A Change is Gonna Come

Security-related issues accounted for only one of the ten priorities laid out by Calderón in his informe address; security agencies saw their collective budget cut by $2 billion under the PAN economic program; and Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, a prominent advocate of a frontal attack on organized crime, was removed. Taken together, these three facts suggest a sharp turn in how Calderón's anti-crime policy is presented to the public, and perhaps in how it is executed as well.

This almost certainly means a de-emphasis on combating crime in the promotion of the Calderón administration; social development and anti-poverty may not be the buzzwords for the next three years, but they certainly are for the time being. Less certain is whether the above also means an effort to tamp down some of the more violent areas of the country by reducing the intensity of the government anti-crime operations. Along those lines, it may be noteworthy that Arturo Chávez Chávez, the new AG pick, served in the same position in Chihuahua from 1998 to 2002, a time period that I believe coincided with a drastic lessening of the violence, from the post-Amado Carrillo mayhem to the relative calm that prevailed in the state before the middle of 2008. (Although I hasten to add that the second portion of the preceding is empty speculation. It may well mean nothing of the sort.)