"Jefe Diego" still missing

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

Here's a cinco de mayo story from 2005 that keeps being recycled by various Canadian newspapers.

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 receives only tepid 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

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

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

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

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

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.