AMLO in the Times

Andrés Manuel López Obrador scored a profile in the New York Times earlier this week, with the point being that the economic crisis could vault him back into a position of heightened relevance. This initially struck me as an odd time to be writing positively about AMLO, given that he doesn't really have a home and all of the parties that could claim his movement are going to get smashed come summer, but it could be prescient. If the American recession results in a long-term contraction in Mexico, AMLO will likely win new (or erstwhile) devotees. Still, I think the article underestimates a couple of things: first, absent gross mismanagement, Mexicans are likely to be somewhat forgiving of Felipe Calderón. The public knows that this isn't a problem whose genesis is Mexican, and its anger won't be immediately directed toward Mexican leaders unless there is some further crisis that hits Mexico more directly, like a debt crisis or a round of bank defaults.

Second, while the circumstances will be tilting back toward López Obrador, that can only make up for so much of his decline in the public's esteem. His behavior in 2006 permanently poisoned his image as a reasonable democrat, and he's not going to win over many of the people who left him because they rejected his radical tactics.

Lastly, I can't help but feel that AMLO is optimistic about an economic disaster the way Dick Cheney and Marc Thiessen seem to be hoping for a terrorist attack during a Democratic administration.

Post on Immigration

That would be the Washington Post, not a blog post. Evidently, dangerous immigration offenders have been increasingly ignored as authorities have shifted focus toward increasing the raw number of deportees.

Cooperation

Youtube has offered to work with the IFE to pull down slanderous campaign videos during the Mexican congressional campaigns. This may help a bit, but it doesn't protect against the videos and PowerPoint presentations passed around as email attachments, nor does it address the videos posted to Facebook or Hi5. I'm not sure there is any way to effectively address that stuff, but I'm certain that at this point, no one is.

What Doesn't Qualify as Evidence of the Weakness of the Mexican State

Mauricio Merino argues that the spat between the IFE and the networks over the dissemination of campaign spots during soccer games is evidence of an impotent if not quite failed state that lacks "the sufficient authority to guarantee the rule of law and the viability of the country." According to Merino, the episode provides "implacable symbols that the Mexican special interests are demonstrating, once again, their lack of respect for the decisions taken by the legislative branch, so that everyone is aware."

That's a bit of a reach. New laws often produce conflicts between the government and the companies affected. Was all the carping about Sarbanes-Oxley evidence of an impotent American state? Was Microsoft's conflict with the Department of Justice a symbol of the absence of the rule of law, or a lack of respect for the government? And is the alternative to periodic messy disagreement --companies that are afraid of the government and silently ascent to all governmental initiatives-- any better?

Not Salinas

Despite the PAN's worries, the PRI's gubernatorial candidate in Nuevo León will not be Carlos Salinas, but rather Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz, the ex-interior secretary in that state.

Economic Worry and Other Polling Revelations

According to polling by Ulises Beltrán that appeared in Excélcior, 41 percent of Mexicans believe that the national economy is in crisis, while 55 percent believe it is merely passing through a difficult moment. Only 2 percent believe that the economy is strong. These numbers are moving in the wrong direction; the proportion was about 35-61 in December. Oddly, the expectations for 2009 have been improving in recent weeks: 45 percent think the economy will get better, against 33 who do not. The numbers were flipped in October: 25 thought would bring improvement to the economy against 55 who did not.

Consulta Mitofsky measured perception of public security improvements, and discovered that the public doesn't perceive much improvement: almost half of the respondents report seeing zero improvement in security since November. Nearly eight out of ten Mexicans say that either very little or nothing has been done to combat kidnapping. That's certainly not heartening, but as I've said before, measuring changes in security over such a short period of time is a futile exercise.

Lastly, Jorge Buendía has some polling (sorry, no links) measuring party preference ahead of the summer elections: 41 percent like the PRI, 37.9 would prefer the PAN, and 16.5 the PRD. Despite AMLO providing candidate lists to Convergencia and the Workers Party, the bottom has not fallen out of the PRD. Compared to 2006, the summer elections will be brutal for the PRD, but 16.5 is not much worse than other recent polling. Also notable is the strength of each party's support: of those who said they were really sure of their pick, 43 percent went for the PAN, compared to 38 for the PRI. For those whose support was somewhat strong, 47 were leaning toward the PRI compared to the PAN's 30. This suggests a certain volatility to the present picture.

Not Serious

The PRI has suggested sanctioning artists who write narcocorridos. This is a silly waste of the government's efforts. The narcocorridos are a basically harmless byproduct, not a cause, of the nation's drug problems. This would be like blaming the crack boom on NWA.

