On Peña Nieto's Economic Priorities

Here's a new, mostly positive piece at Este País.

On the Blake Mora Conspiracies

More here:

An alternative theory is much simpler and more logical, though probably more damning. That is, the extraordinary number of fatal crashes is not caused by criminal groups sending messages to the president, but rather by a deficient aviation safety system. Defects in the model that killed Mouriño and Santiago Vasconcelos, a Learjet 45, had provoked a warning from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in 2003, yet the Mexican government purchased a handful of them for use by senior officials a year later.

The helicopter carrying Blake Mora had recently received maintenance, according to reports, but it was also almost 30 years old, having been purchased originally during the administration of Miguel de la Madrid.

With so many fatal crashes in recent years, it’s difficult to rule out criminal sabotage in every case, but the lack of attention to aviation safety crops up again and again. Such carelessness in protecting the men and women responsible for running the Mexican state, while not as viscerally scary as the idea of hyper-aggressive, all-powerful capos, would ultimately be more worrying.

Everyone's a Winner

Here's the latest from Michoacán, according to El Universal:
Hopefully a more definitive result will emerge before too long.

This Christmas Season, the Gift of Petulence Keeps on Giving

Ronaldo being Ronaldo, as ever:

Ronaldo was the subject of 'Messi' taunts and had laser pens pointed at him throughout the session before Friday's Euro 2012 play-off draw with Bosnia & Herzegovina. The Real Madrid star responded by raising his middle fingers to the fans jeering him, but has received criticism in the media for his actions.

"Everyone is speaking badly of me, but why don't people criticise the lasers that were being aimed into my eyes," Ronaldo told the press. "They behaved in that way and so I reacted in my own way ..."

In fairness, having one those laser pointers aimed at your eyes makes you want to kill someone.

Still No Word

Martín Moreno, however, says that PRD insiders know that AMLO has come out ahead in the presidential poll, and that he will be the left's candidate.

Sad News

José Francisco Blake Mora, the secretary of the interior since 2010, has died in a helicopter crash in Mexico City. He is the second secretary of the interior to die in such circumstances under Calderón, with Juan Camilo Mouriño dying in a plane crash just over three years ago.

Advancing

Sometimes, given all of the near-constant lamentations of Mexico's current path, it's healthy to step back and marvel at all the advances that Mexico has achieved in the past century. Here's one piece of evidence of that: in 1930, the life expectancy of a Mexican was 34 years. Today, it's 75. Of course, the goal is always more progress, but that's not bad for 80 years.

Seats Changing

Marisela Morales' short term at the head of the PGR continues to be one of great turnover among the high-level staff: Just a couple months after Patricia Bugarín replaced Morales as the head of SIEDO, Bugarín has been shown the door, replaced by José Cuitláhuac Salinas Martínez. Salinas Martínez, a longtime PGR official, kicked off his tenure by touting the Zetas the group with the most widespread presence in Mexico, which is, I believe, the first such declaration from the Calderón administration. I'm not sure anyone from the administration has ever addressed this directly, but I would have guessed beforehand that they'd have said Sinaloa had the largest presence. This seems to be of a piece with the Calderón administration naming the Zetas the principal priority in the nation earlier this summer.

The Waiting Is Killing Me

A bout of anxiety over the winner of tomorrow's AMLO-Ebrard poll has made blogging impossible for the last several days. Apologies. But a couple of Xanax pills have turned things around, so we are back.

Ricardo Alemán points out, as many (including yours truly) have previously, that the big winner tomorrow if AMLO comes out on top will be Enrique Peña Nieto, as he'd much rather confront the candidate with more limited appeal. However, even if he loses, AMLO will still likely renege and run, so the effect will be the same, or even more advantageous: no viable threat from the left. Tomorrow's results notwithstanding, I won't be convinced that AMLO is really stepping aside until roughly June 30.

Forbes and Chapo

I've returned to one of my favorite subjects at Este País, and it feels quite good.

