital was the 500th project his government has taken credit for completing - and many of the media outlets that have tirelessly gushed over his administration were there to cover the event. (It must be asked how many of these outlets have pages sponsored by the State of Mexico government.)

He emerged from the July 4 gubernatorial elections in worse shaped than he entered, however. Peña Nieto campaigned hard in places such as Oaxaca, Puebla and Hidalgo with the idea that PRI governments in those states would back his 2012 presidential run - no doubt, using public funds. (The PRI lost in Oaxaca and Puebla, while the Hidalgo election is being contested to the electoral tribunal.)

But some in the PRI think the losses in other places might help to keep the State of Mexico in party hands as Peña Nieto will be less able to impose a preferred candidate through the "dedazo" - a practice that backed fired horribly on the PRI in Oaxaca and Puebla - and potential infighting in the state will thus be kept to a minimum.

More electoral twists for 2011?

2010-07-16T15:20:00.004-05:00

How much does State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto fear the formation of anti-PRI electoral alliance for the July 2011 gubernatorial race in his home state? Apparently enough to postpone the election date to July 2012, when the country chooses a new president - and he expects to romp to victory as the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate.

Writing in the Mexico City newspaper La Razón, political columnist Adrián Trejo floated the idea of Peña Nieto promoting a constitutional amendment so that the State of Mexico would hold future gubernatorial elections at the same time as federal elections. The state already holds legislative and municipal elections at the same time as the presidential contest and other states such as Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Morelos and the Federal District already hold gubernatorial elections the same day.

The scenario, according to Trejo, would unfold as follows:

The heavily PRI state legislature approves changing the election date to July 2012. Peña Nieto then resigns Sept. 15, one year ahead of his previously scheduled departure from office. A successor appointed by the legislature would serve out the remainder of the extended term.

Trejo says the idea is being studied, although it would bring a high political cost. He cited no specific sources for his July 16 column and insisted such a change to the gubernatorial election date would be legal.

The possible maneuvering reflects the enormous importance of the State of Mexico in national politics and how its next gubernatorial election is expected to have national implications.

Emboldened by the recent electoral successes of PAN-PRD alliances in Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, the PAN and PRD now are gunning for the State of Mexico as winning the country's most populous state would derail Peña Nieto's presidential aspirations.

The PRI recognizes the importance of retaining the State of Mexico, too. PRI president Beatriz Paredes brokered a deal last fall with PAN president César Nava to avoid any such coalitions in the State of Mexico in exchange for the PRI in the Chamber of Deputies supporting passage of the 2010 federal budget. (The PAN reneging on the deal prompted the resignation of the then-interior minister Fernando Gómez-Mont from the PAN and hastened his departure from cabinet.)

It remains to be seen what happens in the State of Mexico, but the maneuvering for the top political prize of 2011 is only just beginning.

Gómez-Mont resigns - to no one's surprise

2010-07-14T20:22:00.015-05:00

Fernando Gómez-Mont (left) appears at a 2008 press conference with then-PAN president Germán Martínez. Gómez-Mont subsequently became interior minister, but resigned his position July 14.

Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont resigned Wednesday evening, barely a week after three of the PAN-PRD electoral alliances he had harshly criticized - and ultimately cited as motives for resigning from the PAN - unseated retrograde PRI state governments in Oaxaca and Puebla and scored an unlikely victory in Sinaloa.

President Felipe Calderón promptly unveiled a new interior minister, former Baja California government secretary José Francisco Blake Mora - who was barely a week removed from presiding over a PAN electoral debacle in his home state, where the PRI won all five municipalities, including Tijuana, and claimed a majority in the state legislature.

Blake Mora arrives in the Interior Ministry - arguably the most powerful of the federal ministries - with only modest experience in federal politics, having served in the Chamber of Deputies, Baja California legislature and Tijuana city council. The PAN has governed Baja California since 1989.

The new interior minister worked as a Calderón's political operator in the Chamber of Deputies early in the last decade and gained notoriety for spearheading an unsuccessful move to strip lawmakers belonging to the oil workers' union - which was engulfed in the Pemexgate scandal - of their immunity from prosecution. He reportedly spurned previous invites to serve in the federal cabinet.

The departure of Gómez-Mont came as part of a larger cabinet shuffle in which the president replaced one of his closest advisers, Patricia Flores, from Los Pinos and tapped Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos to replace her as director of the president's office.

Flores was expected to be named ambassador to Portugal. Ruiz raised hackles in 2008 for suggesting that if Calderón hadn't won in 2006, narcos would be running the country.

It marked the fourth time in less than four years that Calderón named a new interior minister. Gómez-Mont replaced Juan Camilo Mouriño - Calderón's closest ally during the early years of his administration - in November 2008 after Mouriño perished in a plane crash. Mouriño had replaced current Chamber speaker Francisco Ramirez Acuña, who was deemed a poor political negotiator.

No one ever questioned Gómez-Mont's negotiating talents. He formed a formidable PAN negotiating tag-team with his legal and political mentor, the currently missing former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos - who is eroneously mentioned in many press reports as being a close friend of Calderón. They negotiated many of the early electoral reforms that led to an independent IFE and brokered many deals with the administration of then-president Carlos Salinas.

Gómez-Mont's appointment to the Interior Ministry was interpreted at the time as an attempt by Calderón to build party unity by reaching out to PAN factions that never embraced his 2006 candidacy.

But the Gómez-Mont later resigned from the PAN over the party's willingness to broker alliances with the PRD - a party which has never accepted the 2006 election results. Both Gómez-Mont and Fernández de Cevallos strongly disliked the Mexican left, according to political observers. He also infamously served as "witness" to a deal between the PAN president César Nava and PRI president Beatriz Paredes to have no coalitions next year in the State of Mexico - all in exchange for the PRI backing a 2010 budget with a sales tax increase. It was believed many in the PRI - including Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz - had tried broking deals with Gómez-Mont to avoid the formation of PAN-PRD alliances.

Gómez-Mont, says analyst Pedro Isnardo de la Cruz of the UNAM political science department, presented problems in his role of a negotiator between the presidency and the other political parties. The PRD distrusted him - and blamed him, without offering proof, of having its gubernatorial candidate in Quintana Roo arrested on organized crime charges - while parts of the PRI viewed him as biased toward the faction loyal to State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto.

Gómez-Mont is expected to return to private practice as one of the country's most esteemed criminal defence lawyers.

Where the heck is "El Jefe Diego"?

2010-07-14T15:02:00.001-05:00

Former PAN presidential candidate and legal bigwig Diego Fernández de Cevallos - better known as "El Jefe Diego," or Diego the Boss - disappeared from his ranch in the state of Querétaro 60 days ago. His fate remains uncertain and the domain of much speculation - the most colourful of which involved the FARC supposedly having a hand in his disappearance.

El Universal columnist Katia D'Artigues sums up the current thinking on the case in a July 14 column. Among her points:

1. Diego was kidnapped by professions, who extracted a tracking chip from his body.

2. The kidnappers demanded $50 million, but negotiations are now in the $30 million range.

3. Foreigners are carrying out the negotiations as the Attorney General's Office (PGR) and state authorities withdrew from the case early on at the behest of Diego's family. The captors communicate with the family through messages left at churches and emails.

4. The EPR rebels - blamed for the 2007 bomb attacks on Pemex pipelines - has denied any involvement. "Security experts" say an EPR splinter group known as the Revolutionary Democratic Tendency (TDR) has emerged and might be involved.

In an El Universal column published July 13, Salvador García Soto raised the possibility of the kidnapping being motivated by revenge and linked to the drug trade.

"Revenge for a failed, multi-million (dollar) litigation by (Diego's) powerful law firm, Férnandez de Cevallos y Alba, S.A., that involves a group of businessmen linked to narcotics trafficking in Quintana Roo, is the version that is being given in Mexican and U.S. military intelligence circles to explain the kidnapping," García wrote.

Whatever the truth, what is known - and what is provoking the most disquiet in some cirlces - is the silence from the federal government and the willingness of law enforcement and judicial officials to withdraw from perhaps the most prominent kidnapping case of the past five years. Some legal experts also have questioned the constitutionality of such a move by the PGR.

Ironically, Diego - as I mentioned in a previous post - presides over a faction in the PAN that has placed two of his acolytes: Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont and Attorney General Arturo Chávez, in two of the country's top cabinet positions and in positions responsible for security matters. Now the pair are on the sidelines as their political mentor is held captive by professionals demanding an enormous sum of money - or so we're told.

Expect the case to grow ever the more curious over the coming 60 days.

Slim buys (another) gold mine

2010-07-13T10:03:00.005-05:00

The slogan outside this seafood restaurant in the Col. Roma goes by the slogan, "The only one that doesn't belong to Carlos Slim."

Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, bought a gold mine yesterday - literally.

Slim purchased an actual gold mine in the state of Aguascalientes for $25 million from the Canadian company, Goldgroup Mining, Inc. With gold prices hovering above $1,200 per ounce, the mine should handsomely pad his fortune, which Forbes magazine estimated at $53.5 billion in its most recent survey of the world's wealthiest individuals.

Although not a miner, Slim knows plenty about gold mines.

The purchase comes 20 years after Slim purchased the gold mine responsible for generating much of his fortune: Teléfonos de México - better known as Telemex, the national telephone monopoly.

Through Telmex and the Telmex wireless spinoff, América Movil (Telcel), Slim came to dominate the Mexican economy. At one point it was estimated his companies accounted for one-third of the value of the Mexican stock exchange, while his net worth is equal to roughly seven percent of the country's GDP.

His reach has extended into other countries, too. Telmex and América Movil now compete - actually compete - successfully in other parts of Latin America. And Slim made a $250 million investment in The New York Times, which will pay him a 14 percent return - a situation the jailed former newspaper baron Conrad Black described as "a loan-shark's lifeline." (I disagree with Lord Black's other assessments of the Times, however.)

Slim won control of Telmex through an auction in 1990 as the then-administration of former president Carlos Salinas privatized a raft of government companies. The aptly-named Slim - who name fails to describe his wallet - claimed the crown jewel of the assets being privatized, along with permission to operate Telmex as a monopoly for at least seven years.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Handicapping 2011

2010-07-11T14:48:00.003-05:00

The success of the five PAN-PRD alliances in the July 4 gubernatorial elections has fomented talk of similar arrangements being made for the 2011 gubernatorial and local elections scheduled in at least five states - and most notably in the State of Mexico, where deposing the PRI in the country's most populous jurisdiction would severely diminish the presidential aspirations of Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto.

Already, PAN president César Nava and his PRD counterpart Jesús Ortega - both men having been spared certain destitution because of the electoral successes of their previously maligned alliances - have called for a mega-alliance in the State of Mexico. Potential candidates for the State of Mexico include PAN leader in the Chamber of Deputies, Josefina Vazquez Mota - who isn't anxious to be dispatched to Toluca and thus removed from the presidential race (a move long-promoted by her enemies in Los Pinos) - and former Mexico City mayor and current PRD leader in the Chamber, Alejandro Encinas.

Peña Nieto says he isn't scared of any alliances - a disengenuous position made all the more believable by his striking a secret deal last fall with Nava, PRI president Beatriz Paredes and Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont that called for his block of lawmakers in the Chamber to support the 2010 federal budget in exchange for no alliances being formed in the State of Mexico.

But some commentators have cast doubt on the potential success of an alliance in the State of Mexico and say that the elections of 2011 could prove especially disastrous for the PRD - which might need to form alliances in its own states to stave off a resurgent PRI.

Writing in the newspaper Milenio, Federico Berrueto points to polling data suggesting that the success of the winning alliances in Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa depended more on the unpopularity of the incumbent PRI governors than any other factors.

Citing survey data from GCE - which polls for Milenio - Berrueto listed some of the states with the least-popular governors prior to the elections (with 32 signifying last place):

32. Oaxaca (PRI)
31. Aguascalientes (PAN)
28. Zacatecas (PRD)
27. Puebla (PRI)
26. Tlaxcala (PAN)

In all five states, the incumbent party lost. On the other end of the survey, the states with popular governors holding elections included:

2. Tamaulipas (PRI)
5. Veracruz (PRI)
6. Quintana Roo (PRI)
10. Durango (PRI)
11. Hidalgo (PRI)

The PRI won all five races on July, although its victories in Durango and Hidalgo have been questioned. (In Durango, teachers loyal to the PRI governor of neighbouring Coahuila - who ranked most popular in the CGE survey - poured into the state and helped deliver a narrow victory of less than two percentage points. In Hidalgo, the PAN-PRD coalition somehow managed to claim 45 percent of the vote despite running against a shadowy PRI machine that went so far as to have an opposition campaign office raided by state police on election day morning.)

In the GCE survey, Peña Nieto ranked 12, suggesting the PRI is in for a tight race next year in the State of Mexico.

Ironically, PRD is shaping up as the party with the worst prospects for the coming year. The PRD faces elections in its strongholds of Baja California Sur and Guerrero, which it won in 2005 in an outcome the Reforma newspaper declared, "The end of the Outlaw Mexico."

In the GCE survey, the PRD governors of Baja California Sur and Guerrero ranked 22 and 23 respectively. The PRD is divided in both states and, in 2009, it lost ground to the PRI in Guerrero, which had been divided previously, but made an impressive comeback and even claimed the mayor's office in Acapulco. (Nayarit, governed by the PRI, holds elections in 2011, too.)

Even worse for the PRD, legislative and municipal elections are slated for next fall in Michoacán, where PRD Gov. Leonel Godoy ranks 30 - third worst - on the survey.

Godoy already has discarded the possibility of a coalition in Michoacán - home state of President Felipe Calderón, but a place where the paniísta has failed to establish a significant political base.

The prospect of a resurgent PRI might change Godoy's mind, but chances are that many in the PRD would be loath to broker a deal that so blatently favoured the president.

Tense elections yield unexpected political change in Mexico

2010-07-07T10:06:00.004-05:00

DAVID AGREN

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico – Cristian Licona, an unemployed high school graduate, voted for the first time ever in the northern and oft-violent state of Tamaulipas, where, barely a week earlier, the gubernatorial front-runner, Rodolfo Torre Cantu of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was gunned down in an attack blamed on warring drug cartels. He seemed uncertain if he was doing the right thing, however.

“I’m voting with the faith that somehow the country changes ... that the violence ends,” he said after casting a ballot in the state capital Ciudad Victoria.

Licona was among the minority as a nearly 75 percent of eligible voters in Tamaulipas residents stayed away from the polls on July 4, a reflection of the tense atmosphere in a state with more than 300 murders attributed to the cartels so far this year.

Residents in most of the 11 other states holding gubernatorial races the same day showed more enthusiasm, however, even though the campaigns were often overshadowed by violence, perceptions of politically motivated police action and allegations of vote buying and other electoral vices being used.

The races delivered mixed results with both the resurgent PRI and five alliances -- comprised of left-wing parties joining forces with President Felipe Calderon’s centre-right National Action Party (PAN) -- claiming significant victories. But the races also delivered democratic changes not witnessed in Mexico since 2000, when Vicente Fox and the PAN ended 71-years of uninterrupted PRI rule on the national level.

The alliances scored major victories in the southeastern states of Oaxaca and Puebla, two bastions of retrograde PRI politics notorious for the political persecution of opposition parties and social movements, the use of social programs for partisan ends and the continued rule by caciques (local strongmen).

“Democracy won” on Sunday, said political science professor Aldo Munoz Armenta of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

“It’s a surprise (the coalitions won) because state governments used so much public money against them.”

The PRI had ruled for more than 80 consecutive years in Oaxaca, where Gov. Ulises Ruiz was declared responsible by the Supreme Court for human rights violations in cracking down on a 2006 uprising against his government, while in Puebla, outgoing Gov. Mario Marin was caught four years ago in leaked telephone conversations scheming to railroad a prominent journalist, Lydia Cacho, for writing supposedly defaming a powerful businessman – all in exchange for a bottle of cognac.

“The two most questioned governors in Mexico lost. No one is going to cry over them,” wrote columnist Ciro Gomez Leyva in the newspaper Milenio of the PRI losses in Oaxaca and Puebla and the two outgoing governors.

Still, the PRI won and was leading in nine of the gubernatorial races on Sunday, but pre-election polls had suggested the possibility of the party running the table. Late interventions by Calderon and PRI missteps in reacting to the Tamaulipas assassination possibly swayed some of the races, however.

The president recently introduced measures such as simplifying tax compliance and eliminating a hated vehicle tax and took high-profile trips during the campaign to the United States and Canada to denounce anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and the still-resented Canadian decision to impose visas on Mexican travellers.

After the assassination of Torre Cantu, Calderon called for a national dialogue over security, but some in the PRI spurned the invitations and disparaged the president.

The president still faces a complicated political landscape over the final two and a half years of his administration. And the PRI still leads early polls for the 2012 presidential contest and controls a majority of Mexico’s 31 state governments and the lower house of Congress, which has been slow to address Calderon’s proposed reforms to labour laws and the political system and has showed only tepid enthusiasm for his ongoing crackdown on the drug cartels.

But political observers say the country changed with Sunday's vote. "Alternation in governance is now a fact in Mexico," Munoz said.

Coalitions claim early victories

2010-07-04T19:45:00.004-05:00

UPDATE

The alliances appear to have toppled the PRI in Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, although the votes are still being tabulated. The PRI is leading in the other nine states and should take Tlaxcala and Aguascalientes from the PAN and Zacatecas from the PRD. It also is leading in municipal races being held in the PAN stronghold of Baja California - most notably in Tijuana.

Former PRD national executive committee member Fernando Belnauzarán succinctly summed up the early results with the Twitter posting: Without the alliances, the PRI has a clean sweep.

The multi-party coalitions formed to slay the Institutional Revolutionary Party in six states have declared victory in Oaxaca and Puebla, potentially ending 80 years of PRI rule in two of the country's most notorious political backwaters.

Exit polls give the PAN-PRD-PT-Convergence coalition the lead in Oaxaca. It remains to be seen if the exit polls prove accurate as Oaxaca - where the geography resembles a crumpled-up piece of paper and rural villages are difficult to access - is considered difficult to poll. The state electoral institute also isn't considered especially trustworthy by opposition parties and the PRI is legendary for marshaling its vote.

For its part PRI officials in Oaxaca have already rejected any talk that the party had lost. But political observers and some in the opposition say the PRI was forced to campaign especially hard this time around, suggesting its leadership knew the race would be tight.

Coalition candidate Gabino Cué ran a strong campaign in Oaxaca and seemed able to tap an enormous discontent with Gov. Ulises Ruiz, who developed a sordid reputation for repression and presiding over a crackdown on striking teachers that led to months of violent protests in the state capital. The PRI candidate Eviel Pérez Magaña also came across as being a subordinate of Ruiz - and someone who would be easily manipulated by Ruiz while holding office.

The coalition also claimed victories in Durango and Tlaxcala, but exit polls couldn't confirm those claims - and one poll published by Excélsior gave the PRI the advantage in Tlaxcala.

In the states holding gubernatorial elections July 4, the PRI appeared set to roll. It led in Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Veracruz and Quintana Roo. If the polls prove accurate, it would take Aguascalientes from the PAN and Zacatecas from the PRD.

But losing Oaxaca especially hurts the PRI, mainly in terms of prestige as it had been a state the party had invested heavily in holding. It was deemed so important that the party's main attraction, State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto campaigned on several occasions in Oaxaca. Some local paníistas suggested a deal was afoot in which Peña Nieto would campaign heavily in Oaxaca and back Ruiz for the PRI presidency. Peña Nieto would, in turn, gain the backing of a major PRI state in his bid for the 2012 presidential nomination - and access to the state budget in a jurisdiction with little transparency to promote his candidacy.

The coalition winning Oaxaca sends a message that the PRI - which had rolled on the local level in recent years - is not invincible, which is why the coalition parties will take great pleasure in this potential victory, even though they lost two state governorships. It also sets the stage for a mega-coalition next year in the State of Mexico, where a defeat of the PRI might damage Enrique Peña Nieto's presidential aspirations.

It must also be said that any coalition success saves the jobs of PAN president César Nava and PRD president Jesús Ortega - and makes Andrés Manuel López Obrador look like a hypocrite as he has blasted the PRI as a great looming danger, but did his best to scuttle any anti-PRI alliances. (It's suspected, though, AMLO's tours through the "Usos y Costumbres" communities of Oaxaca might have paid dividends for the coalitions and the same network that got out the vote for him in Oaxaca in 2006 might have been revived. Many of AMLO's people were also less intransigent than him and participated in the coalitions.)

Now comes the hard part for any coalition: Governing. Flavio Sosa, the APPO protest leader from 2006, now goes into the state legislature, sitting in a caucus with the PAN, a party many in the Oaxaca social movements loath - although just perhaps slightly less than the PRI, which is why the coalition appears to have won.

Electoral vices hard to break

2010-07-03T18:57:00.000-05:00

This is an expanded explanation of electoral vices such as vote buying and coercion that I wrote about in a recent Canwest News Service story. (Story link in title.)

The 10th anniversary of the Vicente Fox's historic toppling of the Institutional Revolutionary Party passed on July 2. Two days after that, 12 states hold gubernatorial elections widely expected to result in a PRI landslide.

Much of Fox's and the National Action Party's original agenda of change has gone unfulfilled - and toppling the PRI remains the most remarkable accomplishment. Even less of their agenda of change happened on the state level, where governors now preside over fiefdoms lacking much in the way of transparency - or even impartial electoral institutions.

The lead-up to the July 4 elections have highlighted the lack of change - and also exposed many of the lingering electoral vices that have been hard to break such as vote buying and coercion. These vices have been rife of late, not just been confined to the PRI campaign, and, according to some observers, become more rampant.

Jeffrey Weldon, director of the political science department at ITAM, attributes a large part of the problem to the electoral reforms of 2007, which gave the parties free radio and television advertising and barred political messages from non-political players from the airwaves.

Parties used to spend hundreds of millions of pesos on electronic advertising, but now have extra cash since such ads are now distributed to the parties for free based on a formula that takes into account their previous electoral performances. The extra money now is spent on the "ground game," Weldon says.

"The advantage of the previous system is that everyone had to spend their money on TV, which is all open. Everyone sees what your doing and they didn’t have much money left over to spend on the ground game. It’s the ground game where there’s a lot of fraud,” he explains.

“These things are a lot worse than they used to be and they’ve learned new tricks that they didn’t have to use before.”

Much of the criticism for the vices focuses on state governors, who became powerful over the the past decade and, in many places, effectively run the campaigns of their preferred successors.

Tapes also surfaces in places such as Veracruz and Oaxaca purporting to show two PRI governors, Fidel Herrera and Ulises Ruiz, scheming to win votes for the PRI gubernatorial campaigns and, in the case of the two-time lottery winner Herrera, using government social programs for political ends.

The PRI has countered that the federal government operates social programs such as Oportunidades (a conditional cash transfer program for the poorest Mexican families) with electoral aims and has branded the Social Development Secretariat (Sedesol), "The electoral arm of the PAN." PRI Senate leader Manlio Fabio Beltrones long has pushed for Sedesol to be dissolved and its duties - such as giving cash to Oportunidades recipients - be sent to the state level, where the PRI controls more than half of the governments.

Weldon points out, however, "The federal government doesn’t have money to do vote buying," and that the governors "have taken control of the giving away process."

NO PRI MONOPOLY
Many political observers point out that governors from other parties regularly engage in such vices as vote buying and coercion, too.

"What the PAN denounces in Oaxaca the PAN does in Tlaxcala ... and the PRD does in Mexico City," says Aldo Muñoz Armenta, political science professor of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

In Tlaxcala, the PAN leadership has given governor Hector Ruiz free rein to run the party's gubernatorial campaign - which the PAN could win, a possible lesson for a party rife with dissension over the Felipe Calderon-loyal central leadership's eagerness to meddle in local matters. Ruiz has been accused of putting government resources toward the PAN campaign. (Look to Aguascalientes, where the PAN is poised to lose, along with San Luis Potosí, Mazatlán and Mérida for examples of national party meddling leading to electoral disasters.)

