Gancho

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Chabat on Priorities

Jorge Chabat, pointing out that Calderón probably has wanted to shift his agenda away from security alone but hasn't been able to do so, wonders if the economic crisis will displace it as the top concern of the government.

I don't really know what the answer to that question is (and nor does Chabat hazard a guess), but there is a lot of concern that a breakdown in the economy will result in a surge in crime, which is a bit scary, given where we are today. One piece of logic, while it won't be applicable everywhere, that someone in Torreón explained to me does seem to have something to it: in the beach cities and in the factory towns, the drop in American consumption is going to hit particularly hard. The people most immediately affected are going to be the most expendable, i.e. the most economically vulnerable, i.e. the waiters, line operators, et cetera. If you toss several thousand poor or lower-middle-income people, many of whom probably have little savings to fall back on, out on the street all at once, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to see some of them turn to crime. A more organic rise in crime would be even more unsettling than the recent explosions of cartel crime, because they affect a broader swath of the population.

Ortega Relaunch

Jesús Ortega earned rave reviews from left and right for his speech re-launching the PRD, which was a loud cry for building the PRD around the center-left: "The left must right now present itself as a governing option." He also reaffirmed the party's commitment to non-violence, which I think could have been broadened to include blatantly anti-democratic tactics, such as taking over Congress. That minor point notwithstanding, an optimistic beginning to the Ortega era.

Good Morning

Today I awoke woke with the song "Odio por Amor" (alternative title: "It's Time to Change") in my head. This was a quite unfortunate development, with the repercussions likely to continue throughout the day. Despite being, according to a Post cub reporter friend of mine, one of George Will's favorites, "Odio por Amor" is a disgustingly addictive song. It's kind of like a bowl of awful-tasting potato chips at a party where there's no one interesting to talk to and no beer and no football on TV: try as you might to avoid it, Juanes' hook digs deep into your subconscious, and the mental constipation that inevitably results is not unlike the stomach irritation that comes from a dinner of greasy Pringles. If you don't believe me, click here. Juanes isn't nearly as hopeless as lots of Spanish-language pop stars, and Manu Chao has shown that bilingual songs can work, but wow, does this song ever flop. May I never hear it again.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Ignatius on Obama's Team

I thought this was pretty savvy:

Managing an all-star team isn’t easy, and I had worried that with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Bill Clinton in her suitcase, and “what-about-me?” Vice President Joe Biden wandering backstage, Obama was setting himself up for a fall. He was ceding to others the conduct of foreign policy, which is his biggest potential opportunity as president. I still think that’s a problem, but I was reassured by the body language of today’s cabinet rollout. This is Obama’s team; he’s clearly in charge. You could see that he wasn’t diminished by the proximity of strong personalities; quite the opposite.

[Break]
I’ve watched other “dream team” cabinets fall into disarray because of the conflict between strong personalities, and this problem has been most acute when there’s a weak national security adviser. That happened during the Reagan administration, when George Shultz was at State, Casper Weinberger was at Defense and a dazed Robert McFarlane was trying to keep order through the NSC. It was a mess.

I remember, too, the enthusiasm that initially greeted President George W. Bush’s all-star team -- the veterans Colin Powell at State, Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and, as a special bonus, Dick Cheney as vice president. They were certified foreign-policy superstars and, what’s more, they had all worked together before. To say that they made a mess does not do justice to its toxicity. The problems were compounded by Condoleezza Rice’s weakness as national security adviser, and by her inability to help the president maintain order in this, forgive the term, “team of rivals.”

Can Jim Jones be the strong national security adviser who makes sure that his all-star team plays well together and shares the ball? Can this group avoid fighting out their policy battles through newspaper leaks (as unpleasant as that dearth of poisoned leaks might be for people like me)? That will be the test of Obama’s foreign-policy team.

I do wish, however, now that the Bush Era's end is upon us, that "body language" would forever be retired as an indicator of anything involving the executive branch.

New Record

One more piece of info from the front page of today's El Universal (that's the third featured today on Gancho; what can I say, they really outdid themselves. The editorial page is really good, too, but I won't be able to get to it until tomorrow.): Mexico cracked 5,000 in 2008 drug executions yesterday. Last year was the most violent year on record for drug cartels, but the number of deaths will be almost doubled by the time 2008 is through.

De La Hoya Talks Honor

Oscar De La Hoya's interviews have always been notably vanilla, agreeably disingenuous, and oddly contradictory. (Other compound modifiers also apply.) For years, I've struggled to figure a way to quickly capture the essence of a De La Hoya media appearance, but I think I finally have it: he's a telenovela caricature of a boxer. He's got the pretty-boy face, the instinct for transparently manufactured melodrama, and the plastered-on emotions (even when they are genuine). Mexican novela fans, couldn't you imagine Sebastián Rulli or Fernando Colunga saying the following about an opponent:

"When he looked into my eyes and I looked into his eyes, and we shook hands and we had a deal, and he talks about honor? I never thought I would fight him," De La Hoya said. "That's also one of the reasons why this fight is so personal to me, because of that night when we signed the deal and he turned his back on me. He's going to have to pay come [Saturday]."