Developments in Michoacán

In recent years, Leo Zuckermann has often argued that candidates matter more than is often realized in Mexico, pointing to, among other elections, the PRI's defeats in Guerrero and Baja California Sur. I haven't been following the Michoacán election too closely, but the news that, according to Reforma, Cocoa Calderón is now leading the governor's race sounds like more evidence of that. She was, after all, in third place a month ago, 13 points off the lead.

Alternatively, the poll could be crap. We'll know here in about 10 days.

H/T

On Calderón's Dispute with the Governors

More here:

The governors, for instance, ignore the fact that they are carrying out the vetting at a snail’s pace. According to a study from the National Public Security System, released in February 2011, just 8 percent of the state police officers have passed through a vetting process, while states collectively spend just two-thirds of their total security budget allocation.

Given these statistics, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the state governments are not doing everything possible to improve the police under their control as quickly as possible. Furthermore, while the gap between the average advanced country’s police and Mexico’s is yawning, the sense of fatalism displayed by Aguirre is disheartening; revolutionizing a police system consisting of thousands of different institutions is a daunting prospect, but shouldn’t Mexico at least aspire to have world-class police forces?

Calderon’s position is motivated in part by the fact that Mexican governors typically respond to increases in violence with pleas to the federal government to deploy troops; this has been the tactic of, among others, Andres Grenier in Tabasco, and Zeferino Torreblanca in Guerrero. Stronger state police agencies would alleviate the strain on federal resources, allow them to concentrate their efforts more selectively, and could also allow the military to withdraw to a more supportive role.

Furthermore, Calderon has long sought a police reform that would consolidate the nation’s more than 2,000 municipal police departments into just 32 state bodies. Such a reform would make the integrity of the state institutions all the more important.

But Calderon’s position is also flawed. He implies that the vetting process simply needs to be brought to a finish, and then the state governments will all enjoy clean, competent police force.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this. Past police purges have not served as a long-term solution to corruption in Mexican security agencies, and it is not likely that this one will be any different. Those police who remain after the vetting are not universally incorruptible; many of them have simply not been confronted with the dilemma. But if a criminal group loses all their local police protectors, logic dictates that they will seek to replace them. No matter the efficiency and thoroughness of the housecleaning, the gains will be only temporary.

New Book. And Relatively New Book.

Here's a brief excerpt from Ioan Grillo's new book, El Narco:

Gonzalo has more demons than most. He was incarcerated in the prison a year before I met him and bought his way into the Christian wing hoping it would be a quiet place where he could escape the war. But when I listen carefully to his interview, he sounds as if he has really given his heart to Christ, does really pray for redemption. And when he talks to me – a nosy British journalist prying into his past – he is really confessing to Jesus.

"You meet Christ and it is a totally different thing. You feel horror and start thinking about the things you have done. Because it was bad. You think about the people. It could have been a brother of mine I was doing these things to. I did bad things to a lot of people. A lot of parents suffered.

"When you belong to organized crime, you have to change. You could be the best person in the world, but the people you live with change you completely. You become somebody else. And then the drugs and liquor change you."

I have watched too many videos of the pain caused by killers like Gonzalo. I have seen a sobbing teenager tortured on a tape sent to his family; a bloodied old man confessing that he had talked to a rival cartel; a line of kneeling victims with bags over their heads being shot in the brain one by one. Does someone who has committed such crimes deserve redemption? Do they deserve a place in heaven?

Yet, I see a human side to Gonzalo. He is friendly and well-mannered. We chat about lighter issues. Perhaps in another time and place, he could have been a stand-up guy who worked hard and cared for his family – like his father, who, he says, was a lifelong electrician and union man.

I have known angry, violent men in my home country; hooligans who smash bottles into people's faces or stab people at soccer games. On the surface, those men seem more hateful and intimidating than Gonzalo as he talks to me in the prison cell. Yet they have killed nobody. Gonzalo has helped turn Mexico at the dawn of the twenty-first century into a bloodbath that has shocked the world.

More here.

While I'm at it, because I was traveling when I read it, I never gave Malcolm Beith's The Last Narco its proper due here. It's a great read, anyone interested in the war on drugs or modern Mexico should dig right in.