In Zacatecas, where the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) is unravelling and expected to lose the governorship to the PRI, the magazine Proceso reported on a video showing state employees plying farmers with cheques and pre-election giveaways.

Other factors may also be at work, including structural differences between federal and state politics and governors now having more money to give away - presumably for legitimate public works.

"There’s an enormous amount of pork being delivered, (more than) in the past," says Federico Estévez, political science professor at ITAM. "There’s a lot of vote-buying out there, but there’s also a lot of public works."

And on the state level, he points out that many governors have the luxury of depending on legislatures split between just two parties as very few states - with the possible exceptions of Michoacan, Tlaxcala, Morelos and Chiapas - feature anything other than two-party political systems. (Mexico City might be the oddest since it's perhaps the only place in the country with PRD-PAN battles as opposed to the usually PRI-PRD or PRI-PAN showdowns. The 2006 federal race between a strong PAN and a strong PRD could be a historical aberration.)

"Governors are taking advantage of their electoral arithmetic," he says. "You don't have much blocking in the states."

Ultimately, Estévez says the problems have been in the democratic reforms, which operated on many false assumptions.

"The flaw isn’t with the governors. The flaw is with the political transition, the democratic reforms," he says.

"They always assumed that what happened at the national level would be replicated inevitably in local politics."

Sympathy for the PRI?

2010-07-01T08:29:00.001-05:00

Priístas head for the exits after a June 26 campaign rally in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, featuring State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto.

Federico Arreola, whose incessant tweets - almost all of the anti-Calderón, pro-López Obrador variety - can be insufferable, often pens excellent columns for Sendero del Peje, a news organization with obvious López Obrador sympathies.

In his July 1 column, he calls the June 28 assassination of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantú in Tamaulipas the party's only significant "campaign act" in any of the 12 state and local elections scheduled for July 4.

A series of leaked phone conversations, suggesting improper campaign meddling and use of social programs for electoral purposes by PRI governors, had cast an unfavourable light on the PRI in some of its most notorious bastions of retrograde politics such as Veracruz and Oaxaca. Now, instead of being viewed as presiding over evil empires and stopping at nothing to retain power, the PRI has some sympathy on its side.

Additionally, the assassination is expected to diminish voter turnout - a factor that always benefits the PRI.

"Fear," Arreloa wrote, "Works in favor of the PRI."

The party depends heavily in many states on its "voto duro" (firm vote) of loyalists, campesinos, unionized workers and government employees - whose jobs depend on the PRI retaining power. The voto duro, along with those lured by its vote-buying schemes and motivated by coercion, is usually enough to win (at the ballot box) unless voter turnout is hight.

The PRI, it must be said, knows how to turn out its vote and is famed in places such as Oaxaca for its year-round organizing and ability to ingratiate itself into the life of every small town and ejido in the state. As one priísta in Oaxaca told me recently, "The PRI organizes all the time. The other parties start organizing three months before an election."

Another factor to watch is the dependability of the PRI vote. As political science professor Federico Estévez of ITAM is fond of pointing out: The PRI vote has stayed roughly the same over the years, while the PAN and PRD votes have varied. The only exception to that might have been the 2006 presidential election, when the party had an unpopular candidate and many priístas drifted over to the campaigns of PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the PAN.

Expect the PRI's voto duro to deliver on July 4 and the PAN and PRD votes to remain low.

PRI gubernatorial candidate assassinated

2010-06-28T13:03:00.011-05:00

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas, Rodolfo Torre Cantú, was assassinated June 28 while heading for the airport in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria.

Torre was leading all the polls by a wide margin in what had become one of Mexico's most violent states over the past six months. Over that time, narcotics-trafficking cartels - supposedly an alliance of the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana - had flooded the state with armed toughs to exterminate Los Zetas, the gang of rogue former soldiers that previously was the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.

The death of a gubernatorial candidate just seven days prior to statewide elections marks the most notable political assassination in Mexico since the 1994 murder of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana. The details and motives for Colosio's death still remain firmly in the domain of conspiracies more than 16 years later.

Torre's death also marks perhaps the most significant political murder since President Felipe Calderón launched his crackdown on the drug cartels in December 2006 - or, according to Patrick Corcorcan of the Gancho Blog, at least the most significant murder since Edgar Millán, acting director of the Federal Preventive Police, was gunned down in May 2008 by the Sinaloa Cartel.

Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and anti-drug prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos died in a November 2008 plane crash mere miles from Los Pinos (the president's residence) but the incident was ruled an accident and foul play ruled out.

Violence attributed to narcotics trafficking has been rife in Tamaulipas, which borders southern Texas and covers the most northeastern parts of Mexico. Some 20 bodies were discovered in the oil town of Ciudad Madero on June 11, while neighbouring Tampico had been gripped earlier in the spring by rumors of pending massacres and violent acts. The border region has been equally bad with shootouts and cartel-sponsored blockades of major thoroughfares. Journalists in many area now avoid any coverage organized crime activities and violent acts - deaths of journalist have occurred and two reporters from the news organization Milenio were kidnapped.

The cartel influence in the region is so rampant the Economist reported that bars in Reynosa serve Zeta-brand whisky.

The violence had negatively impacted campaigns for the July 4 elections. Opposition parties reported problems finding enough candidates willing run for public office. Those holding public office encountered problems, too: Many mayors in the border region reportedly live in the Río Grande Valley of Texas with their families and only cross into Tamaulipas for work purposes.

Q.R. gubernatorial race goes from farcical to tragic

2010-06-13T22:52:00.003-05:00

The federal electoral tribunal (Trife) has rejected a petition from jailed Quintana Roo gubernatorial candidate Gregorio "Greg" Sánchez to overturn a state electoral tribunal decision disqualifying him from the July 4 election. Sánchez, the mayor Benito Juárez - the municipality containing Cancún - faces drug, organized crime and money laundering charges. (Sánchez took a leave of absence from his mayoral post to pursue the gubernatorial election.)

Meanwhile, on June 13, a plane carrying staff members from the poll-leading, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Roberto Borge's campaign crashed in the jungle near Carrillo Puerto. Borges confirmed the crash in an interview with the newspaper Reforma, although the number of casualties - if any - was unknown.

The race in the fast-growing southeastern state has been beset by allegations of dirty politicking as the coalition of left-wing parties previously headed by Sánchez alleges he has been the victim of political persecution on the part of the state's PRI government and federal officials making politically motivated arrests under the pretenses of links to organized crime.

Sánchez was arrested in late May for having supposed links to the Beltrán Leyva cartel and Los Zetas, along with having unexplained riches in his accounts. Polls published since his arrest show the PRI holding more than a 30-point advantage and the PRD running even with the National Action Party (PAN).

The PRD-Labor Party-Convergence party coalition he heads has yet to name a successor, but it confirmed late on June 13 it would do so the following day and that the candidate would carry out no campaign activities. The coalition says it will vie for the entire gubernatorial race to be annulled.

Various officials in the coalition have said Sánchez would campaign from prison if necessary. His wife, Niurka Alba Sáliva Benítez, has been mentioned as a possible replacement, although her name has been linked by various media reports to rings smuggling Cuban migrants through Mexico.

The Attorney General's Office (PGR) has denied any suggestions his arrest was politically motivated and revealed that Greg and the PRD were warned in January that he was under investigation. Actions by the Sánchez campaign - such as recording videos prior to his arrest in which the gospel singer-turned-big city mayor proclaims his innocence - suggest they knew an investigation was ongoing. The Convergence party president in Quintana Roo revealed June 13 that it was recommended Sánchez go into hiding and run a virtual campaign.

The PRD has compared the arrest of Sánchez, currently jailed in the western state of Nayarit, to the arrests of some 28 public officials, including 10 mayors, in Michoacán a little more than a year ago - in a case commonly referred to as the "Michoacanzo." None of the officials has been convicted.

Faith and football on the eve of the World Cup

2010-06-10T22:15:00.007-05:00

"Now I see hunger," Mexican coach Javier Aguirre said of his squad, in comments published by the AP. "They want to write a chapter in history, right from the first day.

Let's hope so.

Mexico opens the World Cup June 11 in the tournament's inaugural match against host country South Africa. El Tri - as the team is known for its three-colour kit, the black version of which is sold out in Mexico - enters the tournament with high hopes, but a history of flaming out in the round of 16 and exiting the tournament in rather calamitous style. (The 2002 elimination by the United States would surely rank as the most notorious of those calamities.)

Some Mexicans are turning to faith - as they often do - on the eve of the tournament. Many of the faithful are flocking to the San Gabriel Arcangel parish near the Tacuba metro station in Mexico City, where they pray in front of a statue known as the Santo Niño de los Milagros for intervention. The statue is dressed in a Mexican team jersey, sewed by women who credit the santo niño with past miracles.

Past petitions for intervention appear to have gone unheeded; perhaps this year will be different. I wrote on faith and football for Canwest News Service; click on the post title to read the story.

PRD still backs "Greg" even if voters don't

2010-06-09T10:31:00.002-05:00

The PRD leadership and a coalition of left-wing parties known as the DIA continued backing their recently-arrested gubernatorial candidate in Quintana Roo, Gregorio "Greg" Sánchez, the mayor of Cancún, and has continued insisting his arrest late last month on drug, organized crime and money laundering charges is politically motivated.

Meanwhile, a new poll from GCE, published in the newspaper Milenio, shows the incumbent PRI with a commanding 30-point lead over the second place PAN candidate and the PRD-PT-Convergence coalition headed by Sánchez. The poll showed PRI candidate Roberto Borge having 51.5 per cent support, PAN candidate Alicia Ricalde, the mayor of Ilsa Mujeres, with 18.1 per cent and Sánchez's coalition drawing just 17.2 per cent

The Quintana Roo electoral institute (Ieqroo) disqualified Sánchez from the July 4 election and gave the coalition until June 8 to find a new candidate. The Dialogue for the Reconstruction of Mexico - the latest incarnation of a legislative coalition between the PRD-PT-Convergence party previously known as the Broad Progressive Front - said June 9 it would disregard the Iqeroo deadline and risk the possibility of having no candidate in the upcoming election.

"We'd rather lose votes than our principles," DIA coordinator Manuel Camacho Solis told reporters.

The arrest and disqualification of Sánchez has revived suspicions of the federal government using allegations of organized crime links to unduly influence the outcome of key elections. The Interior Ministry denies the allegations and the Attorney General's Office says the PRD and Sánchez were warned in January of its investigation.

Federal Police bust heads in Cananea

2010-06-07T15:03:00.012-05:00

Members of Mexico's mining and metalworkers' union show support for their fugitive leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, during a rally at union headquarters in Mexico City. Gómez is living in Vancouver to avoid apprehension on charges pertaining to the alleged mismanagement of a $55 million trust fund.

The Federal Police evicted the remaining striking workers at the giant copper pit in Cananea, Sonora, where miners loyal to fugitive mining union boss Napoleón Gómez Urrutia had shut down the lucrative Grupo México property for nearly three years. The miners originally went on strike over health and wage issues, but the labour stoppage became a show of support for Gómez, who is accused of misappropriating a $55 million workers' trust fund and has lived in Vancouver to avoid apprehension on fraud and embezzlement charges.

Mine owner Grupo México - a bitter enemy of Gómez Urrutia - charged that the strike at Cananea was nothing more than an attempt to pressure the Mexican government to drop charges against the union boss as the health and wage issues were resolved long ago. Other rivals of Gómez agreed.

"We regret that things were resolved in this way, (but) the only person to blame is Napoleón Gómez Urrutia," Carlos Pavón, the union's former director of political matters, told W Radio. "He never wanted to resolve the problem through dialogue. Napoleón always wanted to insert (the issue) of the apprehension orders against him."

Pavón was arrested in late 2008 for fraud and extortion and left the union a short time later.

The most recent raid on Cananea once again put the spotlight on Gómez Urrutia, perhaps the most colourful, controversial and maverick union leader of the past ten years.

Gómez is reviled by a group of dissidents for allegedly making off with their trust fund and was reputedly responsible for derailing the labour reforms proposed during the administration of former president Vicente Fox.

Chihuahua-based Veta de Plata, a cooperative of former mining union members and trust fund holders say Gomez has failed to provide an adequate explanation for what happened to their money and improperly dissolved the trust fund by acting as a signatory for both the union and the trust fund holders.

Court documents provided by the cooperative in 2008 show trust fund money being moved out of the country and being used to pay for shopping excursions in Dallas and personal credit card debts of Gómez's relatives.

Gómez's backers say the union's accounts have been audited and no mismanagement occurred.

The trust fund was established after the Cananea mine was privatized in 1989, when then-president Carlos Salina launched the widespread sale of many government-run enterprises. Workers' in a number of privatized mines received five percent of the shares, which were held in a trust fund.

Although controversial, Gómez draws fierce support from some quarters for his tough negotiating tactics, which produce contracts better than other unions - a rarity in a country notorious for wealthy union bosses and poorly paid workers, and a history of unions being little more than turn-out-the vote machines for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Supporters say Mexican mining and smelting executives still travel to Vancouver to negotiate collective agreements with him - even though he's not recognized by the Mexican government as a union leader.

"He's a different kind of union man," said Aldo Muñoz Armenta, a labour expert at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico in Toluca. Muñoz says many Mexican union contracts are based on the national minimum wage and the inflation rate, but Gómez - who previously ran the national mint and a government mining company in Autlán, Jalisco - would tie wages to the price of minerals.

The Interior Ministry said in a June 7 statement the operation began the previous day and was carried out by some 2,000 federal police officers; seven arrests were made for an arson at the mine. The Labour Secretariat had declared the strike illegal back in January 2008.

The mining union blasted the expulsion as illegal. A coalition of so-called "independent unions" - the telephone workers, electrical workers, UNAM workers and other unions generally not affiliated with either the PRI or governing National Action Party (PAN) - broke dialogue with the federal government in response to the raid. Foreign unions such as the USW, blasted the expulsion, too. The left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) promised demonstrations at the Supreme Court and outside the Grupo México offices in the upscale Polanco district to protest both the action at Cananea and the ongoing struggle of the SME, the union whose members were tossed out of work when the federal government closed down the money-losing and notoriously inefficient Mexico City utility, Luz y Fuerza, last fall.

POLITICALLY UNPOPULAR
The SME and its allies branded the decision to dissolve Luz y Fuerza, "Political," as the union's leadership - which would threaten disruptive strikes every spring that would have left Mexico City and the surrounding states in the dark - is considered close with scorned 2006 presidential runner up Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the nation's self-proclaimed "legitimate president." (It's suspected SME money helped finance López Obrador's "legitimate government.")

Independents unions such as the SME have backed the mine and metalworkers for various for reasons, including a mutual dislike of the conservative and pro-business PAN and an unwillingness to join PRI-affiliated labour groups such as the CROC, CROM and CTM, which have long been pillars in the PRI's corporatist system and headed by leaders accused of not acting in the best interest of the rank-and-file.

Muñoz says the recognition of union leaders is a "judicial process" in most countries, while in Mexico, "It's a political process."

The Labour Secretariat refused to recognize Gómez's 2008 re-election as leader of the mining union, saying he was not a member in good standing and he never worked as a miner - a prerequisite for assuming the position.

Gómez took over the union after the death of his father, Napoleón Gómez Sada nearly 10 years ago. The elder Gómez was extremely popular among the membership, including those now expressing a dislike for his son.

He assumed control after submitting a document to the Labour Secretariat saying that Gómez - who went to Oxford, was a pre-candidate for the 1992 PRI gubernatorial race in Nuevo León and would appear in the society pages of Monterrey-area society publications - worked in the accounting department of a gold mine in the state of Durango for the salary of 28 pesos per day.

Some union dissidents found that a little hard to believe, including one Veta de Plata member who called the story, "A lie as big as all of Texas."

Others fighting for labour rights in Mexico take an equally unfavourable view of Gómez, who has frequently accused Grupo México of "industrial homicide" for the February 2006 mine disaster at Pasta de Conchos in the northern state of Coahuila. The blast killed 65 miners; the bodies of 63 workers remain trapped in the coal mine.

"If Napoleón Gómez Urrutia were such a good union leader, Pasta de Conchos wouldn't have happened," said one widow, who lost her husband in the mine, told me in 2009. Another widows, Elvira Martínez, one of the most persistent advocates of having the bodies pulled from the mine, told me that many of the dead miners were not union members, but paid union dues and received little in return.

Christina Auerbach Benavides, a lawyer with the labour ministry of the Diocese of Saltillo, has worked with the widows since the mine disaster occurred. She says the mining union signed a joint health and safety report with the company and government just 12 days before the mine disaster.

She alleged in early 2010, "The union utilizes the subject of Pasta de Conchos when it wants to raise the issue of Napoleon Gomez."

The union and its Canadian backers - who include NDP leader Jack Layton - have lauded Gómez for trying to improve mine safety in Mexico and allege it has led to him being persecuted by the federal government.

Justice demanded for daycare fire victims

2010-06-05T16:17:00.011-05:00

Photo upload by Luis Alberto Medina in Hermosillo

The victims of the daycare fire that claimed 49 young lives one year ago in Hermosillo were remembered over the weekend during a series of memorials and marches that carried an undercurrent of anger and outrage - for both the high death toll and perceptions the officials responsible for operating, regulating and inspecting the burned-out facility might never be brought to justice.

President Felipe Calderón declared June 5 a national day of mourning, but some parents of children killed and left scarred by the fire - who met with the president - want something more: justice.

One parent, Abraham Fraijo, who was among those holding a vigils for their children at the Angel monument in Mexico City, summed up the families' struggles, telling the newspaper La Razón, "If there were justice and the government did what it should do, I would be keeping vigil over my daughter at home, but there is no justice so we have to come and speak out."

The tragedy at the ABC Daycare has been polemic and political from the moment the facility in a working-class neighborhood of Hermosillo caught fire.

It revealed extreme shortcomings in the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) system of daycare centres, which a Supreme Court investigation found were rife with "generalized disorder." It revived outrage over the perceptions of rampant impunity in Mexico as justice has yet to be handed down in the case. It derailed the political career and presidential aspirations of the then-outgoing governor of Sonora, Eduardo Bours, as the the opposition National Action Party won the gubernatorial election one month after the fire - a lone victory for the PAN in what was otherwise a forgettable year at the polls. It could prompt more political repercussions as the current and former presidents of the IMSS - Daniel Karam and Juan Molinar, respectively - could be forced to resign their political posts, pending the final findings of a Supreme Court investigation.

DAMNING REPORT
The initial findings of the investigation headed by Justice Arturo Zaldívar and delivered June 3 offered a damning assessment of the ABC Daycare and the daycare centres run under contract for the IMSS, an institution notorious for problems in its outsourcing in and procurement processes.

"This high tribunal finds the existence of a link between the generalized disorder [in the IMSS daycare system] and the ABC daycare because the irregularities found in the granting of the contract, as in its operation and supervision are analogous to those that are evidenced in the great majority of the daycare centres that operate under this scheme," the initial court investigation said.

The investigation found fire extinguishers were missing from 57 percent of the more than 1,400 IMSS daycare centres operated under contract. Another 47 percent lacked emergency exits.

The ABC Daycare lacked an adequate number of emergency exits and smoke detectors, the investigation said.

COURT CONTROVERSY
The investigation also declared Bours, Karam and Molinar responsible for not protecting the individual guarantees of the children in the ABC Daycare.

Bours, the court investigation said, oversaw a state civil protection agency, which failed to "detect the accumulation of risks that surrounded the ABC Daycare and the time bomb that the adjacent storage room represented." The June 5, 2009 fire broke out in a nearby storage room located in the same building as the daycare and quickly spread.

The court said Molinar - IMSS president from December 2006 until March 2009 - oversaw the "generalized disorder" in the way the daycare centres were operated and licenses granted, "which led to the conditions for the tragedy."

Karam was mentioned for similar IMSS shortcomings and complaints over the medical treatment provided to the victims. He was not mentioned in a preliminary report on the court's investigation released March 1.

Bours has denied responsibility for any wrongdoing - as has Molinar, the current secretary of transportation and communications (SCT) and a close collaborator of Calderón. (Molinar moved from the IMSS to the SCT after former SCT secretary Luis Tellez was caught in a scandal, featuring a recording of him implicating former president Carlos Salinas in improper activities, but not offering any proof to sustain his allegations.)

Molinar defended himself in a June 3 statement, which read, "It's necessary to emphasize that the factors that contributed to the creation of that risk and the tragic consequence were all, without exception, out of human reach and the normative of any IMSS functionary," a reference to the flammable materials being kept in the adjacent store room.

Molinar expressed dismay in his statement that he was never interviewed by the court nor approached for information. He also differed with the court over its assessment of the state of the IMSS daycare centres.

"For the IMSS, an attended-to observation is not mentioned in the subsequent report. The commission, in turn, assumes that an observation not mentioned in the subsequent report was not attended-to," he said.

Karam said he would abide by the outcomes of any court investigations, although some analysts suggested he was receiving a raw deal since he only assumed his position three months prior to the daycare fire and spent the early months of his job focusing on the IMSS response to the outbreak of the H1N1 virus.

"Karam is paying for the tendency of the Justice Arturo Salívar to satisfy public opinion," Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote in his June 5 column in La Razón.

COURT CONTROVERSY
The court's involvement has been controversial as the 11 justices have the authority to investigate gross human rights violations, not criminal matters - something the court made clear earlier this spring, when it declined to investigate the 1993 slaying of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara. Previous court investigations have been controversial, too - most notably a late 2007 finding the rights of Cancún journalist Lydia Cacho were not violated, despite her being detained and transported to Puebla, where she was jailed for supposedly defaming a businessman with close ties to Puebla Gov. Mario Marín.

The current investigation is courting the same sort of controversy as some analysts have argued the court has no business investigating criminal matters. Regardless of the outcome, the case will not result in criminal charges.

It could prompt the resignations of Molinar, Karam and others affiliated with the IMSS, but that seems to be insufficient for many of the parents.

"No one has gone to jail for the death of the little ones," Lorenzo Ramos Félix, a lawyer for the victims, members of the "Movimiento por la justicia 5 de junio," told El Universal. "That's what inflames the families."

Gregorio "Greg" Sánchez disqualified from Quintana Roo gubernatorial race

2010-06-03T15:45:00.011-05:00

Gregorio "Greg" Sánchez - the gospel-singer-turned-Cancún mayor-turned-PRD-gubernatorial-candidate-turned-accused-drug-cartel-associate - was disqualified Thursday from the July 4 election in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo. The state electoral institute (Ieqroo) decision to disqualify Sánchez followed a previous Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) decision to remove Sánchez's name from the voters' list, a result of him being charged with drug, money laundering and organized crime offences and subsequently being jailed in Nayarit state.

Candidates charged with crimes lose their political rights, which include the right to vote and to run for public office. The Sánchez campaign said it will appeal the decision, while the Ieqroo gave the members of the coalition he headed - the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), Labour Party (PT) and Convergence party - five days to choose a new candidate.

The PRD had insisted Sánchez would continue campaigning - even from prison - although party president Jesús Ortega conceded prior to the Ieqroo decision being handed down that other unnamed candidates were being considered.

The decision threatens to further politicize an already tense situation in Quintana Roo, where Sánchez's supporters and the PRD have alleged bias and branded the case another "Michoacanazo," a reference to the detentions of state and municipal officials with alleged cartel ties in PRD-dominated Michoacán one year ago, during the early stages of the midterm elections. Many of those officials were subsequently released from prison without being convicted of any crimes.

Sánchez's lawyers revealed June 2 the PGR file on their client alleges he attendented a "historic summit" in Acapulco last year with none other than Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, and the leaders of other cartels.

The incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Quintana Roo, President Felipe Calderón and Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez-Mont all have rejected allegations of bias. The Attorney General's Office (PGR), meanwhile, has stated that Sánchez and the PRD leadership knew of an ongoing investigation into the mayor of Benito Juárez - the municipality containing Cancún - since January.

The Sánchez campaign acknowledged its prior understanding of the situation as it released videos - filmed before the candidate's arrest - in which Sánchez proclaims his innocence.