The IFE's Shortcomings

In July, about the electoral reform that places strict limits on what the parties can and cannot say during election season, Leo Zuckermann wrote:

The attacks between candidates are intrinsic to electoral competition. To a candidate who is behind in the polls and who doesn't move up with a positive campaign, the only chance he has to win is to criticize his adversary. Nevertheless, the parties prohibited in the Constitution the airing of negative radio and television spots. Huge error. Now the attacks will be anonymous and therefore more virulent. Under the previous system, at least we knew that the panistas were the ones who said that López Obrador was a danger for Mexico and that the perredistas claimed that Calderón had signed Fobaproa [a notorious bank bailout boondoggle]. But now, the attacks will be unsigned.

The IFE's admission that it has no plans to monitor online media outlets like Facebook, Hi5, and Youtube proves his hypothesis. With younger generations of Mexicans leaning heavily toward the internet as the medium of choice, the IFE's restrictions are going to be obsolete before too long.

Helpful Adverb

My God, Christian Bale is an awful person. In terms of the intensity and personal enmity, it was like a Bob Knight or John McEnroe highlight, only pettier. I love how toward the end of his psychotic rant he says, "Seriously man, you and me, we're fucking done professionally," leaving a window open for he and his beratee to continue a healthy social relationship, just not a professional one. Very forgiving of him.

Killings in Cancún

Yesterday, a general who'd been working in Cancun for 20 days was found tortured and killed along with his security detail. In his short time in the city, Mauro Tello had carried out a series of operations that led to arrests of members of the Zetas, as well as seizures of guns and drug precursors attributed to the same group.

El Universal offers a sketch of the resort town's historic importance to the drug trade (it's just a few hours by air from Bogotá), starting with the Juárez Cartel's arrival in the early 1990s under Rafael Aguilar, the Amado Carrillo years, the Mario Villanueva government, and the recent battles for control between Sinaloa and Gulf Cartel groups.

More Scandal

Marcial Maciel Degollado, one of Mexico's most famous priests and the founder of Legionaries of Christ, was the subject of a New York Times story today alleging that he carried on an affair that led to a child. Maciel, who died last year, was also previously accused of sexually abusing male students under his tutelage. I'm curious if his name will continue to grace the coin-collection plastic containers in the Farmacias Guadalajara here in Torreón. I say yes.

Scamming the Taxman

IVA, IETU, ISR, IEPS--it doesn't matter what abbreviation you throw in front of the tax, a quarter of Mexican businesses are going to ignore it. With oil prices low and Mexican production dropping, inmproving enforcement of the tax code would be a great way to compensate for the revenue shortfall.

Chabat on Differences

Jorge Chabat wonders why Mexican Blagos keep their jobs:

Blagojevich was taped in the act and three months later the Illinois Senate voted unanimously to remove him from office, with the votes of all of the Democratic senators despite his being a member of the same party. Which is to say, there was no party solidarity, which is the favored style in this land, in the defense a corrupt official.

Obviously, the Democrats realized that leaving the governor of Illinois in office would cost them politically and they decided to cut their losses. That sounds very rational in political terms. The question that surges here is, Why in Mexico do the political parties defend their corrupt members and avoid at all costs their removal from office?

The answer to this political riddle may lie more with the voters than the parties. It's obvious that Mexican politicians, if they are allowed, will be corrupt and will cover each others' backs, as has happened for decades. But, why the irrational conduct? For the simple reason that the voters don't pass them the bill when they owe. The overwhelming PRI victories in local elections in Puebla and Oaxaca, after all the scandals from the priísta governors in power shows that the electorate simply tolerates the abuses from those that govern...

As long as the citizens don't do their job and punish deplorable conduct from the government, the democratic system isn't going to work...It's not the fault of the governor, but rather those who keep him in his post...

Chabat probably understates the role of electoral fraud and intimidation and the tendency of unresponsive government to create a widespread sense of apathy, but at base he's correct. Voter abstention in Ruiz's Oaxaca in 2007 was about 65 percent. That same cycle, it was almost 60 percent in Baja California, despite the candidacy of a misogynist whose bodyguards have killed one of his more vocal adversaries. Voter fraud can trim the margins, but had 80 percent of non-voters come out to vote against the PRI in Oaxaca, there's no way Ruiz's cronies would have been able to hide it. But there's just rarely any overriding desire to throw the bums out, to hold people accountable. And as a result, Mexican politicians run wild. 

I also think this has something to do with the odd malleability and unattainability of truth in Mexico's public life. When it comes to politics, truth is almost an anti-concept in Mexico; it's not something to be pursued or sought objectively, but rather something to be denied and doubted and distrusted. The simpler and more obvious truth often gives way to elaborate stories in which malign influences pull the strings behind the scenes. Hence widespread belief (or at least suspicion), despite the lack of any evidence, that Mouriño's plane was blown out of the sky, that Zhen Li's money was from a PAN slush fund, and that Calderón's election was a repeat of Salinas'. 