Not that I doubt the sincerity of his feelings; Pacquiao screwed him big time a few years back. It's just that, like a good novela actor, he always succeeds in overdoing the logical emotion by about sixteen degrees of magnitude.

Decaying Army

The front page of El Universal is occupied by an article on the decline in readiness of the nation's military. Generals and admirals, including the Secretary of Defense, have been calling for the procurement of more extensive stuff for a while, but Congress has evidently ignored the call. According to a new Department of Defese report, now the problem has advanced "to such a notable point that in five years it could become irreversible."

A military procurement expert I most certainly am not, so I really can't comment on the logic (or lack thereof) of the military heirarchy's requests (although 12 F-16s for a middle-income country of 100 million people doesn't seem excessive). I do think it's interesting that none of the requests featured in the article related to counter-narcotics work, nor were any of the declines in readiness alleged to be a result of the military's increased role in combating drug traffickers under Calderón. Of course, that's political too; the Department of Defense would be burning Calderón were it to paint the shortages as a result of the drug wars, and really it probably just wants to burn Congress.

No Longer Taking My Sight for Granted

I finally had the chance to see Blindness this weekend. I wasn't expecting much going in, having read Christopher Orr's scathing review in addition to a couple of other less critical but still unfavorable responses. (His brutal final paragraph: "Blindness is a glum, ugly film, and pretentious in the bargain. But, perhaps least excusable, it is a fundamentally ill-conceived film, the visual depiction of a world without sight. It is further evidence, I fear, that a gifted filmmaker [Fernando Meirelles] is losing his own vision.")

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I liked it. Julianne Moore was fantastic, and Gael García Bernal, although unable to entirely shake that strand of adolescent roguishness in any of his roles, was suitably loathsome. A lot of the things critics found unappealing about the movie --that it allegedly offered no great insight about human brutality, the overly optimistic finale, the nameless characters and city, the pretensions of having big ideas-- were problems with the book first, and the movie simply stayed faithful. If you liked the book --and I certainly did, despite my frustration with Saramago's writing style-- the movie does a pretty good job of capturing its essence. The story loses a bit in its journey to the screen, but that's more a reflection of differences inherent to the media, not of Meirelles's direction.

Capital Punishment

Coahuila's legislature has approved the death penalty for kidnappers who kill their victims. The party-line vote brought the PRD and the PAN together in opposition, but the plan, a pet project of the well liked Governor Humberto Moreira (see previous post), passed with the support of the PRI and the Green Party. (An odder breakdown of opposition versus support of a bill I've not seen.)

Regardless of your opinion on the morality of the death penalty, this will not succeed in limiting the number of kidnappings, as long as the overwhelming majority crimes remain unpunished (between 98 and 99 percent of the total, according to most studies). Another problem: kidnapping is usually the work of a criminal group, not an individual or a pair of crooks. So, is the 19-year-old niece of the boss who fed the victim before she was killed as culpable as the boss himself? Are the four men who took the victim from his car with the expectation that he would be back in his house later that week as worthy of the death as the person who pulled the trigger? I certainly don't mean to defend anyone who would take part in a kidnapping, but developing a standard to assign blame adequately is going to be a huge challenge.

It's also interesting that, if you look at the broad progression of western civilization as moving away from the death penalty, this marks a step backwards for Mexico. The country has long taken a principled stance against the death penalty and, until recently, life sentences as well (for years it was a hang-up to extraditions to the United States). Unless I'm mistaken, the prohibition on the death penalty is enshrined in the Constitution, so I think a Supreme Court challenge would be inevitable.

Trust Thy Leader

The results of the this year's National Government, Politics, and Society poll are in, and don't reveal too many surprises. The list of instutions that Mexicans trust the most are as follows: the family, the Church, universities, the army, media outlets, the IFE (which garnered a 6.6 in trustworthiness on a scale of 1-10, despite the 2006 debacle), the Supreme Court, the political parties, with the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate bringing up the rear. I'd guess that the longer term in the Senate accounts for its 0.1-point deficit against the Chamber of Deputies; those three extra years of listening to comments from, say, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, are bound to bump him down a bit.

Also, on the trust-o-meter of individual governors, Sonora's Eduardo Bours and Coahuila's Humberto Moreira landed in the top spots for the question, Would you trust him with your house keys? The two bottom-dwellers were, predictably, Puebla's Mario Marín and Oaxaca's Ulises Ruiz.

Welcome Aboard

Lane Kiffin, jumping all over the recruiting trail, got his first zinger from Spurrier.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

A Political Genius at Work

Like many Mexican politicians, Santiago Creel's got a proposal to modify the Secretaría de Gobernación, but that doesn't mean it's going anywhere. Evidently, he angered his fellow panistas in the Senate and in Los Pinos by not clearing the proposal with either group before introducing it. That's not the first time he's done something like this, either. The more you see the guy in action, the more it becomes clear why, as the favorite in 2006, he lost to Calderón in the PAN primaries, and why it would be suicide to give him another chance in 2012.

