Those Who Speak Ill

Felipe Calderón recently launched another attack on Mexicans who speak ill of Mexico "sometimes as sport". The president continued, "The murder rate in Mexico is 12 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in Brazil it is 25 per 100,000 inhabitants. Yet Brazil gets the World Cup and the Olympics", implying that it would be impossible for Mexico to pull something similar off given its reputation around the world.

I think there's a lot of truth to that, but Calderón's comments rankle nonetheless. First of all, Calderón bears no small measure of responsibility for the outsized role security issues play in perceptions of Mexico. He played up the issue more than anyone in the early years of his presidency, adjusting his tone really only after the mid-term elections in 2009. Second, Brazil may be more violent, but it does not, I suspect (and it occurs to me that I may well be wrong about this) house criminals with the international notoriety and longstanding impunity of Chapo Guzmán. And lastly, and most importantly, no one wants to be told what to say or think, even if your motivations fall short of totalitarianism. (See Fleischer, Ari for more.) Doing so is both counterproductive (in an open democracy it provokes precisely the sort of commentary you want to prevent) and inappropriate for a president.

If he wants the widespread and unfair impression of Mexico as a scene from Desperado to fade, Calderón's best bet would be to focus relentlessly on other subjects, and be patient. And maybe catch a few more of the most infamous bad guys.

Economic Predictions

Calderón says that the Mexican economy will grow by 4 or 5 percent this year, which is more than what most analysts have been predicting. That would be great, although Calderón and co. consistently exaggerated their optimism throughout the crisis, so there's no reason to expect them to not do so through the recovery. Calderón also pointed to good signs in the labor market, although the unemployment numbers worsened in January.

Earlier this week, a study from the Tec de Monterrey indicated that eight million Mexicans descended into poverty from 2006 to 2009, six million of them in the last two years alone. The number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty jumped by 4 million as a result of the crisis as well. Calderón doesn't talk about the poverty figures so much these days (or if he does he doesn't get a lot of press for it). I don't think makes him the prototypical uncaring right-winger who doesn't care about the poor, because he used to mention Oportunidades and anti-poverty efforts more generally a lot. Rather I imagine it's because, as the Tec study shows, there's no good news for the government on that subject. But I hope that doesn't scare the government off from addressing the topic more aggressively, and not just by celebrating improved GDP figures. According to the study's author, using the rates forecast it will take five to eight years for the labor market to create jobs for all of the newly impoverished, which is a long, long time.

The View from Chile

Intersections' Daniel Hernandez, now reporting for the LA Times, also has some reports from the South American nation.

The End-of-the-Week Scandal

It turns out, Fernando Gómez Mont wasn't the only panista making deals with the PRI behind the president's and the PAN's back: in the last couple of days we have learned that César Nava was involved in the negotiation with Beatriz Paredes last fall, in which he promised to not mount a PAN-PRD challenge to the State of Mexico governorship if, in return, the PRI would support the budget package that was debated last October. Nava says that the PRI broke the agreement; the PRI says he's a liar. Witnesses to the agreement include Peña Nieto's secretary of the interior and Gómez Mont. Here's El Universal's reaction:

If you don't want anyone to find out about something you did, the best recommendation is to not do it. Above all if you are in politics or showbiz...

Everything started when Fernando Gómez Mont renounced his PAN membership because he hadn't been able to live up to his word of honor before the PRI. It was then known that the promise from the interior secretary had been to block the PAN-PRD electoral alliances, which would have endangered PRI strongholds in Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Durango, Sinaloa, and above all, in 2011, Mexico State. The PRI, in return, would endorse the increase in taxes, which the old party denies until this date. César Nava, we confirmed yesterday, signed the pact.

If the declarations of the national president of the PAN turn out to be a lie, what else could be? That Gómez Mont didn't inform the president of the agreement? If that's the case, let's all start to worry because neither the party of the president nor his right-hand man informed him of something so important as an agreement with the largest political opposition. Or worse, the president knew and instructed his operators to sign the agreement.

Assuming it's true, I don't think the second possibility is so bad, or at least it wouldn't have been if they'd just come out and admitted it from the beginning. A bit of unseemly back-room dealing in and of itself is a lot more forgivable than a) outright and repeated lying after the fact, or b) such a fractured, haphazard practice of politics at the seat of power.

The editorial later continues:

After this episode, it will be very difficult for the federal government in the coming years to recover the confidence of their interlocutors. If it has a lier as its connection with the rest of the political forces, then they won't see it as capable of establishing commitments.