UNPRECEDENTED?
No potential candidate had faced the prospect of being declared ineligible since the 2005 attempt to impeach then-Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, who fomented mass protests in the capital that ultimately forced the federal government to back down from what had largely been viewed - rightly or wrongly - as an underhanded effort to thwart the aspirations of a populist presidential frontrunner.

The judicial actions against Sánchez have been interpreted in a similar way by many in the PRD, although López Obrador himself and some of his followers have showed little support - a reflection of the former presidential candidate's cool relations with the current PRD leadership, which is headed an archenemy, Jesús Ortega, and the New Left faction. The case differs in that López Obrador was accused of failing to respect a judicial injunction pertaining to a piece of property in the Santa Fe district of Mexico City, while Sánchez is accused to being linked to the Beltrán Leyva Cartel and Los Zetas - along with various financial irregularities.

Legionaries of Christ denounced

2010-06-02T10:47:00.008-05:00

I recently wrote a story on the impact of the Legionaries of Christ in Mexico for Catholic News Service and reactions to its most recent scandals. (Click here to read the story.) Below is an update on an attempt by the PRD to bring criminal charges against the order and reactions to the Legion's founder, Father Macial Maciel, from his hometown of Cotija, Michoacán.

Anselmo Alcazar, 82, of Cotija, Michoacán, was sent by his parents to study at a seminary/school run by Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel in the 1940s. He says he fled after Maciel attempted to sexually abuse him.

A lawmaker from Mexico’s largest left-wing political party filed a criminal complaint with the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) against the Legionaries of Christ for pedophilia, the corruption of minors, money laundering and organized crime - among other allegations.

The Legionaries, in a May 31 statement, rejected the allegations as “irresponsible” and a smear campaign against members that “have chosen the path of service.”

“In the judicial system, we can’t tolerate gratuitous accusations whose intent is to generate … a media lynching lacking legal substance.”

Such is the state of affairs for the Legion as it has come under attack - often in a gratuitous fashion - for the crimes of its founder, the late Father Marcial Maciel, and its polemic role in Mexican society over the past seven decades.

Maciel, it has been revealed, sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children during his time as leader of the Legion, which he founded in 1941 in the Tlalpan borough of Mexico City.

Maciel and the Legion have generated controversy ever since the order's founding.

Much of the controversy stems from Maciel's strategy of courting the business elite. The Legion founded expensive educational institutions, which, according to detractors, have functioned as a sort of vetting service for membership in the upper classes - along with providing quality educations.

The order, it has been said, "Celebrated wealth," at a time when left-wing strains of thought were gaining traction in the church in other parts of Latin America. Those currently involved with the Legion say its strategy has been to develop leaders, who go on to use their money to do good deeds. They point to charity projects such as the Mano Amiga schools, which provide quality educations to children in impoverished municipalities such as Valle de Chalco, and low-cost universities - which have reputedly been provided with funding by Carlos Slim, the world's wealthiest man.

Schadenfreuder has been common of late, too, as Legion critics - whose voices were kept silent by media outlets, whose owners were either Legion members or fearful of losing advertising from companies owned by Legion members - and media outlets release stories ranging from the supposedly slave-like treatment of consecrated Regnum Christi members to accounts of Maciel fathering children and subsequently abusing them to news the Legion has hired a public relations firm to highlight the charitable work of its members and students in its schools.

Some reports have been scathing and the Legion's motives have been questioned: The sincerity of a statement, which denounced its founder and was released on the eve of Holy Week, was questioned as it came as much of the country was decamping for a week of vacations at the beach.

As ITAM political science professor Federico Estévez says of the fascination with the Legion's largely self-inflicted problems: "This is a Tiger Woods story, but with an institution."

CRIMINAL ISSUE?
The criminal complaint, filed with the PGR May 31, asks for a criminal investigation into the order, along with Legionaries director Father Alvaro Corcuera; Legionaries secretary general Father Evaristo Sada; the rector of the Legionaries-run Anahuac University Father Jesus Quirce; Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carera of Mexico City and Bishop Ricardo Watty of Tepic.

“We want that the investigation gets to the bottom of this,” Democratic Revolutionary Party lawmaker Leticia Quezada Contreras told reporters May 31 of both the order and of allegations of a possible cover up.

But her complaint contains no new proof and, she acknowledges, is based on various media stories that have emerged about Maciel and the Legion over the past 13 years. Two other women already have filed similar complaints, she said PGR officials told her. Furthermore, Quezada said she had had no contact with any of Maciel's victims.

How far her complaint goes remains to be seen. A new law approved in the Senate in late April would give victims the opportunity to go after the institutions that failed to protect them.

The latest complaint also alleges a cover-up on the part of Bishop Watty and Cardinal Rivera.

Watty was part of a five-member apostolic visitation team that investigated the Legion and recommended the order be put under the control of outside leadership and have its charism rewritten. The Vatican acted on those recommendations last month.

How Watty allegedly participated in a cover-up is unclear as he said during a May press conference the Legion had been dominated by Maciel for too many years and a "refoundation" was necessary.

One of Maciel's original accusers, José Antonio Olvera, took issue with going after Watty. He told Milenio, "We found a sincere man that was concerned by the testimony he heard."

Rivera, meanwhile, has a long history of fending off allegations he knowingly sent a pedophile priest more than two decades ago to Los Angeles, where sexual abuse crimes against children were subsequently committed against children. Rivera is known to be close with the Legion and has vigorously defended Maciel. In May 2006, after the Vatican, acting on allegations of abuse against Maciel, ordered Maciel to stop practicing his ministry in public and lead a life of prayer and penance, Rivera denied it was punishment and called such claims that it was, "Pure fiction."

The Archdiocese of Mexico City blasted the latest allegations as "irresponsible" and politically motivated.

HOMETOWN HERO
Legion defenders have been in short supply of late, although residents of Maciel's hometown of Cotija, Michoacán, have jumped to his defence. A recent trip to Cotija - a town 500 kilometres west of Mexico City on the Jalisco-state line known for farmers making a salty, crumbly cheese (queso cotija) - found few residents willing to make negative comments about Maciel, who is considered a local benefactor.

Maciel plowed Legion money back into Cotija, where he was responsible for the construction of a community centre, health clinic, low-cost university, library and refurbished parish in a nearby rancho that was the site of the final Mass said before soldiers in the Cristero Rebellion - a Catholic uprising against anti-clerical measures - laid down their arms in 1929. Legion largesse helped Cotija keep up with other nearby towns such as Tacumbo, home to the ice cream makers responsible for the ubiquitous La Michoacana outlets, and Jiquilpán, where successive generations of the Cardenas clan put money into local projects. (One local historian, Javier Valencia, said Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934-1940, disliked conservative Cotija and wanted to flood it out by building a dam. Ironically, his grandson, former Michoacán Gov. Lázaro Cárdenas Bátel, supported Legion projects in Cotija with state government money.)

Maciel's public works, haven't been forgotten - at least in Cotija.

"When a man does works like this, it's proof theat God exists inside him," said María Dolores García, a nurse and Benedictine nun, who doesn't believe the allegations of improprieties against Maciel.

"The devil is working through the media to destroy all of this," she alleged.

One old-timer, Ansemlo Alcazar, who says he was sent to study with Maciel in Tlalpan in the 1940s with his siblings and ran away after there was attempted abuse, begs to differ.

"They like him here because they don't know the real Maciel."

Mexican resentment lingers over Canada’s visa 'insult'

2010-05-30T15:38:00.004-05:00

An RBD video filmed in 2005 in the Alberta Rockies

The matter of obtaining a visa for travel to Canada continues generating discontent in Mexico, some 10 months after the measure was imposed in a sudden and sloppy manner to stem a growing stream of bogus refugee claims filed by Mexicans.

President Felipe Calderón, as expected, raised the issue while visiting Canada last week. The Canadian government acknowledged shortcomings in the new process, but maintained the visa requirements would remain in tact.

Opinions on the visa issue vary in Mexico. Some consider it an insult. Others view it as a waste of time and money since they have few ties to Canada and would seldom visit. A few waiting in line outside the Canadian Embassy for their visa last summer told me they had no objection to the travel restrictions, but expressed displeasure with the seemingly lack of organization. One student from an expensive private university and frequent traveller to Vancouver told me she endorsed the idea, saying, "There are already too many Mexicans in Canada."

Hard feelings linger for many, however.

One friend, whose husband is Canadian, reported having to submit a letter from her in-laws, vouching for her visit - even though she had been a frequent visitors. If travel to Canada weren't so necessary, she says, "I wouldn't do it."

The fallout of the hastily imposed visa could unravel nearly two decades of promotional activities on the part of Canadian education and tourism officials, who successfully had promoted the country as an affordable, not-so-distant destination for tourism and study abroad excursions. The Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) even brought the sappy, teen telenovela Rebelde to the Alberta Rockies for a week of episodes, while the pop group RBD filmed a video on Lake Louise.

In a way, Canada became cool for many Mexicans - an odd feat for a country considered nice, but dull in many parts of the world.

The CTC figures that tourist visits to Canada have dropped by 33 percent since the visa requirements were imposed as the visa, a poor economy, sinking peso and surging Canadian dollar all combined to diminish interest in travelling north.

Signs of diminished interest in Canada quickly became apparent. AeroMéxico canceled its Canadian routes earlier this year - which it blamed on the visa - as the website Flightglobal reported the airline mostly served Mexican travellers on its Mexico City-Toronto and Mexico City-Montreal routes. Mexicana, meanwhile, has offered more seat sales on its flights to Canada and dropped its Mexico City-Edmonton route.

The exact economic impact of the visa is tough to gauge, but the CTC reported that over the past decade Mexico had been a focus country and, of the countries with CTC offices, Mexico had produced some of the best growth figures. The CTC put the annual the growth figure at 14 percent over the past decade. The CTC also classified Mexican visitors as "high value" as they are known for spending big while travelling abroad and are used to leaving the country for shopping trips. (Witness the glut of malls in such unglamorous destinations as the Río Grande Valley that cater almost exclusively to Mexicans, including Mexicans from places such as Mexico City.)

Expect discontent over the visa issue to continue simmering. In the meantime, here's my latest on the issue for Canwest News Service.

In God's hands?

2010-05-27T12:44:00.004-05:00

In Colonia El Sabinal, a traditional Mennonite Colony in the Chihuahua desert, there are no phone lines, no cellular signals and no electrical lines. Residents travel by horse and buggy, mostly speak Low German and generally have large families. There's also little security, resulting in criminal groups - possibly affiliated with drug cartels or possibly just taking advantage of the local lawlessness - pillaging businesses on the colony.

Now, some of the traditionally Mennonites are looking to move on, although violence isn't the only factor - or even the original factor for looking at land in other parts of Mexico and beyond.

Ever-encroaching modernity is one factor: Residents of other traditional colonies in the area to the southwest of Ciudad Juarez fled for Bolivia when electricity arrived. Other factors for departing included water and land shortages on the colonies, which were founded over the past 25 years by Mennonites looking for their own land; the original colonies other parts of Chihuahua and Durango had already filled up.

Now violence is factoring into the decision to move on, although no one is predicting a mass exodus and many Mennonites cite their deep religious beliefs and acceptance God's will as sources of strength during difficult times.

I visited a pair of colonies in northwestern Chihuahua last month to write on the situation confronting Mexico's Mennonites and to explain how some of them - descendants of Mennonites leaving the Canadian Prairie in the 1920s - have Canadian passports and might just look north if the violence worsens even more.

Here's the story, published in the Editorial Observer section of the Ottawa Citizen.

Calderón visit as much about domestic politics as visa-free travel

2010-05-27T07:56:00.006-05:00

What isn't being said about President Felipe Calderón's globetrotting ...

Calderón visit as much about domestic politics as visa-free travel

DAVID AGREN

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Calderon publicly scolded his American hosts during a visit to Washington last week, when used a speech to a joint session of Congress to condemn an anti-illegal immigrant measure recently passed in Arizona and lax gun laws that facilitate the southward flow of weapons into Mexico.

The condemnation drew scorn in the United States, but played well with the domestic audience back home - especially in the political class.

It’s uncertain if Calderon will bring a similar tough approach to Ottawa this week, his first trip to the capital since the federal government imposed visa restrictions last July on Mexicans heading to Canada.

What is certain, however, is that Calderon brings the same pressing domestic and political concerns to Ottawa as he did to Washington -- even though the visit appears timely: The Canada-Mexico relationship has appeared to be less openly friendly over the past year as the new visa regulations for Mexicans have been poorly received and visits to Canada -- a country that had been an increasingly trendy destination for tourist trips and studying abroad -- have subsequently diminished.

But political analysts say scolding Canada for imposing visa restrictions on Mexicans, instead of fixing a refugee system rife with abuse and bogus claims, would play well with the domestic audience and be an easy way for Calderon to score political points at a time his National Action Party (PAN) has been performing poorly on the local level and gubernatorial elections are underway in 12 of the country's 31 states. The outcome of those election could shape the final two and a half years of his presidency as he tries to achieve reforms to labor, finance, the political system and the public security apparatus, but confronts a divided Congress and increasing powerful state governors reluctant to cede territorial control over matters of law-and-order .

“He’s going to complain, not in a diplomatic way, but in terms of propaganda, about the need for Mexicans to request a visa,” said Aldo Muñoz Armenta, political science professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico in Toluca.

“The only forum he has to promote his agenda … is that he leaves the country," Muñoz added, referring to the traditions of president not openly campaigning in gubernatorial and local contests.

At home, Calderon faces a tough domestic agenda that goes beyond the problems of security and battling the cartels -- a battle that has claimed more than 23,000 lives since he took office in December 2006.

The Mexican economy, hit hard by the H1N1 outbreak and problems in the United States, dipped by nearly seven per cent in 2009, while the rates of unemployment and poverty have increased.

The 12 state-level elections pose enormous political problems, too.

The resurgent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) -- which governed for 71 years until being deposed by the PAN in 2000 -- could run the table on July 4, further weakening Calderon's administration. It could also add to the PRI's advantage for the 2012 presidential elections as the party already governs 19 states and its governors operate effective political machines for turning out the vote, rule with little transparency and frequently manage social programs for electoral purposes.

“There are many elections in which the PAN is at a disadvantage. He needs … to strengthen his party,” Muñoz said.

“These foreign trips are unavoidable,” he added. “The problem is they’re used for electoral purposes.”

Muñoz expects Calderon to raise the visa issue prominently in Canada -- much as he raised the migration and gun issue in the U.S. Congress.

Others issues on the Canada-Mexico agenda include trade, the expansion of programs for sending temporary and agricultural workers to Canada and Canadian assistance in combating the ongoing security problems in Mexico. The Mexican media is certain to raise the issue of fugitive union boss Napoleon Gomez, who has been residing in Vancouver to avoid charges pertaining to the misappropriation a $55 million trust fund.

But the travel visa still generates some negative headlines and hurt feelings in Mexico and its clumsy and sudden implementation has not been forgotten.

The pop-culture publication “Chilango” summed up the mood at the time of the visa’s implementation with its cheeky front-page admonishment, “Be patriotic and don’t be go to Canada” -- a twist on a common expression disparaging “chilangos,” as Mexico City residents are known.

Muñoz says the visa issue, like any matter pertaining to migration -- a perpetual issue in many downtrodden parts of the country -- would receive the most attention in Mexico and provide Calderon with the best opportunity for building political capital.

“Migration is a permanent issue in Mexico. It continues being an issue capitalized on a lot … it’s a beneficial issue for politicians.”

PRD Candidate, Gospel singer "Greg" Sánchez detained for alleged cartel ties

2010-05-25T22:48:00.014-05:00

Quintana Roo gubernatorial candidate and Gospel singer Gregorio "Greg" Sánchez was detained May 25 after arriving at the Cancún airport from Mexico City.

A press release from the Attorney General's Office (PGR) said Sánchez, the PRD mayor of Benito Juárez - the municipality containing Cancún - was detained for alleged links to "Los Zetas" and the Beltrán Leyva Cartel and "offering information and protection to them." The press release added the detention was by a judge's order, that he was accused of offenses related to organized crime, drugs and the use of illicit funds and he would be locked up in the western state of Nayarit.

Sánchez would we be the most high-profile politician arrested in the ongoing crackdown on drug cartels and organized crime since Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006.

Ironically, former Quintana Roo Gov. Ernesto Villanueva Madrid was extradited to the United States earlier this month to face drug charges. He allegedly facilitated the passage of cocaine through Quintana Roo in the mid to late 1990s, when he was governor.

A Twitter feed updated by the Sánchez campaign confirmed the dentention and insisted there was no order for his apprehension. One posting on the feed remarked, "They want to commit another 'michoacanazo,'" a reference to the 10 mayors and various public officials arrested in a sweep of Michoacán last May. Many of those arrested were from the left-wing PRD have since been released and were never convicted.

The Sánchez campaign denied the allegations and planned a rally for March 26 in the afternoon. The PRD called the detention politically motivated and said it was carried out so the left doesn't win Quintana Roo, one of Mexico's youngest and fastest growing states.

Sánchez was leading a PRD-PT-Covergence coalition in Quintana Roo and some in the PAN were backing his candidacy, too. At a press conference in Mexico City earlier on May 25, Sánchez and various left-wing party leaders said he was being "politically persecuted."

Sánchez, known in Cancún for his Gospel music career and derided by some critics for allegedly preaching politics from the pulpit, narrowly captured the Benito Juárez mayor's race in what was perhaps the PRD's most notably victory of 2008. He is trailing the PRI in polls for the July 4 gubernatorial election, however.

The mayor had courted controversy for much of 2010. The newspaper La Razón reported in February his brother was giving classes on extortion from behind bars in Mexico City's Reclusorio Norte. In April, the military raid discovered an espionage centre in Cancún with ties to Sánchez. The centre supposedly gathered informtion from phone calls and radio messages on businessmen, political rivals and supposedly journalist Lydia Cacho, longtime Sánchez critic.

Paulette, Peña Nieto and the presidency

2010-05-24T15:46:00.009-05:00

UPDATE: State of Mexico Attorney General Alberto Bazbaz resigned May 25, just the latest fallout from the botched investigation into the death of four-year-old Paulette Gebara Farah.

State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto speaks to reporters Nov. 12 in Cuautitlán Izcalli, to north of Mexico City, before meeting with Mexico's Catholic bishops' conference.

Could the inept investigation into the death of Paulette Gebara Farah - a four-year-old girl found dead in her own bed nine days after investigators supposedly had searched her room - derail the 2012 presidential aspirations of State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto?

It's too soon to tell, but a recent survey by María de las Herras suggests the fallout has negatively impacted the governor - the leading contender for the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidacy in 2012 and the early favourite for the presidency itself.

The de las Herras survey, published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, found 45 percent of respondents saying their opinion of Peña Nieto worsened because of the Paulette fiasco, which continues generating a bizarre mix of curiosity, outrage and disbelief across the country.

The outrage and disbelief grew even larger after State of Mexico Attorney General Alberto Bazbaz announced the absence of foul play and explained the circumstances of her death.

As my former editor Malcolm Beith explains on his blog:

The authorities have concluded that the 4-year-old girl who went missing for 9 days this Spring and was then found in her bed, dead, died in that very bed, of her own accidental smothering. Apparently, she was actually in the bed the whole time. Apparently, she was there while the police searched her room, the house, detained the mom, searched some more, put up billboards and launched TV ads looking for her, while an aunt slept in the very bed where she was supposedly lying dead.

This story is too fucking ridiculous to be true.

The Mexican public seems to agree - 71 percent of respondents in the de las Herras poll say they don't believe the official explanation. And now, in an even more bizarre twist, Paulette's mother, Lizette Farah told reporters May 24 that she doubts the explanation, too.

"For me, it's difficult to believe the conclusions and I've not had access to the file, in spite of our filing for three injunctions, and the Attorney General's Office of the State of Mexico has never lent it to me," Farah said.

The behaviour of judicial officials has failed to surprise some political observers as the state - a diverse mix of wealthy industrialized areas, ramshackle suburbs of Mexico City founded by squatters and a rural landscape, too - is famed for corruption and sleazy politics.

It gained fame for crime in recent years, too - especially for displacing Ciudad Juárez as the jurisdiction with highest rates of murders committed against women. Most of those crimes have not been solved.

State judicial officials now say the Paulette case is solved, but few people are buying it and the process has been questioned.

"In the Paulette case, people no longer know if they should think it's a sin of negligence, corruption or stupidity. In any of those three cases, the cost for Peña Nieto could be very high," de las Heras wrote.

Or, it might not have much of a cost at all.

Peña Nieto has maintained high levels of popularity in the State of Mexico as a well-oiled publicity machine - and generous coverage from media outlets such as the Televisa broadcasting empire - continually publicizes various public works projects his government claims credit for completing.

Peña Nieto has the inside track winning the PRI nomination for 2012, too, as he effectively controls the PRI and Green Party factions in the Chamber of Deputies and, according to many political observers, controls many of the PRI's state governors - key power brokers in the party, which has a weak central leadership.

The Paulette case may continue generating public outrage for some time - and Peña Nieto's critics will continually revive the matter - but how much it impacts the governor's long-term political fortunes remains to be seen.

El "Jefe Diego" still missing; investigation suspended

2010-05-23T18:50:00.005-05:00

The disappearance of Diego Fernández de Cevallos became all the more mysterious over the weekend as the children of the former presidential candidate asked federal and state officials to "stay on the sidelines."

The Attorney General's Office (PGR) and Public Security Secretariat (SSP) subsequently complied.

The request only fueled speculation about the fate of Fernández de Cevallos - a political and legal bigwig known as el "Jefe Diego" (Diego the Boss) - as theories of him falling victim to kidnapping or a political crime already had been discarded by various groups and individuals ranging from the family to a shadowy rebel group to the president himself.

The kidnapping theory could be surging again as the most plausible explanation - one of "Jefe Diego's" 12 brothers, Manuel Fernández de Cevallos Ramos, told the newspaper Reforma the family was expecting, "A good negotiation."

Family requests that the authorities stay on the sidelines are not infrequent in Mexican kidnapping cases. But, in the case of Fernández de Cevallos, it raises questions: He is the political patron of Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez and Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont - two of the most senior members of President Felipe Calderón's so-called security cabinet. Chávez previously worked as a lawyer in Fernández de Cevallos' firm and only became attorney general last year, replacing Eduardo Medina Mora. Both he and Gómez-Mont are among the most prominent members of the so-called "Diego Faction" in the National Action Party. ("Jefe Diego," while reputedly pious and, without doubt, controversial - recall the "Highway of Love" built with public and private money to facilitate travelling to his girlfriend's hometown in the Los Altos region of Jalisco - is not part of the ultra-conservative "El Yunque" as some with unfavorable opinions of the PAN have stated.)

About the only acknowledged fact in the disappearance is that Fernández de Cevallos went missing late on the evening of May 14 from his ranch in the state of Querétaro. A photo of a bearded man wearing a blindfold - with a similar resemblance to Fernández de Cevallos - has circulated, but its authenticity cannot be verified.

Gómez-Mont, for one, expressed doubts.

"I think it's out of focus and regretable that this kind of photograph is published due to the delicate nature of the subject," he told reporters May 21.

He asked the media "to be prudent."

MEDIA BLACKOUT
Coverage of the disappearance has diminished somewhat, although other sensational matters - most notably the Paulette fiasco in the State of Mexico - stole the headlines.

Media giant Televisa has announced it would stop covering the matter out of respect for the family and to "put the life of Fernández de Cevallos ahead of the practice of journalism. It wasn't an easy decision."

The stance drew a sharp response from one of Televisa's harshest critics, radio and television journalist Carmen Aristegui.

"Is self-censorship responsible journalism?" she wrote in her a May 21 Reforma column.

"If it weren't so serious - because the most powerful media outlet in the country threatens the right to information of millions of Mexicans - it would be ridiculous and hilarious, the self-censorship declaration of the national chain."

