Gómez Mont Analysis

Leo Zuckermann says cabinet changes were inevitable after the elections, and that yesterday's (which included Gerardo Ruiz coming into serve as Calderón's chief of staff, replacing Patricia Flores, who is now to serve as secretary of social development) are good news because they indicate that control of and responsibility for enacting the president's agenda will lie with Los Pinos, rather than being dispersed among cabinet members:

With the cabinet changes announced yesterday, it seems to me that the president is returning to the organization that functioned during his first year of government, which is to say, that the operation and political negotiation were carried out from Los Pinos. That's how it worked when Juan Camilo Mouriño was chief of staff. But, inexplicably, with a model that worked, Calderón moved Mouriño to the interior secretariat and in that moment the government lost force.

There may well be a lot of truth in what Zuckermann says, but much of the loss in force is that the stickier legislative tasks --namely oil reform-- came after that first year.

Regarding Gómez Mont's replacement, he writes:

The naming of José Francisco Blake, former interior secretary of Baja California, leads me to think that this department will handle more security and, in particular, coordination between the various agencies of the federal government and the state governments. Blake comes with the experience of a state which, though it continues with high levels of crime, has managed to lower the violence in its big cities thanks to the effective coordination in the three levels of government.