Political Fanboys and Girls

If you can stomach it, the comments on Enrique Peña Nieto's website are lots of fun, in a cringe-inducing sort of way:

The FBI's New Gang Report

I have a new piece looking at the new report, and what it says about Mexico. Highlights:

The report is also noteworthy for what it doesn’t say. For the past several years, U.S. authorities have highlighted the role of Mexican criminal groups in the U.S., painting the picture of a situation that is growing ever-more precarious. In 2008, the National Drug Intelligence Center published a report that named 195 U.S. cities in which Mexican traffickers “operate,” including remote locales like Decatur, Alabama and Kalamazoo, Michagan.

That number continued to rise. “Mexican drug cartels are in well over 200 cities here in the United States,” Gil Kerlikowske, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told The Daily earlier this year. In the same report, an ICE agent told The Daily that the activities of Mexican gangs in cities “all over America” was “the stuff of nightmares.” Despite the fact that law enforcement officials gave little context or qualification for their concerns, voices like Rep. Michael McCaul and Lou Dobbs used such comments to stir up fears of an invasion in progress by Mexican criminal groups.

The most recent assessment, in contrast, offers a much more nuanced picture of the relationship between the most notorious Mexican gangs and crime in U.S. cities. Rather than a Mexican hegemon pulling criminal strings on U.S. streets from thousands of miles away, what we see is evidence of a supply chain. The Mexican groups all have local partners charged with retail distribution of their merchandise: the Sinaloa Cartel works with, for instance, the Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia, while the Zetas work with the U.S.-based branches of MS-13 to market their drugs.

This is not fundamentally different from the relationship other foreign drug traffickers -- Vietnamese opium producers, Colombian cocaine manufacturers -- have set up to import drugs into the U.S. Indeed, foreign producers of any good, illegal or otherwise, will by necessity have a similar relationship with domestic retailers. Rather than the ominous incursion of the world’s nastiest gangs into the U.S., this is merely the working of a global supply chain.

Fox and His Non-Pact Pact

New piece here.

The Victims' Advocate

M Semanal has a long piece about/interview with the head of the new Procuraduría Social de Atención a las Víctimas de Delitos, Sara Irene Herrerías.

Hillary Hates Enrique?

Bajo Reserva says that, a couple of years ago, Hillary Clinton responded to the possibility of a Peña Nieto presidency with not entirely friendly, "Over my dead body". I'm not sure what she may know that the rest of us don't, but that's an odd reaction, if it's true. First of all, it shows very little appreciation for the historical ineptitude of the US when trying to influence Latin American elections. Second, it shows little appreciation for the context, since Peña Nieto has been the favorite for 2012 since well before Clinton was deployed to Foggy Bottom. And lastly, it's especially odd because I can't why he would provoke such a harsh reaction from an American diplomat. I am no fan of Peña Nieto's, but he is not outside the mainstream of the Mexican political elite, nor does he represent a wing of it that is especially hostile to the US or its interests. In any event, it said she is warming to the idea of a Peña Nieto presidency, as well she should, given its likelihood.

The same column offered some details of Lula's recent visit to Mexico, in which he called for a Pemex-Petrobras partnership and scolded the PRD. Bajo Reserva, which referred to him as the "legendary Brazilian ex-president", said that Lula postponed meetings with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Marcelo Ebrard to hang out with Peña Nieto and Humberto Moreira for a while longer.

Another Day, Another Chaotic Internal Election for the PRD

Aguachile has the info:

As expected, things went very wrong in the PRD's internal election this weekend. The count was cancelled in five states - Mexico City, Chiapas, Zacatecas, Oaxaca and Veracruz - all key states for the party.

Having cried fraud for more than two weeks ahead of the contest, the discredited Dolores Padierna and her internal party faction IDN as expected managed to sabotage the election, and blamed Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard for the disturbances. In several states, thugs loyal to the IDN resorted to violence against its party opponents, such as in Durango, where the infamous Cecilio Campos led groups armed with lead pipes that attacked their fellow party members.

If there ever was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this is it: IDN and Padierna actively tried to derail the process in order to make Marcelo Ebrard look bad. It his hard to understand this logic of "destroying your own party to save it" from a rational point of view, but from that of the IDN, who support the bid of Ebrard's rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador to become the presidential candidate of the left, it makes perfect sense to make the PRD, now led primarily by the social-democratic Nueva Izquierda faction close to Ebrard, look bad.