More strange political bedfellows

2010-05-21T10:48:00.007-05:00

In 2006, Flavio Sosa led an uprising of groups agitating under the banner of the Oaxaca People's Assembly (APPO) that called for the head of Gov. Ulises Ruiz - who made a botched attempt at removing striking teachers from the central square of the state capital, Oaxaca city. The ensuing conflict shut down the capital for months and ruined the state's tourism economy.

In 2009, Sosa tops a list of Labor Party (PT) candidates seeking the seats in the state legislature distributed through a proportional representation system known as the "plurinominal."

The PT is participating in a coalition of opposition parties - along with the PAN, PRD and Convergence - that united to oust Ruiz and the PRI in the July 5 gubernatorial elections.

Sosa's placement at the top of the PT plurinominal list almost guarantees his arrival in the state legislature - a long way from the street protests of three years ago and the prison cell he subsequently occupied while waiting for charges against him to be dismissed. (He was never convicted of any crimes from the 2006 uprising.)

It would also put him in a caucus with the PAN, a party which many leftists believe rigged the 2006 federal election and which has helped keep Ruiz in power - a condition demanded by the PRI for its allowing President Felipe Calderón to take the oath of office in a divided Congress.

But such is the dislike for Ruiz among all the opposition forces in Oaxaca that they backed Convergence candidate Gabino Cue for the 2009 election. Even the small, left-wing PT, which withdrew from coalitions in other states such as Hidalgo at the behest of 2006 election runner-up López Obrador, has backed the coalition - although López Obrador, who has been running roughshod over much of the PT in recent years, has not endorsed the Cue's candidacy.

Polls show a tight race in Oaxaca - closer than most of the other states contesting gubernatorial elections on July 5. A Reforma poll put the race between Cue and PRI candidate Eviel Pérez in a statistical tie.

Sosa wasn't the only plurinominal candidate in Oaxaca to raise attention, however. The PAN list of plurinominal candidates included Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, who made news in 2007 for unsuccessfully trying to run for the mayor's office in the municipality of Santa María Quiegolani.

The mostly indigenous Zapotec municipality is governed using something known as "usos y costumbres" (local customs) - something common in much of rural Oaxaca - which were invoked to prevent her participation in the last election due to her gender and, according to Cruz, her professional status.

"Jefe Diego" still missing

2010-05-20T12:13:00.010-05:00

Former National Action Party presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos went missing May 14 and remains missing. What became of the political and legal heavyweight known as "Diego the Boss" remains a mystery and the subject of speculation.

As of May 20, federal officials had released no plausible theories for his disappearance from his ranch in the state of Querétaro. Possible motives such as kidnapping, revenge and narcotics-trafficking cartels possibly sending a message by abducting a political figure - one with a close relationships to the interior minister and attorney general - have been discarded.

Others, ranging from the president to a rebel group to the family, have all publicly stated their bewilderment at what has shaped up as one of Mexico's most curious political mysteries and comes amid a nationwide crackdown on narcotics-trafficking cartels and organized crime that has claimed some 23,000 lives since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006.

Calderón told CNN in a May 19 interview, "Until now, it's a mystery," and discarded suggestions the disappearance was the work of narcotics-trafficking cartels trying to send a message. "Criminals send me clear messages through other channels," he said.

The EPR rebel group also expressed mystery at the disappearance. The group - which claimed responsibility for pipeline explosions three years ago - said it was not involved in any possible crime.

The Fernández de Cevallos family, meanwhile, pleaded with any potential kidnappers to please contact them.

Politicians from all the political parties have expressed preoccupation with the disappearance of "Jefe Diego" - even though Fernández de Cevallos has cut a controversial path throughout his legal and political careers. The latter has been marked by his work as a PAN operative, presidential candidate, party leader in the Chamber of Deputies and, most recently, senator.

The 2008 book, "The Untouchables," listed Fernández de Cevallos as one of its 10 Mexicans operating with impunity (others profiled in the book included boxer Julio César Chávez, Cardinal Juan Sandoval of Guadalajara and discount-drug baron Victor González Torres).

Some in the PAN despise Fernández de Cevallos and Calderón has not been considered close with "Jefe Diego," although relations between the two men have reputedly have thawed in recent years as members of the PAN's "Diego faction" such as Interior Minister Fernando Gómez-Mont and Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez have assumed senior cabinet positions.

"The Diego faction has been wary of Calderón, but Diego has been placing some of his people so they're not completely out of it," said Federico Estévez, political science professor at ITAM.

"His best placement of course was Gómez-Mont ... although I'm not saying (Fernández de Cevallos) engineered it."

"Jefe Diego" - like much of the PAN establishment - didn't back Calderón in his run for the 2006 presidential nomination.

Fernández de Cevallos is best known for being the 1994 PAN presidential candidate and winning the first-ever presidential debate with PRD candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and PRI candidate Ernesto Zedillo - the eventual election victor. Despite winning the debate, Fernández de Cevallos mysteriously maintained a low profile throughout the rest of the campaign.

He previously served in the Chamber of Deputies, where, along with Gómez-Mont, he led one of the most successful PAN negotiating teams in party history and was able to broker deals in the early 1990s on such things as financial reform and the formation of the Federal Electoral Institute.

"They got big policy designed ... they changed the electoral system and got the reforms they wanted," Estévez said. "A lot of the economic policy was also very panísta."

But Fernández de Cevallos became especially controversial for - among other things - his 2000 - 2006 term in the Senate. While sitting as a Senator, he represented some of Mexico's most elite companies as they took legal action against the federal government and won large judgments. In a 2002 case, he won a case against Hacienda (the Finance Secretariat), forcing the return of 1.8 billion pesos to his client, Jugos del Valle.

His moonlighting prompted the introduction of the so-called "ley antidiego," which remains frozen in the Chamber of Deputies.

Fernández de Cevallos won other judgments after leaving the Senate, although he recently lost an especially large case in the Supreme Court. The court rejected arguments that his client, who had purchased a Banamex investment in 1987 at an interested rate of 91 percent, was owed 250 billion pesos (roughly $20 billion).

His political maneuverings won him the most controversy - especially with the Mexican left, a group for which Fernández de Cevallos and his protege, Gómez-Mont, have had an abiding dislike, according to many political observers.

That dislike was on display earlier this year, when Gómez-Mont resigned from from PAN over the party's decision to form alliances with the left-leaning PRD for the 2010 gubernatorial elections in states such as Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Puebla. For his part, Fernández de Cevallos, a long-time opponent of electoral alliances, blasted the deals, too.

His past wars with the left have been legendary. Fernández de Cevallos reputedly played a role in making the Mexico City video scandals public early in the last decade. Those scandals caught on film local PRD rainmaker René Bejarano - a former chief-of-staff to ex-Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador - accepting cash from developer Carlos Ahumada.

After the close 2006 election - when Calderón narrowly beat López Obrador by less than a percentage point in the official vote count - the outcome was decided by a panel of judges known as the federal electoral tribunal, or Trife. In the Trife, according to the book, "The Untouchables," "It was considered that a majority of the members of the tribunal owed their position totally or partially to the then-still powerful PAN senator." Fernández de Cevallos led the PAN legal team in the electoral dispute.

Fernández de Cevallos had, over the past 18 months, become more relevant in national politics as Calderón opened up his tight inner circle to include figures such as Gómez-Mont - a result of the death of then-interior minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and electoral defeats.

It makes the disappearance of Fernández de Cevallos all the more mysterious.

Cinco de Mayo not what it seems

2010-05-05T22:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a cinco de mayo story from 2005 that keeps being recycled by various Canadian newspapers. I'll do the same this year, too.

By David Agren, Calgary Herald

Oswaldo Torres planned on celebrating cinco de mayo (May 5) the same way he does every year: by going to work.

"It's a holiday, but not a very big one," the Guadalajara, Mexico taco-stand manager said.

"The big day for celebrating is September 16 [Independence Day]."

While the holiday only receives tepid in enthusiasm in many parts of Mexico, cinco de mayo has surged in popularity north of the border, where both Latinos and non-Latinos indulge all things Mexican, including food, drink, music and dance. It's also become a day of pride for Chicanos, surpassing holidays like Independence Day and Day of the Dead in stature.

"Cinco de mayo is a chance for Mexican-Americans to show non-Mexicans that they have strength, unity, and a strong history," said Linda Lowery, an author in San Miguel de Allende, who wrote a children's book on the holiday.

May 5 offers non-Latinos an opportunity to party too--although many simply use it as an excuse to bash piñatas, chug Corona beer and sip margaritas.

"For non-Mexicans, it's like St. Patrick's Day, a celebration and identification with Mexican culture, food, and music," Lowery explained.

"Many [people] have only a cursory understanding of the significance of cinco de mayo and the Battle of Puebla," she added. "They often mistakenly assume it's Mexican Independence Day."

Cinco de mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla, where an out-manned and out-gunned Mexican battalion led by Ignacio Zaragoza defeated a powerful French invasion force in 1862. France eventually won the war, however, and made Maximilian emperor of Mexico. (He was later overthrown and executed).

Although May 5 marks a normal day on the calendar for most Mexicans--banks and government offices remain open, public schools usually close--poblanos (Puebla state residents) take a special pride in the event.

"It's really a regional holiday here," Lowery said.

With the growing popularity of cinco de mayo, some Latino groups have taken exception to how businesses are using the holiday. Beer importers and bars have been accused of hijacking cinco de mayo, using the holiday as a way to market Mexican suds and promote irresponsible drinking.

Mexico shows its Brazil envy

2010-04-28T09:13:00.002-05:00

From World Politics Review.

DAVID AGREN

MEXICO CITY – President Felipe Calderon raised eyebrows earlier this year, when he admonished those gathered at a meeting of the nation’s top diplomats to speak better of Mexico – in spite of the negative perceptions abroad generated by violence from the ongoing war on narcotics trafficking cartels and the 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 virus.

To emphasize his point, he mentioned Brazil, saying the emerging South American power is perceived abroad in far more favorable terms than Mexico and is spoken of well by its own citizens.

“I have never as a politician nor as president of the Republic … heard a Brazilian speak badly of Brazil. And, yet, I’ve heard many Mexicans speak badly of Mexico to the world,” he said.

“The international perception is that Mexico is in chaos … and Brazil is some sort of paradise.”

The comments were perhaps a reflection of Calderón’s frustrations in Mexico, where a three-year crackdown on narcotics trafficking cartels has claimed more than 18,000 lives, the Mexican economy has lagged – dropping 6.8 percent in 2009 – foreign direct investment has been halved over the past year and his agenda for state, labor and economic reforms were dealt a blow in the midterm elections.

But the comments reflected an envy of Brazil often repeated in Mexico.

While Mexico suffered through a miserable 2009, Brazil emerged from the global economic downturn more quickly. It also continued wielding increased regional influence – at time Mexico was mending fences other countries in Latin America such as Venezuela and Cuba – with its peacekeeping presence and Haiti and involvement in the Honduras political crisis.

Even Brazil being awarded the 2016 Olympics was another point of envy for some in Mexico.

First Lady Margarita Zavala remarked in February.

“In Brazil, there are 25 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants. We have less than half (the homicide rate) of Río de Janeiro … and they won the Olympics and (2014) World Cup.”

Ironically, the Mexico Football Federation withdrew its early bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups due to funding issues.

“The average Mexican is happy for Brazil’s success, but for the elites, there’s some jealousy,” said Mexico City pollster Dan Lund, president of the Mund Group.

Along with that jealousy comes fear.

Mexico and Brazil have started exploring a free-trade agreement that some in Mexico have promoted as way of lessening the country’s dependence on United States – the destination for some 80 percent of Mexican exports.

But a 2009 poll released by a major business group found 95 percent of its members uneasy of such a deal. The fear comes even though some Mexican companies such as telecommunication giants Telmex Internacional and América Móvil – both controlled by the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helú – have performed strongly in the Brazilian market.

Much of Mexico’s dependence on the U.S. market is attributed to geography, but also the 1994 NAFTA agreement. The timing of NAFTA’s arrival was unavoidable for some political observers, given the current Brazil-envy on display.

“While Brazil was consumed by a deep crisis (in the early 1990s) Mexico sold itself as the best emerging market on the planet,” political analyst Juan E. Pardinas wrote last fall in the Mexico City newspaper, Reforma.

“For us, the forecast was a sweet promise; for them, a black cloud. Today, our respective national futures are no longer what they were before.”

Pardinas and other observers attribute the turnaround to economic reforms in Brazil and pragmatic governance.

Over that same time period, Mexico has been mired in political gridlock – especially since 1997, when the lower house of Congress slipped into opposition control. It has remained split between the three main parties ever since. Additionally, few significant reforms were approved during the 2000-2006 administration of President Vicente Fox.

Calderon, meanwhile, has won reforms for the criminal justice system, taxation and the energy sector, but many political observers say those overhauls were inadequate.

“As a country, we’ve taken half steps,” said Eduardo García, publisher of the online business publication, Sentido Común.

“We have a democratic system, but it’s very divided.”

Those divisions were on display during the 2008 debates to reform the energy sector – one key area in which Brazil and Mexico have taken disparate development approaches.

The Mexican reforms allowed for increased private sector participation in the state-run oil concern, Pemex, but failed to address deep-seated problems such as the dominance of the oil workers’ union or provide sufficient incentives for outside players to help discover and exploit new petroleum fields – at a time when Mexican production was in decline.

Pemex lacks the technology to exploit deep-water fields in the Gulf of Mexico, which are though to hold enormous reserves. Meanwhile, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras, has been hailed as a world-class company and successfully exploited deep-water reserves.

Pardinas sees lessons for Mexico – where keeping the oil industry in government hands is a pillar of national sovereignty – in Brazil’s management of its petroleum sector, but also hope the country can turn itself around like Brazil has over the past two decades.

“Brazil’s success is a motive for envy. However, its successes give us hope that history is not destiny and the future is not a mechanical repetition of the present,” he said.

Lorena Ochoa calls it quits

2010-04-25T10:26:00.004-05:00

Guadalajara golf star Lorena Ochoa officially announced her retirement on Friday, saying she wanted to focus on other priorities such as family and her charitable work in Mexico.

She plans to play her final competitive tournament early next month at an LPGA tour stop in Morelia.

Ochoa departs as the No. 1 player in the world and perhaps the most dominant female gofer of the past decade – at least the latter half of it. She won 27 times and claimed two majors, although her early career was marked by near misses and a sense of being snake bitten in the big events

But she accomplished the rare feat of becoming one of the country’s best-known athletes even though she competed in a sport with a limited profile and one that offered few opportunities for the masses to easily discover – Mexico has no public golf courses, something Ochoa and her foundation have long wanted to change.

Ochoa was perhaps Mexico’s top female athlete over the past decade, along with former world champion sprinter and 2004 silver medal winner Ana Guevara. She might have been Mexico’s top overall athlete. (Who else? Barcelona defender Rafael Marquez?)

In Guadalajara, where sports coverage begins and ends with the soccer club, Chivas, Ochoa is a living legend. My former editor at the Guadalajara Colony Reporter often recalled covering Ochoa and a young Tiger Woods winning world junior golf championships in the early 1990s.

How much golf has grown in Mexico because of Ochoa’s exploits is uncertain – she was certainly no rags-to-riches story, having learned to play at the pricey Guadalajara Golf and Country Club. But she became an icon and true sporting heroine in a country that often lacks much in the way championships or international exploits.

Court opts against investigating cardinal's 1993 death

2010-04-21T21:26:00.004-05:00

The Mexican Supreme Court decided April 20 against launching an investigation into the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, who was shot dead outside the Guadalajara airport while wearing his clerical robes and heading to greet Archbishop Giralamo Prigione, papal nuncio to Mexico.

Gov. Emilio González Marquez of Jalisco state -- which is served by the Archdiocese of Guadalajara -- had asked for an investigation, but the 11-member court unanimously voted "no."

Gonzalez argued the court should have launched its own investigation due to irregularities in the original criminal investigation, which said Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was a victim of circumstances and caught in the crossfire of a shootout between rival narcotics-trafficking cartels.

The court decided after 40 minutes of deliberations it would not launch an investigation. The court has the authority to investigate matters involving alleged human rights abuses and it generally refrains from delving into criminal matters -- although it has in a few recent cases such as the June 2009 daycare fire in Hermosillo that claimed 49 young lives. That investigation determined that prominent figures in the IMSS, Hermosillo municipal government and Sonora state government - including then Gov. Eduardo Bours of the PRI - had some responsibility in the matter.

Church officials have long rejected the findings of the official investigation into Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's death and consider his slaying on May 24, 1993, to be a state crime. The then-President Carlos Salinas has denied any involvement and, according to a 2007 church report leaked to the media, sought the Vatican’s intervention to have the slaying not considered a state crime.

None of the authors of the crime have been convicted. A cartel hitman, Alfredo Araujo Avila, “El Popeye,” was found to be in possession of weapons used in the Cardinal Posadas Ocampo slaying, but was convicted last year of unrelated firearms charges. Church officials said the conviction meant "nothing."

Not everyone in the church has bought into the state crime theory. The late Luis Reynoso, a lawyer and the former bishop of Cuernavaca, rejected talk of speculation with his investigations in the late 1990s, which came to the conclusion that the cardinal was in the wrong place at the wrong time and no proof of premeditated murder exists.

Veteran church observer and religious studies professor Victor Ramos Cortés of the University of Guadalajara says the Catholic Church, with its history of bickering with the federal government and coming out on the losing end of many anti-clerical measures, has been wedded to the state crime theory because it allows for the creation of a martyr. The church already has beatified martyrs from the Cristero Rebellion, a 1920s uprising in Western Mexico against anti-clerical measures imposed by the federal government. The Archdiocese of Guadalajara also is building a massive new house of worship known as the Sanctuary of the Mexican Martyrs, although the project became polemic in 2008 when Gov. Gonzalez donated 90 million pesos of taxpayer money to the project. (The money was returned by the group responsible for the construction and came after widespread outrage flared in Jalisco and the governor let loose with a profanity laced tirade against critics and the media.)

Columnist Raymundo Rivera Palacio speculated in his most recent La Razón article that the shootout targeted the cardinal - and that the slaying was not a state crime.

"Posadas Ocampo had been bishop of Tijuana, where the dividing line between the cartels and the local church hierarchy always has been very tenuous," he wrote.

The furniture factory the nuncio had come bless, Rivera added, belonged to a lieutenant of a main rival of the Tijuana Cartel.

Church officials deny the late cardinal had any untoward relations with narcotics traffickers.

Whatever the truth, the slaying of a popular prelate ushered in vast political changes in Jalisco, one of the country's most populous and conservative states. Dissatisfaction over the cardinal's slaying compounded the already immense dissatisfaction in Jalisco in regards to the government response to the April 1992 sewer line explosions that flattened a long stretch of working-class neighbourhoods in Guadalajara.

The conservative PAN won the 1994 gubernatorial election and has held power ever since.

In May 2008 comments to The News, Jorge Zepeda Patterson, now the editor of El Universal and the former editor of the independent Guadalajara daily Siglo 21, compared the sewer explosions and cardinal's murder to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake as events that changed different parts of Mexico - but in vastly different ways.

"The 1985 earthquake generated the formation of a civil society with distinct [left-wing] ideologies, while in Guadalajara, it was essentially a turn to the right."

Hockey Night in Mexico

2010-04-18T14:36:00.002-05:00

A Mexican player leaves the ice after team Mexico dropped a 5-2 decision to Australia on April 14 at the Division II World Hockey Championship played earlier this month in Naucalpán, Mexico.

Hard to believe, but Mexico hosted a world hockey championship tournament April 10 - 17 at a nondescript rink in Nuacalpán, an industrial suburb to the west of Mexico City.

(I attended one day of the tournament so I could file a dispatch on the quixotic quest for glory in the lower echelons of international hockey; click here to read the dispatch in the Ottawa Citizen.)

The Mexican team finished fifth in the six-tournament, besting only Turkey. But players on the Mexican squad say they made progress at the event by putting in credible performances against the "elites" of Division II such as Spain, Australia and Belgium. Indeed, Mexico lost 4-2 to Spain - the eventual tournament winner - and 5-2 to Australia and Belgium. The scores were more lopsided at past events.

In the game against Australia, the "Hockeyroos" played a physical game that wore down the smaller Mexicans. One Australian player commented that many on the team got their sporting starts in rugby union and rugby league - an advantage for a contact sport like hockey. The Mexicans, he said, play an aggressive game and show lots of heart, but needed to work more on establishing a system.

Hockey is a boutique sport in Mexico, which has barely a dozen rinks. Mexican players gain experience by heading to tournaments and summer hockey camps in Canada. The Mexican Ice Hockey Federation plans on organizing a senior league that would begin play this fall. Such a development would be a long way from the origins of hockey in Mexico, which federation president Joaquín de la Garma said began in the late 1950s when an Ice Capades-style show performed in the Arena Mexico and left a sheet of ice that a few determined hockey players were able to use.

Mexican bishops acknowledge threats against prelates

2010-04-18T09:37:00.005-05:00

Bishop Miguel Patiño Velazquez of Apatzingán, Michoacán, enters Mass on April 1.

The Mexican bishops' conference acknowledged last week that Catholic priests have suffered threats of violence and extortion at the hands of narcotics trafficking cartels and organized crime. The acknowledgment ended a stream of conflicting messages from various church officials on a delicate subject that many in the church seem uncertain of how to handle.

The bishops said in an April 15 message at the end of their spring planning session that an increasing number of prelates in areas rife with drug activities had been moved to other parishes and other parts of the country or assigned other pastoral duties.

Their acknowledgment comes as the Mexican government revised its death toll figures upward in the ongoing crackdown on the cartels to at least 22,700 since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón took office.

Their acknowledgment also comes as Mexico's evangelicals have gone public with their own travails with extortion and threats. Evangelical leaders told the newspaper Reforma early this month that at least one pastor had been kidnapped and that extortion has taken place at many places of worship and even at their charity projects.

Catholic officials had been reticent to acknowledge the threats against prelates and had been somewhat late in developing a comprehensive response to the issue of violence in Mexico. Church observers say Catholic officials prefer to follow the government's lead on such issues and desperately wanted to avoid running afoul of the cartels, who have become the de facto authorities in some parts of Mexico.

In early April, a spokesmen for the bishops' conference, in comments published by Reforma, denied that there had been any threats against Catholic prelates. Catholic leaders in troubled dioceses and archdiocese such as Durango, Acapulco, Morelia, Tacambaro and Apatzingan all told me last year there had been no threats against priests.

Last summer, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City told reporters that priests had been threatened in the state of Michoacán - drawing a swift denial from the Catholic hierarchy in that region. A few priests would occasionally break with the official line in their dioceses, however. Father Alfredo Gallegos Lara - a gun-totting, rachero ballad-singing priest in Michoacán, better known as "Padre Pistolas" - told the news agency Quadratin that a fellow priest had been threatened and that he himself had been robbed. He also encoured his parishioners to keep arms in the homes - something permitted by the Mexican constitution.

The church's relations with the cartels is another touchy issue: Catholic officials deny that they accept donations from cartel leaders, although the bishops' conference president, Archbishop Carlos Aguiar Retes of Tlalnepantla, acknowledged: The cartels have been generous in various parts of Mexico by donating funds for infrastructure projects. Others in the church said the cartels' money was not welcome. One bishop in southern Chihuahua declared in late 2008 that no priest in his diocese would perform funerals for "narcos," but a church spokesman in the state later said the move proved unpopular.

Past comments and actions on the issue have been contradictory, however. The late bishop of Aguascalientes caused a scandal in 2005, when he said the church receives money from the cartels and could put the illicit funds to good use. His comments were quickly disavowed.

Bishop: church treated abuse cases as a "minor cold"

2010-04-12T21:16:00.004-05:00

Once again, Bishop Raúl Vera López of Saltillo - fresh off of an Easter homily in which he accused the federal government of waging a phony crackdown on narcotic trafficking cartels - veered from the standard line by speaking candidly on a topic many of his colleagues would seemingly prefer to put behind them.

