Among the PRD Plurinominal Candidates

Manuel Clouthier, former panista and the son of one of the most important members panistas of the 20th century, will evidently be among the plurinominal congressional candidates for the PRD. That should not be a huge surprise, since he has been among Calderón's most prominent critics for years, though it is still a bit jarring to see him alongside AMLO and the Chuchos.

Alabama without Mexicans

Great new piece from Gatopardo. Highlights:

"Where are the Mexicans?", le pregunté a Matthew Jenkins, poco antes de llegar a la cima de la montaña, al final de un camino serpenteante. Esperaba encontrar al menos a algunos, pero hasta entonces no había visto más que una solitaria pareja de afroamericanos con sombreros de palma desbrozando la yerba, a lo lejos.

"They're gone", me respondió. Apenas pude escucharle entre el ruido de los amortiguadores y una canción en la radio.

Cuando descendimos de la destartalada pick-up, Jenkins se fajó su raída gorra de camuflaje militar y se llevó a la boca un puño de tabaco para mascar. Tras dar unos pasos, hizo un ademán con los brazos para mostrarme la desolación de su campo de tomates abandonado.

"Ésta es la parte más afectada", me dijo. Señalaba un páramo.

Hasta donde alcanzaba la vista, no había una sola persona. Aquí y allá, miles y miles de frutos verdes, amarillos y rojos, agusanados e infectados por feos puntos negros de podredumbre, se apilaban sobre la tierra y atraían nubes de moscas. Podía escuchar cómo algunos estallaban debajo de nuestros pies conforme avanzábamos en silencio, liberando un desagradable olor agridulce.

Al lado de un montículo particularmente grande de tomates, interrumpió la caminata. "Ya no hay posibilidad de salvar esta parte de la cosecha. A estas alturas diría que la hemos perdido —me dijo—. Todita esta parte, sí, señor".

Matthew es dueño, junto con su madre, Ellen, de la plantación Jenkins, una granja de tomate de doscientos acres ubicada en la punta noreste de Alabama, donde termina la cadena de los Apalaches. Estábamos prácticamente en el pico de un monte rodeado por bosques y lagos, no muy lejos de la frontera con el valle del Tennessee.

En el condado predominantemente tomatero de Saint Clair, enclavado en el sur más profundo de Estados Unidos, eran los primeros días de otoño, justo cuando las granjas circundantes sacan a relucir sus jack-o'-lanterns —calabazas huecas iluminadas con velas para el día de brujas— y las plantaciones agrícolas de la zona inician su etapa más productiva. Un periodo a mediados de octubre de siete, quizá diez, días para recolectar lo plantado durante la primavera, antes de la llegada de las heladas.

Problems in the Judicial Branch

Drawing on a recent article from Contralinea, I have a new piece at InSight here. Highlights:

Many of the incidents were presumably more minor missteps, but included on the list were several cases involving some of the more notorious capos to be arrested in recent years. In 1997, for instance, one judge dismissed drug trafficking charges against former Sinaloa Cartel boss Hector Palma Salazar without justification, sending him to prison instead for weapons possession, which carried with it a sentence of just six years.

Another judge twice dismissed charges of money laundering against the founder of the Sinaloa-linked Colima Cartel, Adan Amezcua Contreras. The judge was suspended from his post for ten years as a result.

Overall, however, the majority of the sanctions were simple reprimands, issued either publicly or privately. Just 156 of the cases in which sanctions were handed out were deemed grave, and experts told Contralinea that Mexico lacks mechanisms to more easily remove dishonest or incompetent judges from their posts.

These statistics and anecdotes are a reminder that, despite the judicial reforms passed in 2008, Mexico still lacks a way to effectively deal with corrupt judges.

The 2008 reforms have emerged as a pillar of Calderon’s response to Mexico’s public security dilemma, and an answer to critics who say that the results of Calderon’s crime policies have been purely negative. According to this argument, despite the short-term spike in violence -- some 17,000 killings last year were linked to organized crime, compared to roughly 2,700 in 2007 -- Calderon and his team have set the stage for a long-term improvement in security by modernizing the judicial system.