Abascal Passes Away

Ex-Interior Secretary and Labor Secretary Carlos Abascal died this morning. The 59-year-old Abascal had been suffering from cancer. The kind words of leftists Carlos Navarrete and Manuel Camacho toward their ideological adversary stood out during day's tributes. It could be the same whenever a political heavyweight dies and I just haven't noticed, but I don't remember seeing such conspicuous expressions of condolences in similar situations in the past.

Pay Up Or Else

Excelsior led today with a story about the increased extortion of Mexico City businesses. The practice has shown some anecdotal signs of being on the rise around the nation, Torreón prominently included. The evolution of drug trafficking groups into multi-faceted, Italian mafia-style might be a sign of weakness (more obstacles to moving cocaine and methamphetamine), but it could at the same time make them harder to break up.

Nitpicking

Anne Applebaum slips this passage into a column about Russia's forgettable imperial designs:

As Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez boarded the vessel, his beefy bodyguards tried to follow him up the gangplank. They were stopped by their equally beefy Russian counterparts. The Venezuelans, who presumably spoke no Russian, tried to push their way through. The Russians, who presumably spoke no Spanish, fought back.

[break]

And yet -- the lingering image of those thuggish bodyguards, shouting at one another in mutual incomprehension, remains weirdly appropriate.

Why are they thuggish (a word she deployed twice)? From the description, it doesn't seem like either side did anything that the Secret Service wouldn't do. Is being the bodyguard of a president with authoritarian leanings a thuggish occupation in and of itself? By that logic, would a Secret Service agent go from being heroic (or at least admirable) under Kennedy to shady a few years later under Nixon, and then back to admirable for Ford and Reagan?

Ortega's Plans

Jesús Ortega, newly minted as the chief of the PRD, is promising to root out the authors of the political fraud that left his victory in limbo for eight long months. Even if this is done in good faith, a healthy effort to clean up the party will probably be seen more as a way for Ortega to purge his enemies. Overall, this seems likely to split the party further.

On the other hand, Ortega says AMLO isn't leaving the party just yet.

The Cash Faucet is On

The money from the Mérida Initiative is starting to flow, first with a couple million toward building a national database of police officers. If it had been in place a few years ago, maybe military deserter Noé Ramírez wouldn't have been in a position to sell Siedo to the Beltrán Leyva.

This is a great place to start, and much more so than military hardware, it has the potential to really attack Mexico's security weaknesses. In general, this is where the plan can make an impact. The sheer scale of the money spent is less important than it's destination, and here we have a few million dollars that is more valuable than a $100 million of F-16s would be.

One caveat: even the best police tracking system in the world doesn't mean much if it's complemented by honest oversight. It's not hard to envision a scandal in which an official tasked with maintaining the database removing a dirty cop from a police blacklist at the behest of a cartel. So, who's policing the police of the police?

Monday, December 1, 2008

Smart Aleck

The following headline lays atop a weekend story in Excelsior about a recent sporting event: "Something different...Kenyan wins with the marathon in Puebla."

Raphael's Criticism

It's only fair to follow up a post about how much Calderón has done with one about what he has failed to accomplish. I hereby cede the floor to Ricardo Raphael:

The fight against discrimination is just one hot button. The reforms to the media law that Supreme Court mandated last year have also remained outside of the presidential magnifying glass; the postponed labor reform that is to democratize and make more efficient the labor market; the education reform that can't be replaced by the failed Educational Alliance; or reforms that would allow us to better protect consumers in these times of crisis and savage capitalism.
Even if --relatively speaking-- we observe a squeezed presidency, it's worth noting the executive's priorities are the only ones that are discussed and resolved in the public space: Why was a reform of energy more important than that of education? Why do fiscal problems have more relevancy than labor issues? Why was the media reform forgotten?

Fair points, but I think it should also be noted that there's only so much one government can do. Calderón and his team scrapped their way to five major reforms, and it's hard to imagine him having had enough time or political capital to dedicate to several more in his mere two years at the helm. Nor am I convinced that the executive's failure to take up these reforms is a reflection of Calderón's lack of interest in teachers or unions or the media; each government has to assign priorities according to its own criteria, and inevitably some worthy goals fall further down on the list than is ideal. You can quibble with the order (I'd certainly have considered placing labor reform higher on the list), but I don't think you can yet paint Calderón's crew as not caring about education and the rest. I take Raphael's column more as a list of goals for the next few year, rather than an indictment of Calderón's performance thus far.

Terrible Twos

Felipe Calderón celebrates the second anniversary of his arrival to the Mexican presidency today, which I remember being one of the coldest days I've ever seen here (maybe 35 or 38 degrees in the morning when I woke up). I'll have more about this later, but despite all the tribulations of the past several months, I remain extremely impressed that a president who barely won a third of the votes in 2006 and took the oath amid jeers and punching legislators has been able to accomplish as much as Calderón has. Excelsior has some polling on Mexicans' satisfaction with their president: 67 percent of respondents say Calderón has met or exceeded their expectations for his administration. In eight of nine different categories, ranging from combating drug trafficking to improving public health, more people today than a year ago call themselves very or somewhat satisfied with his performance; the only area where the measure of satisfaction declined was in job creation.