The bishop - one of Mexico's most outspoken religious leaders - spoke candidly April 12 on the church response to the controversy swirling over the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, saying that in past years the matter was treated as a "minor cold" and not taken seriously enough.

"It was a very superficial way of seeing things. At one time it was believed a priest that had that problem had a cold; it was thought it would go away," Bishop Vera told reporters on the eve of the annual spring planning session of the Mexican bishops' conference.

The comments come as the Vatican defends itself against allegations from a number of countries that it failed to take allegations of sexual abuse committed by clergy seriously. But it also comes as Mexico's most notorious case - that of Legionaries of Christ founder Father Marcial Maciel - receives enormous scrutiny and the order confirms the sordid details of its founder's double life, which was marked by him fathering at least three children and the sexual abuse of seminarians.

Bishop Vera's comments appeared to differ from the recent tone taken by the country's most senior Catholic official, Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City. The Cardinal, on the Thursday before Easter, read his priests the riot act, saying the Archdiocese of Mexico City would not defend any prelate against allegations of sexual abuse. Barely a week later, however, Cardinal Rivera said the church was under attack, but not in crisis. The archdiocese issued an editorial April 11, saying the church was not being damaged by a supposed crisis that had been provoked by the actions of a few "terrible priests" along with "undeniable outside enemies."

The enemies reference is a nod to the history of sour church-state relations in Mexico, although the church appears to have taken a more active role over the past decade by denouncing the changes to the Mexico City laws concerning abortion and same-sex marriages. The Archdiocese of Mexico City also has an especially sour relationship with the Mexico City government - in part because of measures such as the new same-sex marriage laws and the decriminalization of abortion, but also because the church refused to endorse allegations of electoral fraud made by 2006 presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. (López Obrador's PRD party dominates Mexico City politics.)

The posture of the Archdiocese of Mexico on the issue of abuse has been fodder for church critics, however, and his recent admonishment was greeted with skepticism. The day after Cardinal Rivera admonished the assembly of 500 priests about abuse, the newspaper Reforma ran the headline, "Cardinal (finally) condemns pedophilia." One comment on the newspaper's website asked if the April 1 admonishment was an April Fool's prank. Cardinal Rivera had preavious defended the Legion of Christ and its founder in the strongest of terms - even after the Vatican in 2006 asked Father Maciel to renounce his public ministry and lead a life of prayer and penitence. In 2006, the cardinal called allegations the Vatican had punished Father Maciel, "Pure fiction."

The Legionaries of Christ have been a controversial order, but one that successfully courted the wealthy and powerful. (Father Maciel presided at the wedding of Carlos Slim, who would become the world's richest man.) It's fate is uncertain, however: A five-bishop investigative committee recently submitted a report to Vatican that could result in the order being disbanded - or forced to be refounded.

Roberto Madrazo surfaces

2010-04-09T21:01:00.006-05:00

He's back! Former PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo surfaced last week in Monterrey, where he blasted the PAN-PRD alliances, formed to challenge the PRI in the July 4 gubernatorial races, for lacking "scruples."

His outburst marked the latest outburst by a prominent Priísta against the alliances between the right-leaning PAN and left-leaning PRD that aim to defeat the PRI in some the party's most solid strongholds such as Oaxaca, Puebla and Hidalgo - all places, like Madrazo's home state of Tabasco, with notorious reputations for retrograde politics, authoritarian governance and elections that are anything but squeaky clean.

"What they're uniting for is only an interest in power for the sake of power itself. You can't unite ideologies so different as those that exist between the the PAN and PRD with the lone proposal of defeating the PRI," Madrazo said.

Of course, the PRI - like many political parties - could be accused of seeking power the sake of power itself and being unscrupulous for trying to unite disparate viewpoints on contentious social and economic issues. After all, PRI party president Beatriz Paredes - a woman often accused of lacking the courage of her convictions - has been taken to task for playing up her "social democratic" and feminist tendencies, but staying silent as 18 state governments, the majority of them run by the PRI, outlawed abortion under all circumstances.

And Madrazo would know a thing or two about seeking power for the sake of power, too. Many of his actions as PRI president last decade were made with an eye toward capturing the 2006 presidential nomination. He developed a sordid reputation for hardball politics. The PRI was an obstructionist force in Congress under his watch and he clashed with SNTE teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo and many state governors - who not only stayed on the sidelines during his presidential campaign, but made sure he didn't win.

Madrazo's motives for blasting the coalition are unknown, but the move reflects a general unease among Priístas over the issue of the electoral coalitions formed to confront them. (Recall the supposed PAN-PRI deal to have the PRI back a tax increase if the PAN wouldn't form an electoral alliance for the 2011 State of Mexico gubernatorial election.) Madrazo, for all of his enemies in the PRI, gained his much of his support in Southern Mexico and in orphan states - states such as Jalisco, Guanajuato and Baja California, places that have solid bases of PRI support, but no powerful PRI governors to marshal votes for preferred candidates. Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz - whose regime is so despised by the PAN and PRD that they would unite against it - was a solid Madrazo backer, which perhaps helps to explain the outburst.

Madrazo would know about coalitions, too.

The infamous TUCOM (Everyone United Against Madrazo) formed during the PRI primary to select a single candidate that would face Madrazo for the nomination. TUCOM chose State of Mexico Gov. Arturo Montiel, who was subsequently sandbagged - allegedly by Madrazo's campaign - for ethical problems that included his owning properties in Europe and such luxury spots as Careyes, an exclusive enclave on Jalisco's Costa Alegre.

Madrazo's 2006 PRI presidential campaign also struck a deal with the Green Party - even though the PVEM had a promising candidate in Bernardo de la Garza. In the waning days of the campaign, he welcomed back the campesino wing of the now defunct Alternativa party - the same gang that advanced the nomination of discount drug baron Víctor González Torres (aka: Dr. Simi) and clashed with the party's 2006 nominee, Patricia Mercado.

His coalition building all amounted to a hill a beans, however. Madrazo led a badly divided PRI to its worst finish ever as he gained barely 22 percent of the popular vote and failed to win a plurality in any of the Republic's 31 states or the Federal District.

Election failure did little to remedy is bad reputation. He entered a German marathon in 2007 and won his age group, but, mysteriously, he didn't pass through all of the checkpoints along the course and was disqualified.

Now he's back - clean-shaven - perhaps proving that no reputation is ever too unsavoury for Mexico's political system, which has an enormous capacity for recycling disgraced figures.

Cash, status lure youths to drug trade in troubled parts of Mexico

2010-04-08T22:52:00.001-05:00

By David Agren, Catholic News Service

APATZINGÁN, Mexico (CNS) -- Father Javier Cortés vividly recalls being approached recently with an unusual request by a group of teenagers in this agricultural town 300 miles west of Mexico City. There, La Familia Michoacana, a quasi-religious drug cartel, dumped four human heads at a prominent public monument during Holy Week as a warning to its rivals.

"Some young people said, 'Father, I've come so that you will bless me because I'm going to kill Zetas,'" he said, referring to the gang of rogue former soldiers and police officers that La Familia members consider their mortal enemies.

Father Cortés, who is rector of the local seminary, rebuked the plan and refused to bless the killing spree.

Such violence has become common, however, and has contributed to more than 19,000 deaths since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006 and promised to crack down on violent drug cartels. The violence increasingly is claiming young lives as well. Authorities blame the cartels and gangs affiliated with them for massacres such as the January murder of 15 youths at a birthday party in Ciudad Juárez and the Palm Sunday murders in Durango state of 10 young people who were returning to their communal farm.

But the request made of Father Cortés highlighted an even more disturbing trend in drug-related violence, as young people are increasingly recruited by the cartels and lured into the seemingly easy money of the drug trade.

"We're talking about a lost generation of young people that is falling into the networks of narcotics trafficking," said security expert Pedro Isnardo de la Cruz, who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

He attributed the recruitment of young people to a combination of factors that include Mexico's long-underperforming economy, family breakdowns and the seduction of the cartels.

Church leaders and young people concurred and said such factors are at play in Apatzingán, the hub of an economically neglected region of downtrodden communal farms and lemon groves known as Tierra Caliente, or Hot Earth.

Read more here.

More hard luck for Cd. Juárez

2010-03-28T15:28:00.006-06:00

Things just went from bad to worse in Ciudad Juárez - at least in sporting terms - as the hard-luck local soccer team, Club de Fútbol Indios de Ciudad Juárez, was relegated to the Liga de Ascenso, or Mexico's second division. The relegation comes as little surprise: Indios - also known as El Tribu, or The Tribe - only snapped a 27-game winless skid last weekend and had needed to win its remaining six games to have an outside chance at avoiding relegation.

Atlante put Indios out of its misery with a 3-0 victory in Cancún on Saturday night, however.

Relegation in Mexican soccer usually comes down to a nail-biting final weekend as the team with the worst cumulative record over the past three years is demoted. The Liga de Ascenso winner, meanwhile, is promoted. Since Indios suffered through such a miserable season, such nail-biting was avoided this time around.

Ciudad Juárez, of course, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. A turf war between rival drug cartels and the gangs working for the cartels has intensified and soldiers and federal police have been patrolling the streets. The 2010 death toll in the state of Chihuahua now stands at 585, according to Grupo Reforma, and an estimated 400,000 residents of Ciudad Juárez, a former boomtown on the Chihuahua-Texas border, have decamped for presumably safer places such as neighboring El Paso - one of the safest cities in the United States.

Perhaps making the Indios story so much more sad is the team's unfortunate reversal of fortune. Founded in 2005, Indios was promoted to the top division for the season beginning in the summer of 2008. It became the little team that could: El Tribu made an improbable playoff run by defeating the defending champion, Toluca, before bowing out to Pachuca in the semi-finals.

Then the misery and losing began - and the team never snapped out of it.

Adios to Indios. Teams relegated to the Liga de Ascenso are usually not missed - a few Necaxa fans might disagree - but the Inidos just might be.

Tensions mount between Catholic Church, liberal Mexico City government

2010-03-20T12:41:00.000-06:00

Why the Mexico City gov't and local archdiocese don't get along (originally published by Catholic New Service in March 2010 ...)

By David Agren Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- Mayor Marcelo Ebrard was witness to five same-sex marriages March 11 in Mexico City's old government building, the first such unions in the country and the first ones under new laws approved in the Mexican capital.

The Mexico City Archdiocese, meanwhile, expressed disappointment. Father Hugo Valdemar Romero, archdiocesan spokesman, said in a statement March 11, "It's clear that Mr. Marcelo Ebrard is responsible for the approval and execution of these laws that are destructive to the family and he doesn't conceal his aversion to the churches and the majority of people he governs, who profess the Christian faith and reject the perversion of their most cherished values."

The disagreement escalated tensions between the archdiocese and the local government. During the last three years Mexico City also decriminalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy -- and paid for abortions performed in public hospitals -- and liberalized euthanasia laws.

It also marked a further departure from the good relations the archdiocese and local government shared prior to Ebrard taking office in 2006.

Previously, "Relations between the archdiocese and the Mexico City government had always been cordial," Father Jose de Jesus Aguilar Valdes, director of the radio and TV for the archdiocese, told Catholic News Service.

He emphasized that current relations with the national leadership of the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party -- which dominates politics in much of Mexico City -- are cordial. But with the Ebrard administration and local assembly, "there's been a distancing" and little direct contact, he said.

The distancing runs counter to the current thawing of relations between church and state in Mexico, where the institutions officially had been kept separate for 150 years.Relations between the two often have been strained.

Political observers say current church-state relations are marked by political parties and candidates courting church support even though Catholic leaders have said they don't take sides.

"Church support is not usually the deciding factor (in elections) ... but it helps," said Aldo Munoz Armenta, political science professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

Munoz traced the origins of the discord to electoral politics. Specifically, he cited the tight 2006 presidential contest, which former Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador narrowly lost and considers to have been rigged.

During his 2000-2005 administration Lopez Obrador developed a cordial relationship with the archdiocese. His government even provided money for renovations to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Metropolitan Cathedral.

Enoe Uranga Munoz, a Democratic Revolution Party member of Mexico's lower house of Congress, told CNS that Lopez Obrador thwarted attempts by the Mexico City Assembly to decriminalize abortion.

"He did it out of conviction, but also because he saw himself as a presidential candidate and had the need for an alliance with the church hierarchy," Uranga said.

For its part, the archdiocese disapproved of a 2005 attempt to impeach Lopez Obrador -- a move that would have disqualified the early frontrunner from the 2006 election. But false assumptions by Lopez Obrador that the church would back his presidential campaign caused relations to deteriorate, Father Aguilar said.

Lopez Obrador and his backers view the 2006 election as a "betrayal," said political historian Ilan Semo Groman of the Jesuit-run Iberoamerican University.

Semo added that the church traditionally seeks good relations with whichever party wins power and recognized President Felipe Calderon's narrow victory.

Lopez Obrador organized mass protests after the election and declared himself, "legitimate president" of Mexico. He refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Calderon administration and, like Ebrard, maintains that posture to this day.

Ebrard won office at the same time as Calderon and, almost immediately, began pursuing a socially liberal agenda. Political observers say he pursed that agenda out of a need to separate himself from Lopez Obrador and lay the groundwork for a possible presidential bid in 2012.

The pursuit of that bid could lead to a worsening of relations between the archdiocese and local government.

"They're using confrontation with the church as their primary weapon," said Uranga, who is openly gay and supports much of the Ebrard agenda -- if not his political tactics.

Some observers see political profit in antagonizing the church, however, mainly because Mexico City is more secular than other parts of the country, due to having an intellectual and political class with anti-clerical attitudes.

"The conflict between Marcelo (Ebrard) and the church is electoral," Munoz said.

"Your enemy is electorally important, and you'll use it as it suits you. Being anti-clerical, for Marcelo (Ebrard), for where he is, is something very convenient."

World's richest man dominates Mexican economy

2010-03-12T18:42:00.003-06:00

Peces, a seafood restaurant in Mexico City's Col. Roma, uses the slogan, "The only one that doesn't belong to Slim," a reference to the world's richest man, Carlos Slim.

By David Agren, Canwest News Service

MEXICO CITY — News of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu topping the annual Forbes list of the world's wealthiest individuals came as little surprise to many in Mexico, including social-activist-turned-restaurateur Marco Rascon.

Famed for previously masquerading as "Super Barrio" — a portly protest leader clad in wrestling tights and "lucha-libre" mask — Rascon has turned his mischievous instincts in recent years toward highlighting the enormous influence of the country's richest man on the national economy and his apparent ability to run roughshod over regulators.

As an example, Rascon's seafood restaurant — Peces, or Fishes — goes by the slogan, "The only one that doesn't belong to Slim." Rascon has tried living beyond the reach of Slim's empire as much as possible by avoiding the billionaire's companies, which dominate the telecommunications sector and have a strong presence in retail, construction, tobacco and banking — among other industries. He's mostly failed in his attempts.

"It's a fantasy," he said flatly of any attempt to avoid patronizing Slim's companies.

"You almost can't breath in Mexico" without paying him something.

Such is Slim's dominance of the Mexican economy, which long has been characterized by the enormous concentration of wealth, monopolies and limited competition in sectors such as telecommunications, broadcasting, cement and brewing, and perceptions the federal government and regulators are unable or unwilling to abate monopolistic business practices.

Slim's dominance of the economy is so expansive that nearly anyone in Mexico making a cellphone call, surfing the Internet, smoking a Marlboro cigarette, sipping coffee in the ubiquitous Sanborns chain, shopping in his malls (anchored by Sears, which he owns in Mexico) or driving on the roads built by his construction company puts money in his pocket.

It's estimated his companies at one point comprised roughly one-third of the Mexican stock exchange's value, while his telecommunications companies — fixed-line operator Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) and cellular operator America Movil — have been accused of charging some of the highest rates in the industrialized world.

Telmex and America Movil deny charging exorbitant rates, while Slim has denied being a monopolist and says on his personal website that Telemex has more than 600 competitors. Industry analysts credit Slim with transforming a monopoly with antiquated technology and a reputation for surly customer service into a world-class company.

Read the rest of the story at the Ottawa Citizen website.

Desperately seeking tourists

2010-03-05T13:37:00.005-06:00

From FFWD Weekly (Calgary)

Honduras is fine for a holiday, despite last year's coup

by David Agren

Dinner is always served immediately after sundown at Hacienda San Lucas, a rustic inn set in the Honduras hills overlooking this colonial town of cobblestone streets and whitewashed buildings with red-tile roofs near the Guatemala border. The four-course dinner of salad with a hibiscus vinaigrette, vegetable tamales, chicken with a secret adobo sauce and a candied papaya dessert is prepared in a country kitchen outfitted with old-style wood-fired ovens, enjoyed by candlelight and washed down with South American wines.

In past years, reservations were always a must for such feasts — as were reservations for the hacienda, a collection of eight guest rooms with breathtaking views of the town and easy access to nearby Mayan ruins that, in recent years, put this isolated corner of northwestern Honduras on the tourist map.

But then Honduras suffered a coup last year — and tourism plunged. Hacienda San Lucas owner Flavia Cueva says her occupancy rate has dropped from 98 per cent to two per cent.

“This political crisis is killing me,” she says over drinks on an autumn evening, when just three tables on her expansive patio were occupied.

Such is the state of tourism across Honduras, the second-poorest country in the hemisphere and a place that dominated the headlines throughout the latter half of 2009 for all the wrong reasons.

The June 28 coup ousted president Manuel Zelaya from office and was marked by soldiers ushering him out of the country for allegedly violating a Supreme Court decision forbidding a referendum on holding a referendum on whether to rewrite the constitution. Zelaya supporters call his removal an old-fashioned coup and allege suffering heavy-handed repressions at the hands of the de facto government. (A new president, Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, took office Jan. 29, but his government is not recognized by many countries in the hemisphere.)

Subsequent images of violent protests in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and stories of curfews and border closures have dissuaded many visitors from coming to Honduras, where a nascent tourism industry was beginning to grow and places such as Copán Ruinas and the white sand beaches of the Bay Islands — reputedly the cheapest place in the Caribbean to dive — were gaining fame.

Guatemalan officials, meanwhile, aggravated the situation by spreading erroneous information of dangerous unrest and border closures to keep tourists from crossing into Honduras, an area long treated by guide books as an appendage of Guatemala — a country with a thriving tourism industry, despite crime and murder rates as bad or worse than those of Honduras.

The impact was immediate. Belgian expatriate Geert Van Vaeck, former director of the local tourism council, says his daily tourist bus from Antigua, Guatemala, used to arrive full. The day after the coup, it had two passengers.

But the situation in Copán Ruinas, Van Vaeck says, never descended into violence or disorder — spare the day Hondurans spilled into the streets to celebrate the national soccer team miraculously qualifying for the World Cup.

Those arriving in Copán Ruinas instead find a traditionally Honduran town, where locals convene markets brimming with fruits, vegetables and handicrafts, three-wheel taxis dart through the hilly streets and hoards of foreign missionaries — complete with their blond hair, ties, nametags and Bibles — are easily spotted.

Talk of politics has certainly been rife in Copán Ruinas, but almost in a dismissive sense.

“I just want these two clowns (Zelaya and the then de facto president, Roberto Micheletti,) to get lost and for someone else, anyone else, to take over,” says a self-confessed party girl named Fanny, while lounging at Van Vaeck’s hotel bar, Via Via.

The party scene is somewhat subdued these days in Copán Ruinas, although during happier times, Peace Corps volunteers, backpackers and Hondurans from other parts of the country would pour in for weekend junkets.

They would lounge on couches and take in DJ performances on weekends at Via Via, while next door at Tun Club, patrons would sip mojitos and bottles of SalvaVida — or Life Preserver, the national brew — while sitting on saddles next to the bar, enjoying live performances by bands covering Latino hits.

Others would come for a more laid-back, almost quirky vibe. At the Carnitas Ni’a Lola, for example, the restaurant serves up massive steak dinners for $10 and the waitresses carry drink and snack orders to the tables on their heads.

Still more would come for the outlying attractions, which provide much of Copán Ruinas’s true charm. Those places include Macaw Mountain, a sanctuary for exotic birds. In the village of La Pintada, a short walk from the Hacienda San Lucas, indigenous Maya Chortí women weave cornhusk dolls to provide incomes that support entire households. (Sales are scant these days.) And, of course, there are the Mayan ruins, which, while less grand in stature in comparison to other Maya ruins such as Tikal in Guatemala and Palenque in Mexico, feature a large number of sculptures.

Further afield, the El Cisne coffee and cardamom plantation takes guests for horseback tours of its working farm, swims in the local hot springs and overnight stays that include feasts prepared from the locally grown bounty.

Over a breakfast of passion fruit juice and fried yucca, El Cisne owner Carlos Castejon boasts of the potential of his corner of Honduras and even figures the political unrest might ultimately work to the country’s advantage — in a tourist sense.

“The whole world now knows about us,” he says, adding, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity."

Recovering Haiti looks to tourism to bolster economy

2010-02-05T14:18:00.004-06:00

A young guide in Milot, Haiti, readies to the lead a horse to La Citadelle, one of the largest forts in the Caribbean. The Sans-Souci palace - ruined in an 1842 earthquake - is in the background.

By David Agren, Canwest News Service

MILOT, Haiti - The earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince failed to budge La Citadelle la Ferriere, an early 19th-century fortress that towers over this community in northern Haiti.

With thick, stone walls, rows of cannons and piles of cannonballs, along with breathtaking views from a setting nearly 900 metres above Milot, local tour guide Maurice Etienne calls it "one of the biggest fortresses in the Caribbean,'' and one of the best tourist attractions in the region, too.

And now, with the economy in shambles and the capital in ruins, Etienne and others in Haiti's nascent tourism industry see potential in places such as La Citadelle and are calling for the country to urgently embrace one of the Caribbean's most lucrative industries.

The proposal to bolster tourism in Haiti isn't entirely new, however. Haiti was among the pioneers of Caribbean tourism in the 1950s, but the industry petered out with the rise of strongman Francois "Papa Doc'' Duvalier.

Read more at Canada.com.

Haitians living in Dominican Republic return home to find relatives

2010-02-04T09:30:00.003-06:00

I recently returned from 11 days of reporting in the Dominican Republic and Northern Haiti. Here's one of the stories from the trip on the mass return of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic to Port-au-Prince in an effort to retrieve relatives left homeless or injured by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

By David Agren
Catholic News Service

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (CNS) -- Saintivo Gassant boarded a small, intercity bus with 37 other passengers -- mostly fellow Haitians -- at a ramshackle station in the Dominican capital, beginning a seven-hour journey back to the rubble of his native Port-au-Prince.

He carried a backpack stuffed with documents: immigration papers, a copy of his university degree, and even photos, including a snapshot of him with the president of the Dominican Republic at a tourism exhibition. He clutched the backpack tightly for much of the first leg of the journey, knowing its contents could prevent any glitches in his attempt to bring his 12-year-old daughter, Kimberley, back to the Dominican Republic.

Gassant knew few details about her situation, just that Kimberley had been living temporarily with her mother when the magnitude 7 earthquake flattened the Haitian capital Jan. 12, and that she was now living in the street, under the care of his sister.

"I still don't know the whole story," he said Jan. 26, explaining that he learned of Kimberley's fate in a brief, Jan. 16 phone call. "My return home will be completely unexpected for them."

Gassant was just one of the thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic -- and points farther abroad -- to return to Port-au-Prince in search of information on loved ones and, in many cases, to retrieve them from the ruins of an earthquake that claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and destroyed a city that will not be fully reconstructed for years.

Read more at Catholic News Service.

Gubernatorial politics makes strange bedfellows

2010-01-13T15:51:00.008-06:00

Politics makes strange bedfellows - and nowhere more so than Oaxaca, where the oft-conflictive southern state holds local and gubernatorial elections July 4 that will choose a successor to polemic Gov. Ulises Ruiz.

To refresh memories, Ruiz heads an old-school state chapter of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), clashes frequently with Section 22 of the SNTE teachers union and various left-wing movements and presided over a 2006 uprising by the teachers and their allies that descended into lawlessness and destroyed the state's tourism-dependent economy.

