Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Criticizing Calderón's Efforts

Jorge Fernández Menéndez wasn't overly impressed by Calderón's strategy rollout:
There was no new strategy in the fight against organized crime, as some colleagues have said, in the article that the president published at the beginning of the week. It could be a bad or good strategy, but there was nothing new at all and the objective wasn't to present it but rather, on the contrary, ratify the stance held since the beginning of this administration. Things that have been said on countless occasions were simply pasted together into a text, such as this isn't a fight against drug trafficking but rather a fight to recover public security, which for some turned out to be new.

And that very fact demonstrates two things: first, that in the media we are not paying attention to something as basic as the central message of the president regarding the most important topic of his administration: the fight against organized crime and all that has to do with security. For many it's more important to tally, with all sorts of imprecision, the number of victims and fallen than the reasons that they are falling. But all that demonstrates as well that the government message on the issue is a disaster zone: if after four years of governing with the same strategy there is still space, when the strategy is laid out again, for people to interpret it as something new, that means that the message hasn't been permeating even among the media outlets.

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