The party will likely make another attempt next weekend to hold elections in the remaining states.

And more, in bullet form:

* The heads of the PRD factions meet to lick their wounds and attempt a "reconciliation," with new elections scheduled for next weekend in the five states where they were not held this Sunday.

* But Dolores Padierna/René Bejarano of the IDN faction, which has caused so much trouble and discredit of the party, was not there.

* Earlier, IDN claimed it had intercepted a trailer or two of handouts, but offered no evidence, nor did it report the alleged incident to the authorities.

* And in a very open attack on Ebrard, IDN even demanded that Ebrard leave the PRD!

* Former party president Jesús Ortega blamed IDN for the turmoil this past weekend, arguing it is part of IDN's strategy to discredit the PRD and Ebrard in order to promote the candidacy of AMLO.

* Pro-AMLO groups also demand the cancellation of election in other states where it appears their opponents won.

* The Mexico City government, through Secretary of Government José Ángel Ávila, denied that it had anything to do with the elections.

* Marcelo Ebrard, from Kuwait: The 2012 candidacy will not be decided by "whomever screams the loudest," the perennial strategy of Padierna et al.

With regard to the possibility of Ebrard leaving the party, you have to wonder if he hasn't considered it. This is of a piece with everything that has happened within the party since the 2008 election for party president.

Leo Zuckermann has more here.

Murders in 2011

I had a piece earlier this week about the recently released data on murders in Mexico in 2011 (through August). Highlights:

But while the news is bad in [Acapulco and Monterrey], other areas have experienced a significant lessening of violence. The foremost is Juarez, the border city in Chihuahua, which has for the last several years enjoyed the dubious designation of Mexico’s most dangerous city.

While it remains exceedingly bloody, Juarez is far safer than it was in 2010: with 1,065 murders through August, it is on pace for just under 1,600 murders, a murder rate of roughly 120 per 100,000 residents. In 2010, the city registered some 3,000 murders and a murder rate of roughly 250 per 100,000.

The drop in violence in Juarez is driving a broader decline in murders in Chihuahua, though one that is not nearly as marked. With 2,147 murders through eight months, the state is on pace for slightly more than 3,220 murders this year, compared to 3,514 in 2010, according to the SNSP.

Another region where murders have dropped is Baja California, the Pacific border state that is home to Tijuana and Mexicali. With 464 murders so far in 2011, the state, which has long been among the regions most readily associated with organized crime violence, is on pace for 696 murders this year. That would give Baja a murder rate of 22, comparable to the nationwide average. In 2010, in contrast, Baja California was the site of close to 900 murders. Part of this drop may be due to what's been called a "Pax Tijuana," whereby two large criminal forces reach a business arrangement, thus reducing the competition and acts of bloodshed.

Taken together, the picture is one of a nation growing slightly more violent, with the violence growing significantly more dispersed. The Calderon government has long responded to critics by pointing out the violence is concentrated in a relatively small number of areas, Tijuana and Juarez prominently among them. However, even as the violence drops in some of these hot spots, it is more than balanced by the increases in formerly tranquil oases like Monterrey.

Switching Roles

For most of the past couple of years, while the race for 2012 was still a messy blob just beginning to take shape, Manlio Fabio Beltrones was always the sensible, modernizing alternative to Enrique Peña Nieto's dinosaur redux. But on the oh-so-important issue of Pemex, the roles are reversed: Peña Nieto spoke recently about opening Mexico's oil company up to outsiders, while Beltrones responded by rejecting any privatization of Pemex.

The easy explanation is that Peña Nieto is aware of his reputation as a new-age dinosaur and is seeking to modify it, while Beltrones simply needs to distinguish himself from Peña Nieto however possible. In this case, I think the easy explanation is pretty much correct.

More on Zepeda Patterson and Monterrey

Right here. Also, Norma Samaniego looks at the links between the labor market and violence in Mexico here.

