Leo
Zuckermann praises Felipe Calderón response to the plane crash last week:
[T]he government has reacted well. There haven't been information vacuums that fill up with speculation. The secretary of communication and transportation has punctually reported each and every one of the discoveries. Luis Téllez has promised that the information will continue flowing, which will permit us to establish if what happened was an accident or an attack. Meanwhile, President Calderón has been very careful in not rushing to judgment. He doesn't refer to an accident or an attack. Such a judgment, as it should be, must wait for the investigation.
He also throws water on the idea that Calderón would want to cover up a sabotage, should the investigation reveal one.
If it turns out that the crash was an attack, the government should be the party most interested in announcing that. I don't see what the motive would be to cover it up. What would it gain? Not appearing vulnerable to the guilty parties? In fact, it would be very risky for the government to mount a cover-up operation that involves international institutions [American and British officials are also investigating the accident].
I agree with this analysis, and it also reminds me that Mexicans' skepticism is not part of the national DNA, but rather a lingering result of decades of governmental lies. As the political system has opened up, events like the Mouriño plane crash have been more likely to be handled honestly and openly, whereas in the not-so-distant past (like the 1994 murder of PRI bigwig José Francisco Ruiz Massieu) the opposite was the case. Should future episodes continue to be treated transparently by the government, I imagine that future generations of Mexicans will be much likely to trust their government.
2 comments:
Many years of my reviewing airplane incidents produce one conclusion-- airplanes don't just fall out of the air. Very worrisome, why no cockpit conversations? What happened that a perfectly good airplane with superb pilots on a normal approach in good weather, runway in sight, to crash for no reason visible at this moment? Even a structural failure would give time for a few seconds of comments. Suicide in the cockpit? Ground fire?
What I can't understand is if it was sabotage or a bomb, why didn't it go off until right before they were about to land? In such cases, the bomb explodes or the motor stops working usually shortly after takeoff, not when they are landing hundreds of miles away, which makes logical sense. I agree that whatever happened was really weird regardless, and that planes just don't fall out the sky, but the above seems like a relatively strong circumstantial argument against it having been an intentional attack.
Also, there are reports here that the airplane had been grounded in the past, so I don't know.
In any event, it would be great if they found the black box, but I guess that doesn't seem to likely now.
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