Quite the Contrast

Last week, Alejandro Hope published a characteristically interesting post in which he called for something akin to DEA spreading its version of the nuclear umbrella across Mexico. More generally, the piece was about the need for the government to focus on communicating effectively with the narcos, not in the back-of-the-seedy-bar sort of way, but rather using signaling to paint some lines in the sand.

A few days ago, Felipe Calderón made the following statement:

There are people that attack my government for combating criminals, and now what did they want us to do? To invite them inside, to serve them a cup of coffee or what? Whoever doesn't want to combat criminals does not govern, that's the truth.

I'll have more to say about this at some point in the future, but if you aren't willing to look for ways to distinguish between different groups, you can't draw any lines, and you can't incentivize different behavior. It does not seem like Calderón has ever been particularly interested in distinguishing between different gangs or different criminal activities.

Josefina's Chances

New piece here. Highlights:

Después de 12 años de presidentes panistas, y muchos de ellos no tan exitosos, México está listo para un cambio. La lógica dicta que este deseo de cambiar es una mala noticia para la abanderada del PAN, pero me pregunto si el impacto negativo sería mitigado por la omnipresencia mediática del ex-gobernador mexiquense desde hace varios años. (Tampoco le hace daño que el delfín panista de Calderón fue otro.) Es decir, Peña Nieto lleva tantos años abiertamente en pos de Los Pinos que ya no se siente como una cara nueva. Si esta hipótesis es correcta, los que quieren emitir un voto de cambio buscarán otra opción.

Sin embargo, tener la posibilidad de ganar es muy diferente que ganar, y el camino no será fácil. Aunque su ventaja ha disminuido, Peña Nieto sigue siendo un gran favorito. Además, para aprovechar de sus pasos falsos, Vázquez Mota tiene que evitar los mismos; es decir, tiene que ser la política preparada, disciplinada y visionaria que él no parece ser. El tiempo nos dirá si tiene las cualidades para sobresalir en una campaña presidencial, pero son muchas las voces que opinan que no.

The Electoral Reform's Lasting Impact

Leo Zuckermann has had a couple of columns in recent days detailing some unfortunate and inevitable side-effects of the 2007 electoral reform, which needlessly and (probably) fruitlessly sought to limit political appearances outside of the official campaign periods. Even if you think Zuckermann's argument is not that strong (which is not what I'm saying, but just supposing), I don't think I've ever read an affirmative case for the electoral regime's restrictions that was remotely convincing.

[New Year's resolution number 231: jump between first and second person in the same sentence more often.]

Zuckermann also speculates today that we are going to see the arrest of a big fish priísta in the days to come. If that's done for electoral purposes, aside from being morally suspect, it's also politically risky, given the end result of the michoacanazo and the Jorge Hank Rhon case.

Pessimism in Mexico, Optimism in Brazil

Here's an interesting comparison from Este País. Such polls do not lend themselves to nuance, and I've seen others that show Mexicans feeling much more optimistic about life, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Going Overboard

Allow my to get ornery and foul-mouthed ahead of the Barça kickoff: In response to Ronaldo's latest offensive explosion, Deadspin's Timothy Burke wrote:

You are unlikely to see as perfect a soccer goal as this for a very, very long time. Cristiano Ronaldo, who's hoarding goals at such a clip it's as if he's trying to make every Spanish soccer fan forget the name Messi forever...

(Here's the goal.) This is just fucking stupid. First of all, Messi has been a bit off-form since the Málaga game, but he has more goals than Ronaldo in all major tournaments this year, and more in the Liga excluding penalties. He also has more assists, is more consistently involved in his team's offense, and, as good as CR7 is, he is just transparently better than Ronaldo, as the three consecutive Ballon d'Or awards suggest. Nobody is forgetting Messi, dipshit.