So what does that have to do with Governors Marín and Ruiz? Because when the truth is something unattainable, it becomes very easy to equate any negative press, even those caused by very real misdeeds, with slander. If Calderón partisans can chalk up the Zhen Li stories to calumnious enemies, then Ruiz partisans can perform the same mental calisthenics to excuse his fraudulent election and his authoritarian governance. And a large number of voters, instead of sifting the through the various stories to distinguish fact from rumor, simply throw up their hands, settle on everyone being corrupt, and turn away from politics altogether.

Bad Networks

I always seem to miss the big Super Bowl moments peripheral the game itself; I missed Janet Jackson, and I missed...actually Jackson's wardrobe is the only thing I can come up with, which makes for a pretty lame trend. Whatever.

This year, the Mexican broadcast earned controversy for interrupting the action to air now-mandatory electoral spots (starting on January 31st, 48 minutes of every day must be given to the parties). The controversy stems from viewers' anger that the games they were watching were interrupted without warning. I noticed the spots, but, as with Janet Jackson, I missed the cause of all the uproar; I don't ever remember seeing a play be diverted to the electoral ad. More info here.

Everyone here, from the independent electoral authority to the parties, is blaming the broadcasters for the spots, and since Televisa and TV Azteca aren't denying it, that seems logical. But it's kind of odd that, of its own volition, the networks would both decide to interrupt highly rated programs (soccer games were also affected) to squeeze in the spots. I guess they would do so to maximize the advertising revenue during the regularly scheduled breaks in the action, but how is it in their interest to alienate all of their viewers? The broadcast TV oligopoly explains part of it, but Mexicans have as many cable options as other nations' citizens, so that seems like a really short-sighted decision from the networks.

Also, Joe Montana was the guest expert for the Televisa broadcast. I couldn't help but feel a little sorry that most people's greatest QB ever can't even land a gig on a network in his own language, much less his own country.

Could You Be a Little More Generic?

Richard Cohen's totally unforeseen disillusionment with the Obama Administration, regarding its failure to include education provisions in the stimulus package:

How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with the No Child Left Behind law but insisting that testing -- accountability -- be maintained? How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching. The pay is lousy, and the work can be hard. Can $100 billion do something about that? Could be.

It'd be easy to say that, while I haven't read the stimulus package, were I a highly paid columnist with a nationally prominent paper like Cohen, I most certainly would make my way through its 647 pages before writing a column criticizing it, so that I may write with a degree of precision above that of a tenth-grade B student. That's a lie, though; I'm fairly certain that I would do no such thing. At the same time, in the age of Google, can't he get a little more specific than "...the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be"? What does that even mean?

The City That Doesn't Work

In Mexico City, some days you can't drive; on others, the water is cut off. The first is an arguably misguided attempt to attack the smog problem head-on, the second is the result of generations of failed governance. Forty percent of the city's drinking water is wasted because of bad pipes! The water problems are nothing new, but no one has ever dealt with them effectively. It's not a coincidence that democracy has existed in Mexico City for only slightly more than a decade.

The Right to Use a Cell Phone

It's getting costlier: thanks to a new provision in the Federal Communications Law signed by President Calderón, would-be cell phone users will have to provide a photocopy of an official identification, a fingerprint, and register themselves in a national database in order to be granted permission to use one.

This is a bit disturbing. First of all, that's a lot of information to hand over to any government, especially one that has a history of abusing its citizens. Who's going to have access to the information? Some of the members of the kidnapping group that killed Fernando Martí were federal police; how can the government ensure that other criminal bands won't have access to priviledged information?

Second, how exactly is the government going to use this information? I'm not saying it couldn't be useful, but in a country where the police often ignore evidence and neglect to investigate, the burden of proof is on them. If there is an attempted extortion by telephone, and the would-be victim turns in the number, what then? Who's going to be in charge of investigating the crime? Since the kidnapping bands will likely have a register of the numbers they called, won't this open the victims up to retribution? The details need to be made public.

Lastly, if the goal is to prevent extortion by phone, wouldn't a public-education campaign be an easier, cheaper, and potentially more effective way to combat the crime?

Funniest Thing I'll Hear All Day

It's the corrido de Barack Obama! If you hear anything better all day, I'll give you your money back.

Gancho's favorite lines: Su nombre Barack Obama y en la historia va a quedar, desde el cielo su abuelita a su nieto cuidara.

Or: His name is Barack Obama and it will live on in history, from heaven his grandmother will watch over her grandson.

It's weird how when you see them in print, corridos never seem like they keep a beat at all.