New Monterrey Piece

Letras Libres has a new piece on Monterrey, which very long and full of good interviews, and about which I wrote here. Highlights:

Between the Mariano Escobedo Airport, in the industrial municipality of Apodaca, and my hotel in San Pedro Garza Garcia, a bit past 11 at night and after crossing the entire city of Monterrey, I don’t see a single soldier or policeman, despite being just a week after Mexico’s worst attack against the civilian population: the burning of Casino Royale, perpetrated by gunmen who acted with impunity in the broad daylight, where 52 people died. And that will be one of the most unusual constants during this visit. Not even in the interview with the secretary of governance, Javier Treviño, nor with the threatened mayor of Guadalupe, Ivonne Alvarez, nor on the drive around the Barrio Antiguo, not even to enter the Tec [de Monterrey] for a ceremony presided over by two of the most important businessmen in Mexico, no one ever asked me for identification, checked my backpack, nor confirmed that I had an appointment or an invitation.

The explanation for this lack of control was given to me by Jorge Tello Peon, unsalaried cabinet coordinator for security in the Nuevo Leon government. The creator of Cisen, the old collaborator of Fernando Gutierrez Barrios and maybe the man who best understands what goes behind the scenes in Mexico’s security agencies, Tello is emphatic during a breakfast in a restaurant simply named Wall Street: “Nuevo Leon is facing an alarming deficit of police officers.” The systematic clean-ups of officers who are corrupt, if not on the payroll of organized criminal groups, has left the state agencies, and the majority of the municipalities, with negligible numbers. Bernardo Gonzalez-Arechiga, director of the Tec’s Graduate School of Public Administration and an expert on security issues, corroborates the statistics: “Nuevo Leon has less than 8,000 police officers and it should have, given its population and under the UN standards [at least 2.8 police per 1,000 inhabitants], 20,000, and under the Goode standards [which measures the number of losses among the police to calculate the required number], 40,000.” There is a state program in place to build a new police agency, but it’s not easy to recruit. No one wants a job in which you risk your life if you don’t become corrupt. And that’s the case despite conditions having radically improved: the government offers a salary of 14,000 pesos a month with good benefits. The recruiting drive has had to go outside the state and offer housing for those who aren’t residents. Not even that works. Furthermore, the process of incorporating the recruits is inevitably slow. Nothing is more dangerous than recruiting desperate people and giving them a weapon without any training. The Mexican Army knows it, as it confronts the desertion of a significant number of commanders of its special battalions who have turned into leaders of the Zetas. “In February,” Tello tells me as an example, “we fired 30 police, and we need 500 per month.”

[...]

With a per capita income of 40,000 dollars, figures above those of Canada, and with more finance and marketing graduates from North American universities than any other place in the world, San Pedro Garza Garcia, in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Madres, has the luxury of starting with the ceiling, as in the house of the mayor. [Mayor Mauricio Fernandez, a wealthy businessman outside of politics, has an exquisitely painted ceiling on the top of his home.] That is, firing all of its police and hiring as many as it needs, comfortably surpassing the indices recommended by the UN. Creating a municipal intelligence agency. Carrying out a scandalous registration of domestic workers. Even the mayor proposes a reduction in the penal minimum age to 12 years. That’s not to mention the rumors running around about a “group of tough guys” at the mayor’s service. With approval ratings of more than 80 percent, according to various polls, Fernandez Garza can brag of zero kidnappings at this point in the year and only two murders, before 40 per week in the rest of the metropolitan area of Monterrey. Obviously, the mayor-sheriff “method” cannot be transplanted.

Part of the success is owed to a historic revenue collection in his first year in office. He discovered that many of the wealthiest men in the city, some of them his neighbors estate to estate, had gone years without paying the predial, the tax that cities charge and that is the most basic for keeping its books in order: “Tricks from their lawyers to justify their jobs,” he tells me to excuse them. And he threatened them with publicizing their delinquency in the social life supplement Sierra Madre, which is edited by El Norte [one of the biggest daily papers in Monterrey] for subscribers from that city. An effective change: one thing is to cheat the tax man, a bothersome abstraction, but quite another to be chewed over at the country club.