But more to the point, it was a nice strike, for sure, but the most perfect goal you'll see for a long, long time? Please. I don't think it'll wind up in the Liga's top ten this year. Goal quality is, of course, a subjective thing, and personally I prefer a buildup of zig-zagging runs and pinpoint passing, which is both a product and a cause of me being a Barça and Messi fan. Or a fan of Giovani more than Guardado. Burke seems to disagree, and prefers the long-distance strike. Whatever. But it wasn't even that special of a strike. It was surely a nice goal, but Iñigo Martínez has two bombs this season that were far better than Ronaldo's. Vladimir Weiss had a goal that was every bit the equal of Ronaldo's the previous week for Espanyol (about two minutes in). Indeed, it's an odd week when you don't see a strike like Ronaldo's somewhere around the top leagues in Europe.

El Coss and the Marines

Proceso has a new piece about the longtime capo who has emerged as the leader of the Gulf Cartel, which I've excerpted here. It's quite interesting in that it alleges systematic collusion by the marines and the army with Costilla Sánchez, but as with any Proceso article build on a single source's info, one wonders how reliable the story is. Highlights:

The 2010 split between the Gulf Cartel and their erstwhile armed wing, the Zetas, has triggered hundreds of killings in the northeastern states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, which the two groups previously ruled as, essentially, a single organization. The Zetas, whose expansion and violent tactics made them notorious even prior to the split, emerged with a larger share of the territory. They have since expanded, now operating in far-flung states like Jalisco, and have even popped up in Sinaloa.

In addition to fighting with the Zetas, the Gulf bosses have also been battling among themselves. As the Proceso article indicates, Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, alias "El Coss," was piqued at having risen no higher than third-ranking member of the group following the arrest and extradition of former leader Osiel Cardenas in the 2000s. According to an anonymous source, Costilla Sanchez has since focused on setting his rivals up to be arrested or killed by government forces, allowing him to emerge as the overall leader of the group.

While the Gulf Cartel is a diminished force, it retains control of a number of significant border regions, most notably Reynosa and Matamoros, and continues to battle it out with the Zetas in other cities around the region, such as Monterrey and Tampico. Indeed, while its territory has been reduced, the Gulf's level of control in the areas that remain under its dominion seems to have hardened, despite the ongoing battle with the Zetas.

According to Proceso, this is due to the links between Costilla Sanchez and high-level elements in the military. The anonymous source whose account was the basis for the story says that, in exchange for millions of dollars, army and marine commanders essentially give Costilla Sanchez free rein to operate in Mexico’s northeastern region, and attack his enemies as needed. Under Costilla Sanchez, the Gulf Cartel’s previous ruling clique has been displaced, thanks in large part to military pressure. Most notable was former leader Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” Cardenas, Osiel’s brother, who was killed in a shootout with marines in 2010.

Vázquez Mota Being a Woman: Not a Big Problem

This polling from BGC is encouraging, though I don't think it's terribly surprising.

Mistakes from the PAN

I think the PAN did the best they could with a rather difficult hand in selecting their presidential candidate, but in two lesser races, they've made very disappointing selections: eager to prove that the reactionary Christian right remains robust and influential, they passed over José Ángel Córdova the internationally renowned health minister, selecting instead Miguel Márquez Márquez by a margin of 25 points. This led to speculation that the PRI would snap Córdova up as their candidate, which would have been a sharp move on their part, though it appears as though he will now work on Vázquez Mota's campaign.

And, they selected Zeferino Torreblanca, the ex-perredista governor of Guerrero as their candidate for the mayoralty in Acapulco. Torreblanca left office disliked by virtually everyone outside of his immediate family (and rumor has it many of them were on the fence), and was I believe selected as the most distrusted governor in the nation by a poll in 2007 or so. It is understandable that the PAN wants a presence in states where it has one, but Torreblanca is not the kind of presence the party should want.

Peña Nieto's Doings

Peña Nieto today promised to gradually pull the army off the streets should he become president. That gives more wiggle room than a [too lazy to think of a metaphor in which a lot of wiggle room is implied], but I believe it's further than he has gone on that issue in the past. Also, doesn't Peña Nieto looked old here?:
Gray hairs!! Perhaps this is why: in the past three months, according to Ipsos, Peña Nieto's poll numbers have dropped by 18 points. And with Vázquez Mota in the race, he has a lead of just 12 points. As a lesser known figure, Vázquez Mota could well eat into that figure as she introduces herself to the public. Although she also needs to avoid gaffes and make a good impression, something that is certainly not a given. See here, for instance, for more information on that score.