Back to the Drawing Board

Via Alterdestiny, I see that political scientist Stephen Haber has a wide-ranging piece about Latin America's quiet economic and political transformation over the past several years. He makes some decent points about how overlooked changes in Latin American states have made them much more efficient, despite all the hubbub about the region's turmoil. However, I wonder if he doesn't try to yoke too many disparate episodes under his thesis. Take his comment on the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico:

Some sense of Mexico's transformation can be gleaned from one fact: In order to run competitively in the 2006 election, leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador had to jettison most of his left-wing stances during the campaign in order to be competitive with the PAN -- and he lost anyway.

That seems like an awfully broad and somewhat suspect conclusion to draw from an election that was decided by less than 1 percent of the vote. First of all, I don't remember AMLO jettisoning a whole lot of his ideas (though maybe I'm forgetting); he just made more of a rhetorical shift to the center, standard practice in any general election before a moderate electorate. Moreover, his policies weren't the problem; his persona was. Another leftist candidate with the same policies but a less divisive and less extreme demeanor would have likely won handily. AMLO himself probably would have taken the election had Roberto Madrazo's candidacy not been such a disaster as to hand a big chunk of the conservative PRI vote to Calderón.

The following passage is also problematic, though for pettier reasons (after all, I agree with him here):

There are no foreign troops on Mexican soil. There is no martial law. Garbage is picked up, streets are swept and children go to school. Middle-class couples take weekend getaways, and drive there on highways as good as those in the United States.

Two points here: regarding Mexico's highways, evidently, Dr. Haber isn't familiar with the Autopista del Sol, connecting Mexico City and Acapulco. Nor, to take a local episode, was he following Torreón's anguish over the construction and subsequent demolition of the DVR, after a handful of fatal accidents were chalked up to engineering flaws.

Second point: please read the first bolded section, which is part of a brief argument about the strength of the Mexican state (like I said, he goes in a lot of directions in this column). Now, compare it the following passage, which is from an as yet unpublished piece that I wrote several weeks ago:

There are all-too-frequent gunfights and executions, but the state never truly recedes, much less fails entirely. Government offices continue to run. The schools stay open. The trash gets picked up.

Crap! It's like he had access to my computer. I guess that part's not going to work anymore.

Big Party at Old Man Fox's Place

Vicente Fox's attempt to build a tradition of former Mexican presidents establishing centers of study based on the American presidential libraries has been interesting. One of the inherent impediments to what is an admirable idea is that Fox isn't really the kind of politician who you can imagine devoting himself to the quiet pursuit of ideas, even less than his erstwhile counterpart presently settling down at SMU. However, this report demonstrates that the lack of intellectualism from the Fox Center's namesake won't limit the Center's prominence, but rather shift its focus: among the many high-minded plans for 2009, the Fox Center will host concerts from Juan Gabriel, Ana Gabriel, and Tania Libertad. 

Where the Wild Weapons Are

A little numeralia (great word) about the weapons confiscated in Mexico over the course of the Calderón administration: 31,512 weapons have been seized, including more than 17,000 assault rifles and 2,400 grenades. Authorities have also hauled in 4.4 million bullets. 

The PGR says that the majority of the above have come from groups associated with the Zetas/Gulf Cartel, although it didn't specify the quantity, which will likely feed speculation that the PGR protects the Zetas' adversaries. (Among the pieces of the data that contradicts the assertion that the Zetas are the most violent group: two states where the Zetas traditionally don't operate, Chihuahua and Sinaloa, are the most violent in the country.) Anti-tank guns, .50-caliber machine guns, RPGs, and grenade launchers were all discovered in the possession of members of the Zetas. 

Misleading

Excélsior's front page yesterday blared that Chihuahua had witnessed a 512 percent increase in murders. Given how bad 2008 was, that would indeed be unsettling. However, the calculus was screwy; this January's total of 210 killed far exceeds last January's 40, but the crime wave that has made the state, and especially Ciudad Juárez, so dangerous didn't start last January, so that's apples and oranges. Another way of figuring it leads to a much more hopeful conclusion. Juárez accounted for 102 of the January killings. If it maintains such a pace for all of 2009, it will wind up with a total of 1224, which would be a 25 percent decline from 2008. 

Sinaloa offers some more concrete glimmers of hope. In November, 127 people were killed in drug violence. In December, that number jumped to 144. In January, during which the state's kingpins supposedly negotiated a truce, only 59 were killed. 

The Death of Journalism, International Edition

This from The Tombs and I, a novel by Rafael Loret de Mola narrated by a journalist: 

I am terrified by the idea that, in a few more years, technology with allow any citizen to do the work of the reporter. In fact, that's already started to happen: even the successful news shows clamor for the public to send editorial departments images taken with cell phones and, through this, to obtain splendid novelties. Meanwhile, we journalists have to spend hours over the keyboard.