The National Action Party (PAN) and Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) so dislike Ruiz - who last fall was found responsible for human rights violations in the uprising by a Supreme Court investigation - that the two political foes appear willing to join forces in an attempt to oust the PRI, which is said to be largely under Ruiz's control.

Both PAN president César Nava said PRD president Jesús Ortega have already spoken favourably of a possible alliance - even if the logistics of carrying it out would be difficult. It would require the PAN to back a candidate - most likely former Oaxaca city mayor and Convergence party Sen. Gabino Cué, who was backed by a similar coalition in 2004 - that is considered close to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an anti-establishment figure the PAN party branded, "A danger for Mexico," during the 2006 presidential election. For the PRD, forging an alliance with the PAN requires still-scorned members to partner with a party that López Obrador derides (along with the PRI) as the "mafia" and is run by close allies of President Felipe Calderón - a man they accuse of stealing the 2006 election and refuse to recognize as legitimately elected.

López Obrador has rebuked the prospect that any of the country's left-wing parties - PRD, Convergence and the Labour Party (PT) - might even consider forging alliances with either the PAN or PRI.

The Oaxaca state chapters of the PAN, PRD, PT and Convergence already all have signed onto the alliance. Any alliance must be registered by Feb. 10.

DIFFERENT POLITICAL LANDSCAPE
The Mexican political landscape has changed over the past three years, however, making a possible alliance and cooperation between bitter enemies a possibility. The PAN has lost ground in Congress, while the PRD has been beset with internal divisions. The PRI juggernaut appears set to roll once again in 2010, too. The PRI enters 2010 on a roll, having captured a plurality in the lower house of Congress last year and having dominated state and local races in the years since the party's disastrous third-place showing in the 2006 presidential and congressional elections.

For some political observers, the willingness of disparate opposition parties to now forge electoral alliances reflects the revival of a once-popular strategy for taking down the PRI during the 1990s, when its grip on power began to weaken.

"It's the old opposition strategy against the PRI," said Federico Estévez, political science professor at ITAM. "It makes the PRI fight for every last vote."

NOT JUST OAXACA
But Oaxaca could be just one of many unlikely alliances in 2010, when 12 states - including such PRI bastions as Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo and Durango - elect new governors.

PAN officials have already said that they would consider electoral alliances in states with polemic PRI governors - such as Puebla, where Gov. Mario Marín gained infamy in 2006 for attempting to railroad journalist Lydia Cacho - and strong PRI machines that produced clean sweeps in for the party in the 2009 midterm election.

Ortega from the PRD said his party would consider alliances in places with "absolutely authoritarian governors."

Oaxaca tops that list for many political observers and non-PRI politicians. The state is among the poorest in Mexico and governance among the least transparent. Violence long has been a calling card of Oaxaca politics - and critics of the PRI such as Section 22 and the Oaxaca People's Assembly (APPO) have been accused using tactics such as intimidation, vandalism and extortion, too.

Current PRI Deputy Elpidio Concha is accused of belonging to a mob that beat a protesting teacher to death five years ago. (He enjoys immunity from prosecution as a Chamber of Deputies member.

Diego Petersen Farah, former editor of the Guadalajara newspaper, Público, opined during the 2006 uprising, "Ulises Ruiz is a troglodyte and the Oaxaca PRI is more a criminal organization than a political party."

López Obrador spent the latter part of 2009 touring the more than 400 Oaxaca municipalities that use non-partisan forms of local governance that are based on traditional "usos y costumbres." Cue travelled with López Obrador - who carried Oaxaca during the 2006 presidential election - during the tour, which featured outbursts blasting both the PAN and PRI.

The former presidential candidate has been critical of Ruiz and the Oaxaca PRI for years. The criticism increased after the April 2009 assassination of an Oaxaca activist for his "legitimate government," Beatriz López Leyva, that was blamed by her family on a PRI mayor.

HARD TO UNSEAT
Ruiz won a disputed election in 2004 and, according to his critics, proceeded to run run the state with a heavy hand. He brought about an unpopular gentrification to the popular Zócalo square in the center of the state capital without holding proper consultations, for example. But his July crackdown on striking teachers in the Zócalo provoked the 2006 uprising. (The teachers in Oaxaca have struck annually for more than 25 years.)

Opposition politicians called for Ruiz's head, but he refused to back down. The PRI also refused to abandon Ruiz. Political circumstances ultimately saved him - along with political tactics for survival by the PAN and Calderón, who barely won the 2006 election and risked having the PRD block his taking the oath of office.

With the PRD attempting to prevent Calderón from taking office, the president began working with the PRI.

As Grupo Reforma columnist Sergio Sarmiento told me in Nov. 2006: "Either (PAN) makes agreements with the PRI or they forget about ruling the country for the next six years."

The cost of making agreements with the PRI appears to have been high. Former PAN deputy Gerardo Priego told me numerous times in 2008 that his party erred by making so many legislative and political deals with the PRI - at the price of sparing governors such as Ruiz and Marin - and that voters would punish the PAN because they would "see no difference" and opt for the more experienced party.

Now the PAN wants the PRI out of the Oaxaca governor's office - and could be willing to make agreements with a man they consider "a danger for Mexico" to do so.

Estevéz gives the coalition a chance of success since the PAN has reasonably a good organization in some parts of the state and former interior secretary and former Oaxaca governor Diódoro Carrasco defected to the PAN in recent years. Cué performed strongly in 2004 and Ruiz has been polemic since taking office.

The terms of agreement might derail any coalition, though.

"PAN is usually unwilling to go into alliances if it's the junior partner," Estévez said.

And then there's the prospect of trying to unseat a party that has always governed Oaxaca and operates a legendary political machine that produced a clean-sweep in last summer's midterm elections and reputedly is operating on all cylinders - especially in the "usos y costumbres" municipalities.

"Oaxaca is old-time Mexico, in terms of politics," Estévez said.

A bit of New Year's self-promotion

2009-12-31T21:53:00.003-06:00

I spent three days in early December working as a fixer in the Lake Chapala area and Guadalajara for a New York Times reporter, who was investigating what happens to the undocumented migrants that lose access to health care services in the U.S. and subsequently return to Mexico. The story focuses a 34-year-old woman, Mónica Chavarría, from an ejido on the Jalisco-Michoacán state line. She has end-stage renal failure and used to receive treatment at a public hospital in Atlanta. But the hospital closed the kidney dialysis clinic earlier this year due to budgetary issues.

The undocumented migrants receiving dialysis were offered three months of treatment elsewhere and a trip home. (U.S. Citizens with kidney failure are eligible for Medicare.) Mónica returned to Mexico with her youngest son, while her husband and older son stayed in the Atlanta area. Her husband has been working as a paver and raising money to pay for a transplant - which would cost far less in Mexico.

Read the full story here, at the Times' website.

Happy new year to everyone!

Christmas potpourri

2009-12-26T00:15:00.017-06:00

Parroquia in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. Photo by Steven H. Miller.

I avoided working on Christmas Day for the first time in three years. But I noticed enough happenings back in Mexico worth mentioning in a blog post. (There certainly weren't any here in Canada worth mentioning, spare this outstanding year-end column penned by Lord Conrad Black from his Florida prison cell on the worst nonsense of 2009.)

Trips to the newsroom on the past two Christmas Days were rather bleak affairs - and made even more bleak by a big boss that was partial to a no-fun, let's-take-ourselves-too-serious editorial policy that kept the lighter side of the news out of the newspaper on holidays. (How many times can you write seriously about Andrés Manuel López Obrador rallies in the Zócalo? For the record, I've done it more than 20 times.)

The lighter side of the news in Mexico around this time of year often involves fireworks - or, more accurately, some mishap with fireworks, such as a pyrotechnics warehouse blowing up in Cancún.

And with most Mexicans feasting on their Christmas dinners - accompanied by generous amounts of drink - late on Dec. 24, a not-so-enterprising reporter in León wrote about the traditional remedy for a night of hard drinking: A hot bowl of menudo, or tripe soup. Menuderías were, no surprise, busy on Christmas morning, ladling up hot fare for those that hit the liquor a little too hard.

Others hitting the liquor a little too hard got busted by the "alcoholimétro," or breathalyzer. The Mexico City Public Security Secretariat reported that 1,096 motorists have been detained so far this holiday season for failing breathalyzer tests. Cops in the capital have reputedly been less inclined to take bribes from those anxious to avoid a possible trip to the drunk tank.

Reforma, meanwhile, noted that the Mexico City prison population also got into the Christmas spirit by hitting the liquor a little too hard. The newspaper reported in a Boxing Day story that wealthier inmates celebrated Christmas with feasts that featured "Serrano ham" along with "alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, music and ... and hired women."

Inmates with culinary skills reportedly prepared the feasts for their wealthier counterparts, who, the Mexico City daily said, "Are known as godfathers." An inmate known as Juan "N" told Reforma that guards got in on the act, too, but in a far less festive fashion. He said that the guards charged less-fortunate inmates double to be marked "present" during roll call because they needed money for Christmas bonuses and didn't want to have to disrupt the prison parties.

Christmas, unfortunately, was bleak for many in Mexico's working and lower classes, who have suffered through an economic crisis in 2009 that has been marked by rising prices, lower wages and record unemployment.

El Universal interviewed one of the Santas moonlighting in Mexico City's Alameda Central, who said he took the gig because his construction job wasn't giving him any hours. The 15-year-old Santa said that his temporary gig paid 130 pesos per day and that he liked the work - even though his reasons for saying so seemed truly dismal.

"They pay me less here, but I like it more," he said. "I remember my childhood [while working as a Santa], although Santa never brought me anything."

One person grumbling about the big Santa better known as the federal government not bringing anything for anyone was López Obrador - the so-called "legitimate president" and self-styled champion of the downtrodden. Not one to avoid mixing disparate happenings and holiday events with his pet causes - recall his August 2008 proposal to solve insecurity and kidnappings by avoiding the "privatization, open or disguised, of the national petroleum industry" - López Obrador invoked Jesus Christ in his Christmas Twitter remarks.

"According to history, a day such as today, 2009 years ago, Jesus Christ was born, the most important defender of the poor that has ever existed."

Naturally, Mexico's religious institutions weighed in on Christmas - but not with the usual tidings of comfort and joy. Bishop Raúl Vera López of Saltillo - a man, who, like López Obrador, shows frequent disdain for the country's political class - delivered a Christmas Day rebuke to the federal government's recent scalping of cartel kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva.

Members of the Mexican Navy shot Beltrán Leyva dead during a Dec. 16 raid in Cuernavaca. That raid, and the subsequent papering of the body with bank notes by crime scene workers, upset the good bishop. He told inmates at a women's prison that the federal government appeared to have no interest in capturing Beltrán Leyva, only executing him.

"They went to execute, not to apprehend," the bishop said.

"They went to execute, in a way to exhibit the executed people in the same way they exhibited those that were killed and left hanging from trees in the era of the Revolution.

"Now they're smearing them in bank notes."

Bishop Vera has been critical of the federal government's war on drugs from outset and told me in June 2007 that soldiers should be sent back to their barracks since they lack the proper training for dealing with the public.

The Archdiocese of Mexico City differed. Cardinal Norberto Rivera - who seldom sees eye-to-eye with Bishop Vera - told reporters Dec. 20 that he favoured keeping soldiers in the streets since there wasn't another organization ready to take their place.

But the cardinal became far more animated by the Mexico City Assembly (ALDF) approval last week of same-sex marriage laws and the last-minute changes to the legislation to allow same-sex couples to adopt children.

Archidocese of Mexico City publication, Desde la Fe, reported Dec. 24 that during the archdiocese's annual posada, the cardinal "expressed his discontent with the recent approval by the (ALDF) of 'marriages' between persons of the same sex and the adoption of children by theses couples." (Bishop Vera, for the record, backed a 2007 initiative in Coahuila state, site of his diocese, that approved same-sex civil partnerships. He also has blessed the formation of a gay Catholic youth group in Saltillo.)

The salvo against the ALDF for its approval of same-sex marriage was only the latest in a series of tart editorials and statements from the archdiocese against the ALDF and the Chamber of Deputies. Past salvos have taken issue with lawmakers' lavish salaries, partisan political posturings, and their supposed frivolity in the face of the serious economic and social problems facing the country. The archdiocese went even further than just blasting the ALDF for approving same-sex marriage, however. The archdiocese issued an especially grumpy Christmas statement blasting the recently approved Mexico City budget, which increases taxes and metro fares and imposes a new water tariff regime that is meant to stave off forced water rationing in 2010.

"Why is the [majority] PRD, a fierce opponent of federal taxes, such a thief on local (taxes)?" the archdiocese asked.

"Will it be that they need more money to sustain corruption in the boroughs and the scandalous budgets of local deputies that they only use to approve criminal laws such as the one for abortion, immoral ones such as weddings between homosexuals and unjust ones such as the adoption by couples of the same sex.

Going beyond the ALDF, the archdiocese took issue with federal lawmakers, too. A Dec. 1 editorial asked federal lawmakers "to set the example" and take less generous Christmas bonuses, known as an aguinaldos.

The 500 deputies took their usual bonuses - a pro-rated sum of 65,000 pesos this year. The bonuses also included 9,157 pesos in coupons for a Christmas dinner.

At least there was no re-run of last year, when the deputies were reimbursed the money from their aguinaldos that had been deducted in taxes.

PRD kingpin quits party

2009-12-16T08:59:00.006-06:00

A PRD senator on the losing end of a power struggle in the Mexico City borough of Iztapalapa has quit the left-wing party.

Sen. René Arce - PRD power boss in Iztapalapa, one of the biggest local-level jurisdictions in Mexico and one of the party's most populous bastions of support - announced his departure Dec. 15 in a move that had been expected, but underscored the ongoing disunity and disarray in the Mexican left. In an open letter to PRD president Jesús Ortega, Arce expressed dismay with the refusal of the party's hardline factions to negotiate with political rivals - such as the PAN and PRI, parties that former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador brands, "The mafia" - or advance structural reforms in areas such as taxation and the petroleum sector.

"Our country requires a left, that, without fear of the taboos of the old marxist left or of the anachronistic revolutionary nationalism, is willing to reach broad national agreements, including [agreements] with those in all sectors of society and with our political adversaries," Arce said.

The comments were pointed directly at López Obrador, who has admonished PRD members to avoid all dealings with the PAN and PRI and crusaded tirelessly - and unsuccessfully - last year against plans to allow greater private sector participation in the state-controlled petroleum sector.

Arce had crossed swords with López Obrador over the years, but the feuding between the two intensified after the latter narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election.

The senator had been a key organizer in a PRD faction known as the New Left, which is loyal to Ortega and narrowly prevented López Obrador's preferred candidate, Alejandro Encinas, from winning the 2008 internal election. (The electoral tribunal [Trife] overturned the annulled internal election and awarded the PRD presidency to Ortega.)

López Obrador, aided by ace Mexico City organizer René Bejarano and the PRD's IDN faction, took revenge on the New Left and Arce in the March 2009 primary election for PRD borough chief candidate in Iztapalapa, however. (Arce and his brother, Víctor Hugo Cirigo, were previously borough chiefs in Iztapalapa and Arce's ex-wife Silvia Oliva competed in the 2009 PRD primary.)

The former Mexico City mayor later ousted the Arce clan from Iztapalapa. He promoted the successful primary candidacy of Clara Brugada, although she was disqualified in June by the Trife due to irregularities at some of the polling stations in the primary election. The Trife decision set in motion the "Juanito" saga in which López Obrador co-opted the PT campaign of Rafael Acosta and had Acosta promise to step aside for Brugada if the PT won the election. Juanito won on July 5, held office briefly, but took leave so that Brugada could take his place. (Read about the Juanito saga here and here.)

López Obrador's Iztapalapa coup severely weakened the New Left. Ortega also appeared to be weakened as party president and unable or unwilling to intervene in Iztapalapa on Arce's behalf. According to some columnists, Ortega has stayed out of Iztapalapa in an attempt to make peace with the López Obrador factions so that he could launch a bid for the Mexico City mayor's office in 2012.

Arce is reportedly trying to form a new local party with former Chamber of Deputies speaker Ruth Zavaleta - who also resigned from the PRD - that would most likely align itself with the PRI.

Already, Adrián Rueda wrote in his La Razón newspaper column that Arce has a political association that could be converted into a political party. But even before any party is formed, Rueda reported Dec. 16 that Arce was creating headaches for the local PRD in the Mexico City Assembly, where three Arce loyalists also quit the PRD. Their departures deprive the PRD of a majority in the Assembly and thus means that the leadership in the Assembly will be rotated among the represented parties - the PRD had been in position to hold the Assembly leadership for the next three years.

President unveils political system overhaul

2009-12-15T11:03:00.012-06:00

Calderón's proposed political reforms include reelection, run-off elections and fewer federal lawmakers

President Felipe Calderón unveiled a proposal on Dec. 15 for staging run-offs in future presidential elections. The process would pit the two biggest vote-winners in a run-off election to determine a clear victor - and presumably avoid a rerun of the narrow 2006 presidential contest, when Calderón narrowly won by less than a single percentage point and the scorned runner-up, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, derided the process as rigged.

The president unveiled the proposal as part of a 10-point plan for overhauling an oft-maligned political system that is dominated by powerful political parties and, according to some observers, run by an irresponsible political class that lacks both professionalism and accountability to voters.

The 10-point plan fulfilled a promise made earlier this fall to advance reforms such as the reelection of legislators and mayors, introduce the possibility of holding referendums and allowing for the election of independent candidates.

Calderón's proposals include those ideas, but, if the version he sent to Congress is approved, it would also eliminate the Senate seats distributed through proportional representation and reduce the number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies by 25 percent.

Other proposals call for allowing citizens and the Supreme Court to propose laws and creating a mechanism for the president to critique legislation already approved by Congress before signing it into law. (Torreón-based writer Patrick Corcoran of the Gancho blog compares this to a version of the line-item veto.)

One proposal could potentially imperil the nation's minor political parties - the Green Party, Labor Party, Convergence party and New Alliance - by raising the minimum-vote threshold necessary for them to maintain their registrations with the Federal Electoral Institute from two percent to four percent.

Opposition lawmakers greeted the president's plan with muted enthusiasm. Senate president Carlos Navarrete of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) groused about the president sending the plan to Congress on the final day of the ordinary sessions. (The permanent commission of Congress begins sitting next week.)

"The president likes to wait until the minute and send it in a nick of time, well, he needs to understand that Congress will take its time evaluating the proposals," he told reporters.

Navarrete - described in news reports as being "bothered" by the president's timing - said debate would likely begin in February.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), meanwhile, questioned the president's motives and timing and suggested that Calderón was pursuing diversionary tactics.

"It seems that this change of direction comes after the adverse and precarious results with which the executive arrives at the second half of its government ... in the economic and security matters that were its priorities" said PRI Sen. Pedro Joaquín Coldwell, president of the constitutional points committee.

Still, some in the PRI appeared open to holding discussions with the president, although Coldwell raised the possibility of his party pursuing other reforms such as an overhaul of the presidency itself and giving Congress more of a role in vetting presidential appointments. (PRI heavyweight, Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones has long called for creating a "cabinet chief" position, while Coldwell said the PRI wanted to end the "cronyism" in Calderón's cabinet selections.)

State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto appeared even more cautious that his Senate counterparts. He told reporters that he opposed reelection for historical reasons that go back to the national mythology that constant reelection during the rein of Former President Porfirio Díaz provoked social unrest and led to the Revolution.

Peña Nieto, an early favority for the 2012 PRI presidential nomination, previously has said that he instead favours extending legislative and mayoral terms from three years to four years. His support for any proposals could be key as he reputedly wields enormous influence over the roughly 40 PRI lower-house lawmakers from his home state.

For his part, López Obrador blasted the Calderón proposal for a run-off election. In a Twitter posting, he said, "The mafia want a run-off in the elections. They think that with Televisa and their two parties [PAN and PRI], they're going to keep themselves in power forever."

Calderón and López Obrador both claimed 35 percent of the 2006 popular vote; most analysts say that a run-off would have undoubtably gone in favor of the PAN.

Influence of Our Lady of Guadalupe still strong

2009-12-12T10:38:00.006-06:00

A sand sculpture of Our Lady of Guadalupe on display in Puerto Vallarta

A majority of Mexicans still confess a strong devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, according to a survey published in the Spanish newspaper, El Pais.

The telephone survey by Mexico City pollster Maria de las Heras found 64 percent of respondents “confess a strong devotion” to Guadalupe.

Another 40 percent of respondents “profess that they have personally received a favor or miracle” from Guadalupe, de las Heras said. Some 28 percent of respondents reported that they visit the Basilica of our Lady of Guadalupe at least once per year, while a similar number say they visited the site multiple times each year.

The survey reflects the enormous influence of Guadalupe over Mexican society. As de las Heras put it: "It's impossible to understand Mexico without knowing Mexicans' devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe."

It also comes on the eve of Dec. 12, when millions of followers converge on the basilica to celebrate the anniversary of Guadalupe’s appearance at Tepeyac Hill in what is now northern Mexico City.

Father Jose de Jesus Aguilar Valdes, director of radio and television for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, said that the number of visitors to the basilica has increased over the past year due to the economic crisis in Mexico that has sent unemployment to record-high levels and plunged millions of families into poverty.

Local officials in the borough of Gustavo A. Madero - which includes the basilica - estimated that 5.1 million pilgrims visited the Basilica de Guadalupe this year.

Catholics believe that Guadalupe appeared before Juan Diego – then an indigenous farmer – at Tepeyac Hill in 1531. Juan Diego was canonized in 1999, although a former rector of the basilica, Guillermo Schulenburg, was against the canonization and didn't entirely accept the story of Guadalupe making an appearance at Tepeyac. He also doubted the existence of Juan Diego.

The influence of Guadalupe on Mexican society has been strong for nearly five centuries, however. Her influence extends beyond Mexico, too. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega fulfilled a campaign promise to visit the shrine after winning power in 2007. Former FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt visited the basilica in 2008, saying that she had prayed to Our Lady of Guadalupe while being held in the Colombian jungle.

De las Heras wrote, “(Our Lady of Guadalupe) is more than a religious symbol,” and that for 42 percent of Mexicans, “She is also a patriotic symbol like the flag or national coat of arms … that more than a few social movement leaders throughout our history have taken advantage of.”

Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the father of Mexican Independence, was perhaps the most prominent of those leaders; he adopted a Guadalupe banner in 1810 to rally followers to the cause of overthrowing Spanish colonial rule. More recently, the leadership of a union representing fired utility workers adopted a similar banner for its protest marches that attempted to shut down Mexico City.

Church leaders in November condemned the use of Guadalupe by any group pursuing political ends.

Our course, foreigners also try to leverage Guadalupe's popularity. Then-presidential candidate John McCain made a well-publicized appearance at the basilica during the 2008 election campaign - perhaps an attempt to win favour with Latino voters and shave the rough edges off of a party known for negative views toward undocumented migrants. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visited the basilica in 2009 as part of a trip to Mexico that was marked by her insisting that Mexico was not a failed state.

Adios Juanito

2009-12-11T12:20:00.009-06:00

Juanito's campaign office and home in Iztapalapa

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard finally snookered Rafael Acosta, the vendor-turned-politician better known as "Juanito," by forcing his departure from the borough chief's office in the capital's most populous borough, Iztapalapa.

His unceremonious departure ends a colourful political run for the headband-wearing antihero, whose ascent to the top job in one of the country's most populous jurisdictions was both improbable and unseemly.

The mayor proposed that Clara Brugada - the Andrés Manuel López Obrador loyalist that the electoral tribunal disqualified from the July 5 borough chief election - take over in Iztapalapa. Brugada had governed in Iztapalapa for 59 days until Juanito ended a leave of absence in late November. He later fired her as judicial director after taking his office. (Taking a leave of absence fulfilled a promise he made during the election campaign, when he lent his candidacy for the Labor Party (PT) to Brugada.)