Learning from Jalisco

New piece:

The nuances of the relationships among the other gangs operating in Jalisco are similarly unclear. The Resistance has been described as allied to the Zetas and to the Familia Michoacana, though other reports have depicted them as enemies of both these groups. This interplay among the Jalisco gangs demonstrates that, contrary to the widespread belief that all smaller groups are subsidiaries to one of the larger networks, the low-level gangs have been able to carve out an autonomous toehold.

The local gangs operating in Jalisco and elsewhere also demonstrate that the model of the transnational group, controlling every step of production and transportation, is less and less relevant to today's Mexico. Many of the gangs in Jalisco have no known connections to Colombia, nor do they control valuable plazas in the border region, nor do they have retail partners in the US. These groups, and others like them in Acapulco and elsewhere, either buy into another gang's smuggling network in order to ship drugs northward, or they extract their profits from the local population, whether through extortion, kidnapping, car-jacking, or retail drug sales.

Marisol Valles in Gatopardo

Evidently, the 20-year-old was merely seeking a position as a secretary last year, and was shoehorned into becoming the chief of police in violent Práxedis G. Guerrero, Chihuahua. And now the single mother is a refugee, run out of town by the gangsters in control.

Also, the magazine has a nice long profile of these guys.

On the New Juárez Cartel

This one is a couple of days old now. Highlights:

Such a reorganization of fading older groups into new networks is common in Mexico, and has often led to the further spread of violence. After the death and arrest of all but one of its foremost leaders, the formerly vaunted Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO), for instance, disintegrated into the South Pacific Cartel, the Mano con Ojos, and various other largely regional gangs sprinkled around the country. While these groups have nowhere near the influence that the original group did, they have sparked fighting in Mexico State, Guerrero, Morelos, and other Mexican states.

In other cases, the impact of this reorganization is not so severe. In Michoacan, for example, the rebranding of the Familia Michoacana as the Caballeros Templarios has sparked a comparatively mild increase in violence. Overall, however, the constant process of destruction and regeneration has been a force for greater levels of bloodshed spread across a larger expanse of the nation.

Finally!

I can't overemphasize how much I agree with this statement from Alejandro Poiré, and while I am glad to have heard it, my only quibble is that I don't remember any Calderón official having made such a point in the past five years:

Late to the Party

Congrats to Josefina Vázquez Mota for winning the PAN primary and to Mexico for having a female candidate from a major party. They beat the gringos to it!

Cordero's nearly 40 percent was a far better showing than I would have guessed a month ago, so it wasn't the perfunctory washout that I had expected, but the PAN's failure to determine a candidate until now still seems like quite a lost opportunity. Peña Nieto has gift-wrapped a number of opportunities to paint him as, by turns, out of touch, unintelligent, immoral, and condescending. Throughout that time, Vázquez Mota's primary concern has been Cordero. If Peña Nieto has shaken the cobwebs off and runs a relatively gaffe-free campaign from here on --clearly, a significant "if"-- then the PAN's best moment to make up ground will have been wasted.

Here's some commentary from Cecilia Soto (who also ran for president for a smaller party in 1994), Ricardo Raphael, and Leo Zuckermann.

The Three Tamaulipas Governors

I have a new piece about the past three governors of Tamaulipas and the investigation into their links to criminal groups:

The governors are suspected of having links to groups like the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. As online publication Reporte Indigo reports, a document from the special organized crime unit of Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, dated January 13, refers to an investigation into these alleged ties. Among the specific crimes that the governors are accused of committing are money laundering and accepting illegal payments. As part of the investigation, federal agencies were instructed to record every instance in which any of the governors or 46 of their family members and political associates left the country.

While investigations into such high-profile officials are rare, the suspicions about Tamaulipas politicians being linked to criminal groups are not. The state government has long been accused of protecting the Gulf Cartel and fostering the rise of the Zetas over the past decade. In 2009, renowned journalist Carlos Loret de Mola said the state was “without a doubt” the most dangerous in Mexico in terms of “the social decomposition and the penetration of drug traffickers in all of the structures.”

