New's Divine Commentary

Commentators weigh in on the New’s Divine tragedy, in which the overzealous police bust of a Mexico City nightclub resulted in 12 deaths. The backlash has been aimed mostly at the party that has run Mexico City, from the mayor’s office to the taxis to the street sweepers to the police, for the last decade: the PRD. Francisco Valdés Ugalde, writing in Sunday's El Universal:

The atrocious deaths of twelve people in a bar in the capital and the reaction of the authorities responsible exhibit the backwardness of the system of justice and, worse still, the contradiction of governing with new electoral methods but old political practices.

According to the investigation of the Human Rights Commission of DF (the only trustworthy source for now, unfortunately), the police, the local attorney general, the delegate with authority over the zone, and the mayor have shown their insensitivity and irresponsibility toward the victims and have acted exclusively to protect their image and their interests. The least that can be demanded in situation like this is that the delegate, the attorney general, and the secretary of public security be removed immediately to allow an independent and objective investigation.

For the political races, the calculations about the elections in 2009 and 2012, the image in the media and other courtesan trappings are more important than the society and the citizens. At the end of the list, only at the end and as a last resort, is accountability.

The Legislative Assembly hasn’t even demanded with the necessary force an explanation of what happened. Only opposition deputies have asked that the mayor and others involved resign their posts to allow the independent investigation of the tragedy. Is it that the PRD in the Assembly and the Senate only will defend their officials in the Federal District [Mexico City]? Will they once again put the interests of the party above those of the society they claim to represent?

It’s simply grotesque that in a city governed by the “left,” the police and the Public Ministry commit atrocities like stripping young women, marking them and tabulating them in the presence of men who fondle them. [These are the accusations of the many of the 15- and 16-year-old girls who were taken by the police after the operation.] It’s simply unacceptable that after 10 years of PRD governments in the city, these examples, representative of the purest institutional savagery, still occur. This is the quality of the PRD’s commitment to institutional reform of the Mexican State, which doesn’t even value the attention of the entity that it governs.

Ethics in politics doesn’t come free. It is produced at the intersection of personal probity and rigidly enforced institutional rules, accompanied by illustrative punishments for those [who break them]. In none of these requirements does the Government of the Federal District pass the test.

Somehow, Jorge Zepeda's take on the events finds a villain among the panistas: Germán Martínez, whom he sees as blowing the thing out of proportion to make Mayor Marcelo Ebrard look worse in advance of the 2012 presidential elections. Whatever. I can't claim to know Martínez's motives for fingering Ebrard, and I don't think the mayor bears much direct responsibility, but it happened under his government, which has focused on law and order from the start (as Zepeda points out). As a simple matter of a representative government being accountable to its constituents, Ebrard must answer for why 12 of them are now dead, period. Just as questions about Calderón’s drug policies are legitimate, even if he isn’t the cause of the thousands of executions since he took office.

Alberto Aziz Nassif’s view is somewhere between the two. He recaps the disaster with the following: “In sum, police abuse and ineptitude, the criminalization of young people and corruption form a powerful mix of enemies that must be combated.”