Media reports say that Juanito met with Ebrard earlier in the week, when he was presented with evidence showing that he had supposedly registered for the election with a false birth certificate. Juanito apparently used that false birth certificate - unwittingly or not - to obtain an IFE voting credential and CURP identification. How the mayor and Clara Brugada obtained the documents is still unknown, although officials in the capital were quick to also produce evidence that one of Juanito's closest collaborators failed to declare her full net worth while she held a position in the PAN-run borough government of Miguel Hidalgo.

Juanito apparently quit upon learning that he potentially faced up to eight years in prison - double for being a public servant - for the local and federal crimes of using false documents.

He told Radio Formula on Dec. 11 that the PT handled his documents for registering as a candidate in the July 5 election. But Juanito denied that the prospect of prison motivated his departure - and suggested that the PT lost his original document. Instead, he said, he left because of "the problems that were taking place every day in Iztapalapa.

"When I was a candidate, I wanted peace and quiet and if I wasn't personally well received, I prefer to step aside so that for someone other than Clara Brugada."

Brugada's supporters had surrounded the Iztapalapa borough offices and had hindered access to the building at times last week.

Ebrard has proposed that Brugada take over again in Iztapalapa. The Mexico City Assembly still must approve his proposal, but the PRD is divided over her return. The factions loyal to López Obrador and the PT only have 32 of the necessary 34 votes, according to the Reforma newspaper. The PAN, PRI and Green Party all want nothing to do with Brugada.

Seven members from the PRD's New Left faction hold the balance of power, but it's uncertain if they would back Brugada. Iztapalapa, of course, had been the main power base of the New Left and its Mexico City lieutenant, Sen. René Arce.

Ironically, Arce's ex-wife, Silvia Oliva, was defeated by Brugada in the PRD primary. Later, the electoral tribunal overturned Brugada's primary victory and named Oliva the candidate. López Obrador and Brugada extracted their revenge, however. They co-opted Juanito's campaign and ousted the Arce clan from the Iztapalapa borough government. Why the New Left members would now do any favors for Brugada is uncertain - especially with Arce on the brink of leaving the PRD.

Juanito takes over

2009-12-05T19:43:00.005-06:00

"You're fired!" Rafael Acosta - aka, "Juanito" - said that in so many words to his stand-in, Clara Brugada, after he took over the Iztapalapa borough offices last week.

Juanito, of course, is the elected borough chief of Iztapalapa, who ended a leave of absence that he took after taking his oath of office Oct. 1. Brugada, meanwhile, was the judicial director of Iztapalapa and, for 59 days, the acting borough chief. She was borough chief until Juanito took back his office. He subsequently fired Brugada from her judicial director post and relieved many of her closest collaborators in the Iztapalapa government, too.

The return of Juanito to his elected post - a move that broke a non-binding promise made in public June 16 to step aside for Brugada if he won the July 5 election - has revived an ongoing political soap opera over control of the capital's most populous borough. It also deepened divisions in the country's political left and exposed some of the more unseemly staples of Mexican political culture.

Juanito - to recap - was registered as the PT candidate in Iztapalapa, while Brugada was registered as the PRD candidate. The electoral tribunal disqualified Brugada in June, but López Obrador - who is staunchly backed by the PT - co-opted the Juanito campaign, and had Juanito swear an oath that he would take leave after winning the election in favor of Brugada.

Juanito won, but had second thoughts and ultimately turned on López Obrador.

He acknowledged his sly acts at a press conference last week, saying that he "pulled a coup" on the "López Obrador mafia," and that the Brudada camp would accuse him of just about anything to win his ouster.

"Juanito is accused of everything," he told reporters. "If Clara Brugada gets pregnant, they're going to say it was Juanito."

NOT GOING QUIETLY

For her part Brugada refuses to go quietly. Her supporters - many culled from the so-called "frentes" that agitate for housing and run political machines in run-down areas of Iztapalapa - have occupied the esplanade outside the Iztapalapa borough offices since Juanito's return and have blocked access to the building on at least once. They even prevented Juanito from lighting the borough's Christmas tree on Dec. 4 - or so Juanito said after canceling the event.

Flanked by the Frente Popular Francisco Villa - the same frente linked to the pirate taxi business in Mexico City - Brugado marched Dec. 1 from the Zócalo to the Mexico City Assembly (ALDF). Arms locked, her followers chanted slogans to the effect of, "Juanito go to hell," and waved acerbic placards that demanded Juanito's ouster.

Brugada and her allies branded Juanito, "Crazy" - something they failed to fully recognize when they struck a deal with him to take office and then take leave.

Chamber of Deputies rabble rouser Gerardo Fernández Noroña branded Juanito, "A presta nombre," or someone that lends their name or license to another person to circumvent the law. (In fact, Juanito was a "presta nombre" for López Obrador, but withdrew his consent.)

PRD Assembly spokesman, Alejandro Sánchez, went so far as to say Juanito should be ousted because he was not "morally apt" to hold office. His comments drew a sarcastic response from La Razón columnist Adrián Rueda, who pointed to Sanchez's standing within the PRD's IDN faction - the same faction founded by ace organizer Rene Bejarano. Bejarano, of course, was caught on tape in 2003 stuffing wads of cash from a developer into a suitcase. (Bejarano was exonerated on all charges stemming from the incident.)

ANOTHER DESAFUERO?

Brugada loyalists in the ALDF have filed a motion that would remove Juanito from his post due to "ungovernability" in the borough. The measure needs two-thirds support to pass in the ALDF.

The motion seemed improbable, considering that its backers decried similar attempts in 2005 to strip then-mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of his immunity from prosecution - a process known as the desafuero - and prevent him from running in the 2006 presidential election.

An ALDF committee is studying the removal of Juanito and is expected to report back by the end of December. Juanito's critics allege that his entering the borough office through a back door - and thus not having a proper transfer of power ceremony - bringing a locksmith to gain entry to the borough chief's office and not presenting a report on the state of the installations that he took over are serious enough transgressions to support his ouster.

They also accused the PAN of being behind Juanito. The man that launched Juanito's improbable run to the borough office, López Obrador, meanwhile, blamed a familiar whipping boy: former president Carlos Salinas. He blamed his latest target, State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto, too.

During a radio interview with Joaquín López Dóriga, López Obrador denied allegations that he coveted Iztapalapa because of its more than three-billion-peso budget, saying that he only cared about the "wellbeing" of residents in the capital's most downtrodden borough.

Juanito has accused López Obrador of wanting to use Iztapalapa's budget as his "piggy bank" to finance another presidential run in 2012.

The PAN, meanwhile, has denied being behind Juanito, but his ascent has stirred some discomfort for the No. 2 party in Mexico City - one that generally performs well in the wealthier parts of the capital and does poorly in places such as Iztapalapa.

Juanito appointed Alejandra Nuñez, a former head of markets in the borough of Miguel Hidalgo under then borough chief Gabriel Cuevas - who is now president of the Federal District committee in the Chamber of Deputies - to Brugada's old job. But Nuñez ran into controversy almost immediately as it was revealed that she never fully disclosed her full net worth during her time in the Miguel Hidalgo post.

Mexico City comptroller almost immediately found Nuñez unfit for her position - an act of "unusual efficiency" for the comptroller, according to Rueda.

Cuevas and other Panistas seemed to waver on the issue, saying that that Juanito couldn't ensure governability in the borough.

The PAN also appeared to come out in favor a position outlined by the PRI - which has eight members in the 66-seat ALDF - that said it would back neither Juanito or Brugada and would prefer a third option.

That might just come to pass as analysts say that the Brugada supporters in the ALDF lack sufficient support to depose Juanito. One report in the El Universal political gossip column, Bajo Reserva, suggested that some in the PRD viewed Brugada a poor political operator; she lost her grip on the borough to Juanito - a former vendor, actor and waiter.

Juanito picked up one improbably endorsement, however. The business group Coparmex-DF said Juanito should govern since he won the election - even though it's highly doubtful its members would have trusted Juanito to so much as wash their cars prior to his turning against López Obrador, whom business groups savaged with attacks in the 2006 election campaign and branded a danger for Mexico.

Increasing Decentralization Stirs Disquiet in Mexico

2009-12-01T16:16:00.002-06:00

State of Mexico Governor, Enrique Peña Nieto, arrives Nov. 12 for a meeting with Mexico's Catholic bishops' conference in Cuautitlán Izcalli.

David Agren | 01 Dec 2009
World Politics Review

MEXICO CITY -- Lower house lawmakers convened into the wee hours of the Revolution Day long weekend, Nov. 16, to approve the spending portions of Mexico's 2010 budget, which had been bogged down by demands for increased spending on the beleaguered rural economy from campesino groups linked to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The campesino groups got most of what they asked for, but according to the subsequent media spin, the PRI's 19 state governors emerged as the real winners in the budget process -- the first since the PRI and its ally, the Green Party, won control of the lower house in the July 5 mid-term elections.

The governors received funding for highways and public works projects such as plazas and charro rings -- the outdoor arenas that host Mexican-style rodeo events. Conveniently, they also extracted more money for states staging gubernatorial races in 2010 -- as well as for the populous state of Mexico, whose governor, the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto, is the early favorite for the party's 2012 presidential nomination. The governors even secured concessions that loosen some of the accountability for funds flowing to the state and local levels, where discretion spending can be the norm and transparency is often lacking.

The rest of the article can be viewed here, at World Politics Review.

Juanito's back - and this time it's for real

2009-11-29T13:57:00.008-06:00

"Juanito" has announced his return to the borough government of Iztapalapa after taking leave Oct. 1 to make way for Clara Brugada, the preferred candidate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The newspaper Reforma summed up the ongoing Juanito saga best with its Sunday headline: The show returns to Iztapalapa.

The show features an emboldened Rafael "Juanito" Acosta, the headband-wearing, Iztapalapa borough chief with a leave of absence, taking back the office that he ceded to a die-hard loyalist of Andrés Manuel López Obrador that had been disqualified from the July 5 election by the federal electoral tribunal (Trife).

Juanito entered the borough offices through a back door over the weekend and defiantly promised that he would only leave if "they drag me out dead," according to the newspaper Milenio.

"They used me. Now I'm using them," he added.

But the show also features scorned López Obrador followers threatening to prevent Juanito from retaking his elected office. The López Obrador faction in the Mexico City Assembly (ALDF) already has promised to find "legal" ways to remove Juanito from his office, while supporters of the acting borough chief Clara Brugada - including the various "frentes" that agitate for housing in impoverished parts of the borough a and reputedly run the pirate taxi business in the capital - have surrounded the borough office in Iztapalalpa.

Brugada convened an estimated 500 supporters on Saturday night, when she alleged that Juanito was mentally unfit to hold public office and that he was provoking "ungovernability" in Iztapalapa.

"We're going to demand through peaceful means that Juanito keep his word. We're not going to allow social disorder in Iztapalapa," she told her supporters.

THE SAGA CONTINUES
The Juanito saga began in June, when the Trife disqualified then-PRD candidate Brugada from the borough chief election due to irregularities at some of the polling stations in the PRD primary elections. Juanito, then-candidate for the PT, was then recruited by López Obrador to run - with López Obrador's backing - and then step aside in favor of Brugada after winning the election. Juanito had second thoughts after the election, but ultimately stepped aside for Brugada.

Juanito's return is provoking headaches for more than just López Obrador, however.

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard deemed the political crisis in the capital's largest borough so urgent that he returned early from a trip and met with Juanito on Sunday morning. The two men had met previously in late September - mere days before Juanito took his oath of office - after which time Juanito decided to take leave and informed the media that he suffered from poor health.

Juanito emerged from the latest meeting undeterred from his plans to retake his office - even though he revealed that Ebrard had offered him the top job in the capital government's sports institute. (Olympic medalist Ana Guevara previously held the job.) He demanded that more security be supplied - he plans on living in the borough office - and said that he would ask President Felipe Calderón for assistance if the Mexico City government failed to comply.

UNCERTAIN MOTIVES
Juanito's motives for ending his 59-day leave of absence remain somewhat uncertain. And although he had said over the past month that he would return to running Iztapalapa, his pronouncements were largely disregarded. He also seemed to be moving beyond politics and capitalizing on his celebrity. Juanito was starring in a play and reportedly had been approached about being a correspondent for a Mexican broadcaster at the World Cup in South Africa. He had been pathetically carting around a statue of himself on a dolly, looking for a place to put it.

It also was no secret that Juanito's relationship with the PT had soured since the election. Juanito had been living in a Colonia Juárez hotel since shortly after the election due to fears for his safety in Iztapalapa, but the PT had stopped the bill last week, according to media reports.

Toward the end of November, Juanito let his scorn be known for Brugada and López Obrador - the latter being a man he passionately supported over the years.

"I asked for leave (Oct. 1) because everyone was against me. Clara Brugada and the López Obrador mafia attacked me with everything and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to govern," he told the newspaper La Razón on Nov. 27.

"I knew that López Obrador, along with Clara Brugada, were going to find a confrontation and blame it on me. I preferred to avoid that and that blood not run."

That scorn extended into Brugada's governance in Iztapalapa and the alleged irregularities in the management of social programs.

Brugada already had raised eyebrows by requesting a 50 percent budget increase for Iztapalapa from the capital government. She also fired some 4,000 employees from the former regime - a frequent occurrence in Mexico when governments are changed.

Juanito called the 4.5 billion pesos that Brugada asked for, "Exaggerated," and alleged, "López Obrador saw Iztapalapa as a jackpot and was going to take from it for his campaign" in 2012.

María Teresa López, Iztapalapa social development director and a Juanito loyalist, told Reforma that since Oct. 1, "(Brugada) has controlled social programs and now we're going to review the management that she was doing of these resources and these beneficiary lists because there's been discretionality."

Juanito may not be so squeaky clean, either.

La Razón columnist Adrián Rueda wrote earlier this month that Ebrard had confronted Juanito back in September with proof that "Rafael Acosta has received a large amount of money from Nueva Viga investors and offers to grant permits to garages interested in dealing stolen auto parts."

UNGOVERNABLE?
How the situation in Iztapalapa unfolds remains to be seen.

The ALDF is expected to address the Iztapalapa situation during its next session on Dec. 1. It's uncertain if the López Obrador faction of the PRD and the PT have sufficient votes to oust Juanito, however. Brugada predicted a lack of governability and "paralisys" due to a suspension in services in Iztapalapa. As proof, Brugada alleged on Sunday that 250,000 homes in Iztapalapa lacked water service - even though the borough government has nothing to do with water service.

For his part, Juanito appears to be going nowhere. He told reporters after meeting with Ebrard: "(The mayor) proposed that I keep Clara in her position and I told him, 'I'm the borough chief and I'm going to stay in Iztapalapa."

Former Chamber speaker resigns from PRD

2009-11-28T14:24:00.008-06:00

Ruth Zavaleta, the former speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, who jumped into politics and activism after the 1985 earthquake destroyed her Mexico City home, resigned Friday from the left-wing party she helped to found 20 years ago.

In her resignation letter, Zavelta spoke of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) - which was reduced to third-place status in the Chamber after the July 5 midterm elections - as a lost cause. She also mentioned "intolerance" toward the factions that wanted the PRD to move beyond its self-imposed isolation in the legislature and its anti-establishment posturing. Zavaleta instead wanted the PRD to become part of the political establishment and broker deals with rival parties and the federal government - a federal government that loyalists of 2006 PRD presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador consider to be "illegitimate" and refuse to recognize.

"At this time and since the July 5 election, I don't share the way of doing politics in the PRD," Zavaleta said in her letter.

Zavaleta didn't mention López Obrador by name in her letter, but one long-time enemy of the self-declared "legitimate president," former PRD director of political formation, Fernando Belaunzarán, told the newspaper La Razón that she had tired of the "Stalinist intolerance against her," and, "she was attacked in a hypocritical way."

La Razón columnist Adrián Rueda, meanwhile, suggested on Friday that Zavaleta was disappointed that PRD president Jesús Ortega refused to endorse her aspirations for the 2011 gubernatorial race in her birth state of Guerrero - a move that "accelerated" her resignation.

The decision surprised many, but mostly due to the timing of Zavaleta's departure. The PRD holds a "refoundation" forum Dec. 3 - Dec. 6 that has been organized in response to the party's scandalous 2008 leadership race - that Ortega won by barely 16,000 votes and was settled by the federal electoral tribunal - and could result in disaffected factions and members heading for the exits.

Zavaleta expressed pessimism that the forum would produce results.

"I'm not willing to participate in the supposed discussion on the refounding of the PRD because I don't believe that discussion will be had," she said in her letter.

Her departure reflects the ongoing divisions in the PRD as the New Left, a faction loyal to Ortega that favors dialogue with other parties and the federal government, continues to clash with the factions loyal to López Obrador.

Zavaleta - a former New Left member - favored dialogue with the federal government and reflected that posture during her September 2007 - August 2008 tenure as Chamber speaker.

During her tenure, she said that she had a duty to act in an "institutional manner," which meant dealing with the executive branch of government and allowing debate on legislation that might offend the López Obrador faction - such as energy reform. She became the darling of the PAN and Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), however. Then PAN Chamber leader Hector Larios called her, "A star." But Zavaleta enraged parts of her own PRD, whose members so disliked her that on one occasion they failed to vigorously condemn death threats against her.

López Obrador, meanwhile, leveled misogynistic insults after she met with then interior minister Juan Camilo Mouriño - who López Obrador was trying to scalp for allegations that the Campeche native steered Pemex contracts to family businesses. Then-PRD spokesman Gerardo Noroña Fernández also uttered threats against her after she was seen exchanging pleasantries with First Lady Margarita Zavala at a forum on addictions. (Zavaleta responded to López Obrador by calling him, "A man looking for a fight.")

In some ways, though, Zavaleta was a media creation: She had long been a PRD militant and previously served as borough chief in Venustiano Carranaza, but she held a low political profile prior to her becoming speaker.

Her time as speaker was marked by turbulence; the Chamber approved sweeping reforms to the electoral and criminal justice systems, but was shutdown for 16 days by López Obrador loyalists to prevent the introduction of a bill that would reform the petroleum sector. (The bill was eventually passed in October 2008.) Zavaleta became even less popular among the PRD during the shutdown by presiding over sessions convened in an alternate location that allowed the PAN and PRI to approve legislation that weakened the PRD hammerlock on the Mexico City Assembly.

Her tenure ended with a gala departure, but her career since then has been somewhat quiet. Sources say that she had wanted to replace Javier "El Guero" González Garza as PRD leader in the Chamber, but the internal opposition was too strong. Her aspirations to run as PRD gubernatorial candidate in Guerrero also apparently floundered.

Even though Zavaleta has left the PRD, her fortunes, ironically, may be tied to what transpires in the PRD's refoundation forum next month. Rueda - whose daily column in La Razón is required reading for understanding local politics - wrote Friday that Sen. René Arce, the New Left political boss in Mexico City, has a "political association" registered in the capital that might be converted into a new local party before the 2012 elections.

"They will look to consolidate the new party by negotiating in 2012 with whoever has to gain and seek power in Mexico City," Rueda wrote. That might well be the PRI, which is gaining strength nationally, but is weak in the capital.

Zavaleta has said that she won't join another political party, although the PAN has already come calling with César Nava saying that the doors are open for "distinguished citizen" like her. (Zavaleta is reportedly friends with several senior Panístas, including Zavala and Social Development Secretary, Ernesto Cordero - the latter being a member of President Felipe Calderón's inner circle.) But with her media savvy and a cache of good will from former rivals for her work as speaker, her political future remains bright - and most likely lies with a non-left-wing party.

Political unrest drags down Honduran economy

2009-10-30T15:59:00.006-06:00

Indigenous Chorti Maya in the pueblo of La Pintada near the Copan Ruins sell homemade cornhusk dolls, but sales have dropped since the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya on June 28.

The Honduras political crisis - which appears close to being resolved - deepened the economic misery in one of the hemisphere's poorest countries. Most Hondurans I spoke with during a recent 12-day trip said that their personal economic situations had worsened due to the political crisis and most wanted nothing more for the elected president (Manuel Zelaya) and interim president (Roberto Mitcheletti) to reach some sort of agreement - any agreement.

The pain was very obvious in Copán Ruinas, a tourist town near the Guatemala border that was being bypassed by travellers on the well-worn Central American backpacker trail. Zelaya's ouster along with the subsequent protests and curfew scared off many potential travellers. Some in Copán Ruinas blamed Guatemalan tourism officials for spreading erroneous information about the border being closed in an effort to keep travellers from crossing into Honduras. The tourism minister from the Zelaya's regime - who was recognized by other Central American governments - also told potential travellers: stay away.

Still, even with the political crisis about to end, the economic situation isn't expected to just miraculously bounce back.

Here are the first few lines from my dispatch on the Honduran economy for Catholic News Service:

Political unrest drags down Honduran economy

COPAN RUINAS, Honduras (CNS) -- Oscar Garcia used to sell 100 pounds of tomatoes every day in the municipal market of this colonial town near the Guatemalan border. Since the June 28 ouster of President Manuel Zeyala, Garcia sells just 40 pounds of tomatoes and has to moonlight as a hotel security guard to support his family.

"I'm working day and night and it's barely enough," said Garcia, the father of four. "There are people here starving to death because of the political crisis."

The June 28 coup plunged Honduras into a political crisis, but also deepened long-standing economic problems in one of the hemisphere's poorest countries. Over the past four months, exports have diminished, citizens have reduced their spending and international development aid has been suspended.

Read the full story here.

Church revisits role of priests who supported Mexican independence

2009-10-19T12:54:00.000-05:00

Photo of José María Morelos mural in Morelia, Michoacán, by Steven H. Miller

By David Agren (Catholic News Service)

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- Revelers, clutching flags and clad in patriotic colors -- red, white and green -- gathered in town squares across Mexico earlier this year to celebrate the country's independence with fireworks, music and lusty calls of "Viva Mexico."

They also feted a revolutionary hero, Father Miguel Hidalgo Costilla, with re-enactments of the "grito," his 1810 call for independence from Spanish rule.

The celebrations this year kicked off the countdown to the bicentennial of Mexican independence along with the countdown to the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910 against the dictatorial rule of President Porfirio Diaz.

But the celebrations ushered in controversy for Catholic officials, who have been attempting to clarify the church's role in the historical event that was ignited by Father Hidalgo's fiery sermon but staunchly opposed by the church hierarchy of the day.

Various dioceses have published editorials and pronouncements on the independence movement. The Mexican bishops' conference, meanwhile, has established a commission for both the bicentennial and centennial. The bishops also sponsored a September conference on the church's role in the independence movement, which pitted the indigenous and mestizo populations, along with "criollos" -- Mexicans of Spanish origin, but born in the New World -- against the reigning Spanish-born elite known as "peninsulares."

The peninsulares, according to historians, were supported by the Catholic hierarchy of the day, although an especially terse editorial by Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez of Guadalajara sought to dispel views that Catholics were entirely against the independence movement.

"Mexico always has suffered from a false official history that presents people and events in black and white, when, in everything, there are nuances," Cardinal Sandoval said Sept. 20 in an editorial published by Semanario, an Archdiocese of Guadalajara publication.

"Enemies of the church have wanted ... to obscure the merit of more than 400 priests that took up arms at that time to fight for independence," he wrote.

The various statements have been especially forceful regarding Father Hidalgo, a national icon, whose face adorns bank notes and whose name is given to roadways across the country.

The excommunications of Father Hidalgo and Father Jose Maria Morelos, a fellow independence leader, have provoked controversy for nearly two centuries and have been a source of friction between the church and the nation's political and intellectual elites.

The most recent controversy over Father Hidalgo was provoked by the Mexico City Archdiocese's response to a request from a congressional commission responsible for organizing bicentennial activities. The commission had asked for the intervention of Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City in petitioning the Vatican for the removal of the independence heroes' excommunications. The archdiocese issued a public response Aug. 28 on its Web site that said such a request was impossible because neither man had been properly excommunicated.

