Citizen Candidate

Felipe Calderón encouraged the possibility of someone outside the PAN running for the party in 2012. Maybe it was a meaningless comment, and personally I'd love to see more political outsiders running for office in every party, but it doesn't seem like something one would say if there were a logical, viable PAN candidate.

One of the people most able to mount a legitimate campaign is Alejandro Martí, and I was interested to learn that he has a blog (which in Mexican media is often a euphemism for online opinion column) with Animal Político, a new politics website. Here's a piece of one of his first efforts:

I see two great bottlenecks that impede the improvement of our system of justice: police corruption and inefficiency of the public ministry [the department in each entity that carries out investigations, from what I understand of a combination of a DA's office and a homicide detective].

In conclusion: either no one realized that we would arrive at this national public security crisis because of abandoning our state and municipal police, or many people benefited from this abandonment, which in any event is complicity.

Like a hydra of 1,000 heads, the police, corrupted, have turned against their own creators, leaving the citizens as their prey.