Tamaulipas is significantly less violent than many other states also linked to drug trafficking, which is probably linked to the fact that the total infiltration of its institutions makes it more stable. However, the region has grown more bloody with the 2010 split between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. In the most notorious act of violence in Tamaulipas' recent history, a candidate for governor, Rodolfo Torre Cantu, was murdered less than two weeks before the 2010 election.

Peña Nieto's Imperfect Candidacy

New piece here:

Sin embargo, es indudable que esto representa otra mancha en la imagen de un candidato que parecía impecable y invencible hace unos meses. No es justo, pero es la realidad. Y aunque no nos diga mucho sobre la capacidad de Peña Nieto como ejecutivo, este escándalo a medias sí nos brinda otra lección política: las campañas presidenciales son completamente diferentes a cualquier otro desafío político. Las investigaciones en el pasado de los candidatos son más a fondo; la atención diaria es más abrumadora; las preguntas de la prensa son más y más detalladas; el estrés es más constante. Antes de que pase por todo eso, es casi imposible ver de lejos quien está a la altura de las exigencias. Algunos aspirantes que parecen ideales antes de arrancar el proceso no lo son.

Peña Nieto (junto con su equipo) ha hecho un trabajo de maravilla en aprovechar a los medios durante los últimos seis años y pico. Siendo un personaje altamente conocido, atractivo, experimentado, y no panista, parecía el hombre ideal para las circunstancias actuales. Pero entre los Tuits de su hija, su falta de conocimiento sobre el precio de tortillas o el salario mínimo, la alianza fracturada con Panal, sus vínculos con Humberto Moreira, y varias vergüenzas más, ahora queda claro que un candidato ideal no es.

On Joaquín Villalobos' Nexos Piece: Hope's Turn

Alejandro Hope has a response to Joaquín Villalobos' sprawling and in many ways curious defense of Calderón's crime policy here. The conclusion:

No existe contradicción entre construir el Estado y lo que Joaquín llama “administrar el crimen”. Esa tarea la hacen todos los Estados modernos del mundo. No implica entrar en componendas con los delincuentes. Significa que el Estado, en situación de fuerza pero con plena conciencia de sus limitaciones, ponga rayas, fije prioridades y disuada las peores conductas, aun si eso implica tolerar temporalmente otras. No hay nada particularmente conservador en esa visión y nada eminentemente progresista en sugerir que no hay más ruta que el combate a ultranza, sin referencia a costos y vidas humanas.

My own contribution to antivillalobismo can be found here.

There Are No Scandals in Peña Nieto's World

As with all the past missteps, the revelation that he had a child out of wedlock has had little effect on the support for Enrique Peña Nieto. Sixty-nine percent of those who were aware of the charges basically dismissed their relevance to the presidential race, according to a new BGC poll. That may change once people are paying more attention to the race, and perhaps the most striking thing is that people were largely unaware of the infidelity story. In this case, the widespread dismissal is also logically correct and shows admirable maturity, even if it strikes me as unusual, child of the Clinton years that I am. But when you start comparing Peña Nieto's merits and advantages to his scandals and drawbacks, it's hard not to wonder if a crash is around the corner.

Pobre Giovani

Another transfer window comes and goes, and Giovani stays locked onto Tottenham's bench. Since his breakout performance in the 2010 World Cup, he's had two semesters of absolute irrelevance in London with another on the way, and a single half-season at Racing in which he was the team's most important player and a huge reason they weren't relegated. Harry Redknapp is a fun character and he's doing a good job with the Spurs, but he is screwing dos Santos out of quality years, and he's going to wind up losing him for nothing in the long run.

Also, you know who could have used Gio? Barça, which is wracked by injuries, is lacking in depth (relative to Real anyway), and often shows a surprising lack of attacking spark from the midfield depth when Iniesta is out.

The PRI's Missteps

Jorge Fernández Menéndez talks about how a collection of personal problems have turned into a political nightmare for the PRI.