The excommunications were invalid, according to archdiocesan archivist Father Gustavo Watson and other church officials, because it was carried out by Manuel Abad Queipo, bishop-designate of Michoacan, who lacked the authority to do so and whose title of bishop was never confirmed by the Vatican.

Additionally, church records show that Father Hidalgo confessed in a Chihuahua convent before dying, was given the sacraments by Franciscan brothers and was buried in a church cemetery. Father Morelos also confessed prior to his 1815 execution, Father Watson said.

"They died inside the Catholic Church and died as priests," Father Watson said. "Therefore, there's no reason to ask that the excommunication be lifted."

Despite the statements and release of new evidence, attempts to change minds could prove difficult. Mexican textbooks teach that the two priests were excommunicated for their activities, although Public Education Secretary Alonso Lujambio told reporters in September that possible revisions would "be studied."

Some historians, meanwhile, accuse the church of trying to revise history and rehabilitate its image in the prelude to the bicentennial.

Political historian Ilan Semo of the Jesuit-run Universidad Iberoamericano in Mexico City concurred that Fathers Hidalgo and Morelos did not die excommunicated, but said church officials were being selective in their historical interpretations.

"The church opposed the independence movement," Semo said. "There were isolated priests in support ... but the hierarchy was against it."

Church officials, however, have called for wiping the slate clean and moving forward.

"Let us not be prisoners of the past," said Archbishop Alberto Suarez Inda of Morelia, president of the bishops' conference's commission on the centennial and bicentennial, told participants at a September forum, "The Church and Independence."

"Let us learn from the path of forgiveness and the purification of memories (so that) the evils of yesteryear don't nourish the hatred that continues doing damage ... and, above all, are not repeated."

Juanito: The rest of the story

2009-10-01T17:53:00.033-05:00

Ice cream-vend0r-turned-Iztapalapa-borough-chief-for-five-minutes Rafael Acosta - better known as "Juanito" - at the PRD 19th anniversary celebrations on May 5, 2008 in Mexico City's Col. Juárez.

Rafael Acosta, better known as "Juanito," took the oath of office as borough chief for Iztapalapa on Oct. 1. He then promptly asked for a leave of absence.

His departure ends one of the biggest political melodramas in recent memory - one that vaulted him into stardom as a sort of antihero: a headband-wearing, ice cream-vending, system-fighting, junior-high-school-educated, man-from-the-barrio, who gained widespread affection by defying the mandates of the country's so-called legitimate president and risking the wrath of a shadowy political machine that made it unsafe for him to hold public office.

Juanito showed that defiance one last time on Oct. 1, when he yelled during the swearing in ceremony, "Death to the PT for betrayal" - a jab at the left-wing party that he ran for in the July 5 election, and later pushed him aside as part of its job of doing the legitimate president's political bidding.

By taking leave, Juanito fulfilled a non-binding promise to cede control of perhaps the county's most populated local-level jurisdiction - and 3.5-billion-peso budget - to Clara Brugada, a former federal deputy and die-hard loyalist of former presidential candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador, the man who masquerades as the Mexico's, "legitimate president" and leads an alternative government.

Juanito's decision to step aside has been interpreted by many observers as an AMLO victory - one that will propel him toward another presidential candidacy in 2012, and weaken his internal rivals in the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), whose political heartland had been Iztapalapa.

But it also highlighted the dark - and some might say, "Undemocratic" - side of AMLO, whose confederates resorted to threats of mob rule and violence and made promises to block Juanito's access to take his oath of office. Some lawmakers even devised legal tricks in the D.F. Assembly that would by hook or by crook oust Juanito from the borough office.

AMLO attack dog Valentina Batres of the PRD - fresh from three years of histrionics in the Chamber of Deputies - summed it up best by caustically warning Juanito, "It's best not to come."

(These are same people that decried the 2005 "desafuero" that would have denied AMLO a spot on the 2006 ballot, but four years later proposed pulling the same underhanded tricks on Juanito.)

Juanito basically acknowledged that fear factored into his decision to step aside. He told reporters after making his decision, "I was going to see deaths. I was going to see violence."

IMPORTANT BOROUGH
The vitriol and threats underscore the importance of Iztapalapa to Lopez Obrador - whose alternative government has been reportedly short of cash - and pretty much the entire PRD, the dominant party in the capital. Such drama probably never would had played out in another borough such as neighboring Iztacalco, for example.

Iztapalapa unfolds across the eastern part of the Federal District and long has attracted poor migrants from outlying states that come to the capital in search of better economic opportunities. It lacks many things: good water service, drainage and adequate housing, to name but three. The population now numbers roughly two million, 25 percent of all people in the Federal District.

It also had been the power base of the New Left, a PRD faction that departs from AMLO's admonishments to eschew all dealings with the federal government - a government AMLO calls "spurious" and refuses to recognize. The New Left won the disputed 2008 PRD election over AMLO's preferred candidate, Alejandro Encinas, in a race that was eventually settled by the electoral tribunal (Trife).

The New Left had governed Iztapalapa since the first borough election in 2000, when René Arce - now a PRD senator - won control. His brother, former DF Assembly speaker Victor Hugo Cirigo, would follow. For the 2009 election, Arce's wife, Sivila Oliva, was the New Left candidate for the PRD nomination. (Some voters interviewed after voting on July 5 cited "nepotism" and fatigue with the Arce clan for voting against the PRD.)

But D.F. ace organizer Rene Bejarano - the same guy caught on film accepting briefcase full of money from a developer earlier this decade - moved in and swayed it favor of Brugada, who captured the PRD nomination for borough chief. (Bejarano reputedly holds sway over PRD politics in most of the 15 other boroughs.) AMLO had seemingly bested his PRD rivials.

The New Left appealed the primary vote outcome to the Trife, which annulled results from some of the polling stations, giving the nomination to Oliva.

The ruling outraged AMLO, who - once again - branded the Trife a "political mafia" and began campaigning heavily in the borough. But he lacked a registered candidate. Even worse, the Trife ruling allowed no time for registering Brugada as a candidate for another party.

ENTER "JUANITO"
Rafael Acosta had a spot on the ballot as the PT candidate, however. Brugada supporters belittle Juanito as a "Nobody" when asked about him, but he was a familiar fixture at AMLO rallies. He would stand out with his trademark headband - complete with "Juanito" written on it in a felt pen - and placards with acerbic comments.

Juanito seemed like a die hard AMLO loyalist - one that would comply with any order from the "legitimate president." In a brief interview on May 5, 2008, he gave me business card that read: "Luchador Social" (social activist). In fact, he was a jack of all trades: waiter, vendor and B-movie actor, among other things.

He was also immensely political, according to Francisco Sánchez, a vendor selling freshly fried potato chips and bananas from the back of 1970 Chevy Malibu parked kitty-corner to Juanito's home-campaign office in the Pueblo Santa Marta Acatitla neighborhood. Juanito showed his political convictions and AMLO loyalty by resigning from the PRD after the disputed internal elections. He subsequently joined the PT and won its borough chief nomination for a race that is normally a lost cause in heavily PRD Iztapalapa.

PLUCKED FROM OBSCURITY
The Juanito campaign received little acclaim until AMLO plucked him from obscurity on June 16. In an act of quasi-legitimacy, he made Juanito swear an oath that he would resign in favor of Brudaga after winning office.

AMLO later toured each of Iztapalapa's colonias with Brugada - and often Juanito. Signs went up with AMLO and Brugadas photos that implied Brugada was the PT candidate, even though Juanito's name was on the ballot. The intense campaigning ironically forced AMLO to break his own word as he had promised to only promote PRD candidates in the Federal District. (He always intended to back PT candidates in other parts of the country, spare Tabasco, his home state.)

Juanito won on July 5, along with other candidates for Congress and the Mexico City Assembly that AMLO had been promoting.

SECOND THOUGHTS
Then, almost immediately after winning, Juanito had second thoughts. The borough chief job pays roughly 90,000 pesos per month, involves running the biggest borough in the Federal District - one with more people than municipalities such as Monterrey and Guadalajara - and offers loads of presitige.

As Juanito had second thoughts, his celebrity grew. His pronouncements generated immense media attention - much of it from outlets that AMLO disdains and accuses of bias - even if his style of speaking in the third-person and obvious lack of refinement and knowledge were embarrassing.

And, while AMLO seemingly always has had a dark cloud over his head - and railed against things such as electoral fraud and the skulduggery of former president Carlos Salinas - Juanito, with his impish grin and trademark headband has a sunny disposition and simple manner that won hearts across the country, especially in the working classes and among AMLO's enemies.

Juanito even took jabs at AMLO - which generated even more media attention. He said that he was more popular than the former mayor and that he could have won Iztapalapa on his own. He also confessed to feeling used and disrespected by the Lopez Obrador.

A shopping trip to the Hugo Boss store in upscale Polanco made big news. Even trivialities were gobbled up, including an El Universal interview that revealed his immense liking of Rambo movies, obsession with the Cruz Azul soccer team and his fondness for eating "shrimp with lots of catsup."

Juanito's name even became part of the political vocabulary as media outlets branded the female federal deputies (mostly from the Green Party) that took leave in order to have male colleagues take their places - and mock gender equity rules - "Juanitas." (Juanita referring to someone elected that was never supposed to hold office.)

Some analysts began looking at the bigger of what Juanito represented. Diego Petersen Farah, editor of the Guadalajara newspaper Público called Juanito, "Our mirror," someone whose rise to prominence was essentially an attempt by AMLO to "make fun of the law" - a not infrequent thing in Mexico.

But as his celebrity grew, so did the threats. AMLO loyalists such as Assembly members Alejandro Sánchez Camacho and Aleida Alavez - the latter, ironically, obsesses over the supposedly heavy hand of State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto - threatened to block access to the swearing in ceremony.

"Frentes," groups that supposedly agitate for housing, but mobilize votes in marginalized parts of Iztapalapa - read: much of the borough - began making not-so-subtle threats that Juanito better keep his word. Death threats were uttered and signs at a Brugada rally on Sept. 26 spoke of "killing" Juanito. (These "frentes" are part of the "peaceful resistance" that AMLO supposedly champions.)

At a Sept. 26 rally near the Iztapalapa borough office, Brugada spoke of "non-violence" and "democracy," while members of the Frentes began screaming, "Juanito a la chingada." The murky Frente Popular Francisco Villa even began a protest camp and marched to the Zocalo. (The "Pancho Villas" have gained notoriety for its involvement in the pirate taxi business that reputedly funnels money into the local PRD and holding "political workshops" for its drivers that were instructed by the FARC.)

Juanito took refuge in a hotel shortly after winning the July 5 election. He even announced plans to live in the borough office and asked the Federal District government for additional security.

As a combatant, he seemed to give as good as he took - especially in dealing with pronouncements from a scorned López Obrador, whose hyperbole included words to the effect of, "There's not enough water in the sea to wash away fraud stains."

Juanito would refer to Brugada as "spurious," the same word AMLO disparages President Felipe Calderón with. He would later say, "The people give orders," vintage AMLO language that has been used to justify all manner of legally dubious behaviour, such as protests that frequently shut down parts of Mexico City.

Up until Sept. 27, when he was photographed at a bodybuilding competition," Juanito gave no hint of his stepping aside. He even had sat down with local National Action Party (PAN) president Mariana Gómez del Campo by that point and appeared ready to make deals with the New Left - the faction AMLO wanted out of Iztapalapa.

INTERVENTION
With Juanito set to take office, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard intervened. Details are uncertain, but after a Sept. 28 meeting with the mayor, Juanito said that he would step aside for Brugada due for health reasons. He apparently suffers from heart problems.

Adrián Rueda, local politics columnist with La Razón, said that Juanito would receive cash and the right to fill two borough secretary positions and name three local territory bosses.

Juanito supporters reacted with disgust and disappointment in comments on a Facebook page for the borough chief-elect. Vendor Francisco Sánchez said many in Pueblo Santa Marta felt the same way.

"People here feel really let down," he said.

Brugada supporters responded with an Oct. 1 rally at the borough office. Juanito was nowhere to be found. La Razón reported that he would be off to Europe and that Juanito might never again live in Iztapalapa.

Most commentators opined that AMLO emerged victorious in the whole affair, while others said that Ebrard showed deft political skill - not to mention strength.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Brugada inherits a borough rife with problems - and the droughts expected to hit Mexico City next spring are expected to hit Iztapalapa the hardest. Some residents expressed little confidence in either Juanito or Brugada to fix things. They include cab driver Jesús Barrera, who figured both were more interested in appropriating the budget than actually serving the people.

"No government has done anything for Iztapalapa," he said, while driving down a rutted road.

"This road (we're driving on) is proof."

Mexican bishops look to Colombians for help fighting drug violence

2009-09-29T10:41:00.001-05:00

Mexican bishops look to Colombians for help fighting drug violence

By David Agren
Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- At a press conference earlier this year, Archbishop Hector Gonzalez Martinez of Durango had planned to denounce extortion attempts against priests in his archdiocese. He instead stunned reporters -- and the whole country -- by announcing that cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted man, was residing in a remote corner of Durango state. Even more stunning, he insisted, "Everyone knows it, except the authorities."

His candor generated nationwide headlines and a warning from presumed associates of Guzman, who dumped two bodies along with a note that advised, "No government, no priest can stand against El Chapo."

Archbishop Gonzalez, the subject of intense media scrutiny, would later respond to reporters' questions with the words, "I'm deaf and dumb."

The archbishop's latter words describe the posture of many Mexicans and church leaders when it comes to denouncing organized crime and addressing a wave of violence that has claimed more than 13,500 lives since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and sent the army to suppress Mexico's drug cartels.

But that posture may be changing for Mexican Catholics. The social ministry secretariat of the Mexican bishops' conference is preparing a comprehensive report on violence in Mexico that is expected to provide both a diagnosis and an action plan for addressing the problem.

None of the report's authors wished to comment on their findings before its November publication, but the issue of organized crime has been a delicate one for the church. Equally delicate is the peril of wading into the public policy arena in a country with a history of contentious church-state relations and the risks of denouncing powerful drug cartels that act as benefactors and de facto authorities in many isolated parts of Mexico.

"They (church officials) would like to avoid confrontations with the government -- and also avoid confrontations with the narcotic traffickers," said Victor Ramos Cortes, religious studies professor at the University of Guadalajara.

Complete article posted at Catholic News Service, here.

Mexican drug cartel peddles meth, preaches religion

2009-09-27T12:34:00.003-05:00

I travelled to the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán last month to speak with local Catholic officials about the Aug. 1 raid on an Apatzingán parish that nabbed a cartel kingpin that federal officials say was responsible for sending truckloads of meth from clandestine labs to the United States. Church officials in Apatzinagan obviously objected to raids on religious events and being expected to play the role of detectives for the Federal Police and Army - whose intelligence gathering is woefully inadequate.

We also spoke about the supposed religiosity of "La Familia Michoacana," a drug cartel known for its acts of charity and piety - along with acts of gratuitous violence such as beheadings. La Familia leaders often speak of "imposing order," condemn the consumption of the very products they manufacture and smuggle, and even preach a homespun version of the gospel from their very own religious text. The cartel also has been the focus of an intense crackdown by federal officials - and, frankly, an embarrassment for federal officials, who had to send reinforcements to President Felipe Calderón's home state in July as a response to La Familia counterattacks.

Here's my dispatch on La Familia's supposed religiosity, published by Canwest News Service.

Where H1N1 began

2009-09-26T23:04:00.002-05:00

H1N1 just keeps on giving in La Gloria, Veracruz, the hamlet where the virus was supposedly first detected back in April. Since the media from the across the globe first descended on La Gloria last spring, in search of the first-known H1N1 carrier, five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, the PRI state government has paved a new road through town, painted many of the public buildings and even erected a statue to young Edgar.

Locals seem indifferent to all of the attention - and many express doubts that something as sinister as H1N1 could have originated in their corner of Veracruz. (Some expressed sentiments like: "If it was so bad, why did we survive?")

Others blame the nearby pig farms - a charge hotly denied by the farm operators - and see the largess from the state government as nothing more than Gov. Fidel Herrera trying to make amends for all of the complaints about the agribusiness in the region. The boy, they complain, is an object of propaganda for the powerful state PRI and Gov. Herrera, who has given the Hernandez family a truck and given Edgar a scholarship. The governor said while unveiling the statue in August that it was a testament to the hearty folks of La Gloria, nothing more. Many speak ill of the statue, however.

I accompanied Thane Burnett of Sun Media to La Gloria in late August: here's his report.

Gov't abandons plans for Guerrero dam

2009-09-13T17:46:00.005-05:00

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has canceled plans to build a massive hydroelectricproject near Acapulco known as La Parota that would have produced enough power to light up the state of Guerrero for an entire year. The project had been a crown jewel in the infrastructure plans of successive PAN administrations, but generated enormous controversy among the local campesino populations. The campesinos alleged the CFE failed to properly consult them on relocation and never made proper offers of compensation for their small plots of land near the Papagayo River.

The CFE officially canceled the project due to a lack of financing - and the dam was among a series of projects nixed by the federal government for similar reasons - but the utility had encountered stiff opposition from campesinos and human rights groups, who successfully took the case to court.

I wrote on the controversy over La Parota for The News in the fall of 2007. The story pointed out that irate campesinos and locals facing expropriation over the past 15 years had derailed projects by staging riots, taking hostages and wielding machetes. The failed attempt at building a new international airport for Mexico City earlier this decade in the State of Mexico - where machete-wielding campesinos forced the Fox administration to back down - was perhaps the most notable example. But La Parote was different: The campesinos, backed by environmental lawyers, went to court - and even obtained an injunction against parts of the project.

Whether the federal government and CFE return to La Parota remains to be seen - the dam was first proposed in 1976 and could provide drinking water for fast-growing Acapulco - but the strategy of campesinos mobilizing to fight expropriations that previously would have turfed them from their properties with scant compensation appears to gaining traction.

As examples, just witness the difficulties earlier this year in Tula, Hidalgo, where the state government was unable to expropriate ejido land in a timely enough fashion to meet the deadline for winning the construction of a Pemex refinery. (The state did win the refinery project, but only after a farcical competition with perhaps the most polluted town in Mexico - Salamanca, in the PAN stronghold of Guanajuato - to obtain the necessary land for Pemex.) Or, the Altamira port project near Tampico, where former PAN presidential candidate and legal bigwig, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, won an injuction on behalf of two ejidos facing expropriation that could cost the Transportation and Communications Secretariat billions of pesos.

The campesino skepticism of expropriation offers is understable: Ejiditarios in Tula told Notimex in April that the first time the government came for 50 hectares of their land in the 1970s, they were offered nothing more the five pickup trucks as compensation.

President signs drug-decriminalization law

2009-08-21T11:03:00.005-05:00

President Felipe Calderón finally signed a new law that decriminalizes the possession of small quantities drugs that include marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine. The law - which Congress approved in April, despite objections from National Action Party (PAN) lawmakers in the lower house - also requires state and municipal police forces to crack down on small-time drug dealing, known in Mexico as narcomenudeo.

Calderón proposed the law last year as part of a series of measures for combating narcotics-trafficking gangs. Other measures proposed making it easier for the government to seize the assests of organized crime, overhauled the Attorney General's Office (PGR) and created a new Federal Police. The war on drugs has claimed more than 11,000 lives since Calderón took office in December 2006.

The president's original proposal called for mandatory rehabilitation stints for those caught with drugs. Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) senators balked at that proposal and made rehabilitation voluntary. PAN deputies nearly rioted when the bill arrived in the lower house, however. The deputies unsuccessfully demanded mandatory rehabilitation be included and also objected to the quantities of drugs that could be carried without incurring penalties. The amounts surpassed the original proposals called for by Calderón.

The law allows for the possession of five grams of marijuana, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine and 500 milligrams of cocaine without incurring criminal penalties.

Calderón waited months before signing the law - he also waited to sign a maximum salary law that forbids any public servant or politician from earning more than the president - fueling speculation that he might exercise the presidential veto.

One PAN lawmaker, who voted against the measure, told me back in May that Calderón would eventually sign the law since it contains provisions that force state and municipal police to begin cracking down on small-time drug dealing. Those tasks had been the exclusive jurisdictions of federal police forces. Small-time drug dealing, he added, also is becoming more common in Mexico as the cartels develop a domestic market for their product and pay their underlings in merchandise.

The law follows a previous effort in 2006 to decriminalize drug possession. Congress passed a bill that year, but President Vicented Fox vetoed it after caving to pressure from U.S. officials.

Mexican government apologizes for federal police drug raid during Mass

2009-08-07T16:33:00.001-05:00

By David Agren
Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- The Mexican government apologized after federal police burst into a parish and interrupted Mass in the western state of Michoacan to apprehend a drug-cartel suspect.

An Aug. 4 statement from the Secretariat of Public Security apologized to the Mexican bishops' conference, Bishop Miguel Patino Velazquez of Apatzingan, and the faithful "for the circumstances in which the operation had to be carried out." The statement said that the raid in an Apatzingan parish was undertaken to avoid gunfire and a "violent incident."

The Aug. 1 raid resulted in the arrests of 33 alleged members of a cartel known as La Familia Michoacana and the seizure of cash, weapons, fragmentation grenades and luxury vehicles. The detainees include Miguel Beraza Villa -- known as "La Troca" (the Truck) -- a cartel lieutenant that Mexican and U.S. authorities allege was responsible for transporting tractor-trailers full of synthetic drugs such as "ice" and "crystal" from the cartel's clandestine laboratories to the United States via Tijuana, Mexico.

The bishops' conference had criticized the raid as a show of disrespect for the sanctity of Mass.

"We make an energetic protest against the lack of respect and the violence exercised on the part of the forces responsible for guaranteeing the security of all persons in our nation -- principally in the state of Michoacan -- by interrupting a religious act ... at the moment in which holy Mass is celebrated," the bishops said in an Aug. 3 statement signed by Auxiliary Bishop Jose Gonzalez Gonzalez of Guadalajara, conference secretary-general.

"Nothing explains this kind of action inside a religious place and much less in these moments where Mexico is noted internationally as an insecure and violent country," the bishops said.

The Aug. 1 raid marked the first time that police officers have burst into a parish to arrest suspects linked to organized crime, said Father Mateo Calvillo Paz, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Morelia, which is in Michoacan.

The raid also highlighted the increasing vulnerability of church officials and the faithful of being caught up -- inadvertently or not -- in the ongoing federal crackdown on drug cartels.

The raid continued a high-profile crackdown on drug traffickers in President Felipe Calderon's home state, where some 5,500 federal police and soldiers have been dispatched to fight organized crime. By the end of July, violence from organized crime had claimed more than 250 lives in Michoacan and more than 3,500 lives nationwide, according to the newspaper Reforma.

Federal police, arriving in armored vehicles and accompanied by two Black Hawk helicopters, raided Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Apatzingan Aug. 1, interrupting a Mass being celebrated in advance of a "quinceanera." Local media reported that an estimated 250 attendees and the priest -- identified as Father Vicente Soto by the Michoacan news agency Quadratin -- were held in the parish for six hours.

Media photos of the parish showed dislodged furniture and other minor damage to property. Attempts to reach Father Soto through the Diocese of Apatzingan were unsuccessful.

Father Calvillo said police "took advantage of the Mass to assault a large number of 'narcos'" and avoid bloodshed, but showed ignorance of the importance of the Mass.

Mexico's bishops, he added, "have rejected all types of protection or calls for arming themselves. It would be a false testimony."

The threat to the well-being of prelates due to the increase in organized crime violence has been the source of some disagreement within the church. Father Hugo Valdemar, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, told reporters in July that three bishops in Michoacan had been threatened, but both Father Calvillo and a spokesman for the Diocese of Tacambaro told Catholic News Service that the statement was false.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency lauded the Aug. 1 arrests as key accomplishments in Calderon's battle against organized crime.

Security expert Pedro Isnardo de la Cruz of the National Autonomous University of Mexico said La Familia has shown a surprising resilience that "reflects poorly" on the president's war on organized crime, has demonstrated a "great ability to corrupt" local governments, and also appears to be receiving financing from unknown sources beyond Mexico.