Soon the political reform, a labor reform, and a fiscal reform, among others, will be debated in Congress. How will the governors, legislators, and opposition leaders find someone trustworthy who speaks for the government? It's difficult to imagine that the presidential envoys, the liars, will serve as resolvers of the big pending issues on the national agenda.

Everything indicates that Calderón will be obligated to bring in borrowed credibility from outside his close circle, which is to say, actors who aren't notorious for dishonesty. Otherwise his political agenda will from now on be shipwrecked. What's in play is the word of the presidency, which is different from that of Felipe Calderón. The first is institutional, the second is of the person. The inhabitant of Los Pinos must assure the survival of that word if he wants to leave a presidency outfitted with dignity. He owes it to himself but above all to the future of the country.

I think the consequences of not making enormous changes may be overstated (after all, lies in politics obey a pretty predictable logic, such that agreements are still sustainable), but I do agree that Calderón's reliance on a small group of loyalists has long been a big problem. Especially since his presidency hit rough waters, Calderón should have expanded his circle of friends.

Update on the Jailed Musicians

A Mexican judge lifted the arraigo of 22 musicians who were arrested in December while playing at a party attended by Arturo Beltrán Leyva and Edgar Valdez, but issued arrest warrants for three of the other members of Cadetes de Linares and Torrente. The article doesn't mention why these three are being singled out, presumably because the PGR offered no explanation either. Are these three scapegoats to allow the government to save face after jailing more than two dozen musicians for almost three months? Or is there a legitimate reason?

Campaign Promises

Via Latin American Thought, should María Fernanda Valencia go back on this promise after winning her election, somehow I expect it will provoke rather more outrage than, say, Obama's reneging on public financing in his campaign:

Such is the case with María Fernanda Valencia, Candidate for the Partido de la U, who made it to the front cover of the Colombian magazine Soho (a classier version of the U.S. Maxim) by promising to appear naked in the issue after the March 14 elections if she is elected to the House of Representatives. In the interview with Soho she seems sharp and witty as she explains that getting naked is only the first step to “undressing a political reality.”

Her explanation, of course, insults the intelligence; let's call a spade a spade and a cheap publicity stunt a cheap publicity stunt.

More on Calderón's Turn for the Worse

Leo Zuckermann examined panista frustration with Calderón in a recent column, pointing out that while Calderón was hailed as a genuine panista in 2006, the disillusionment with him now in his own party is deep. The reasons are many: he supported a regressive electoral reform in 2007 in exchange for an insufficient fiscal reform (that had the added negative of angering his business base); he didn't hold out for a genuine oil reform in 2008, and was content to celebrate the mere existence of a reformthat was wholly incomplete; he made backrooms deals to secure the tax increase last year rather than discussing it openly; and finally, for chatting openly with Raúl Castro while Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata was dying in a prison cell.

Somehow, this seems incomplete. Whatever their merit, I don't think the last two ideas would make someone lose faith an official that they were otherwise inclined to support. (What politician doesn't make backroom deals?) But the alliances with the PRD, which Zuckermann largely ignores, are almost certainly a significant driver of panista dissatisfaction. Both the economic conditions (especially unemployment, which is headed up again) and the tricky security situation also play a factor. But I also think that the idea is starting to emerge that, rightly or wrongly, Calderón is a bumbler, even a loser. A big part of that was the harsh reception he received in Juárez, but that's not all there is to it. Other than the LyFC takeover, most of the events impacting national politics in the past year (disastrous elections, same-sex marriage hysterics, Gómez Mont's renunciation) have conspired to make Calderón seem less formidable, less presidential.

Calderón's Pragmatism

Mauricio Merino doesn't think much of the pragmatism guiding Felipe Calderón in recent days:

It was predictable that the criticisms of the excessive pragmatism of the PAN leadership turned into, sooner or later, a direct reproach of the president's political strategy. But what we have seen in recent days reveals that the most important censure that is emerging is from within the ranks of the party itself, because its own members are seeking to judge the moral authority for their leader. The dispute that we are experiencing is not only between opponents and adversaries, but of people in the family.

This tends to happen to the Machiavellis: once the means stop mattering to them, the ends are also lost. And in the case the damage could be far greater, because a successful sexenio for all of Mexico and not just the politics of the PAN must be among those goals. But as far as we can tell, the pragmatism that appears to be guiding the decisions of Los Pinos and the panista leadership could make both objectives more difficult. On one side, because it would be adding new motives of bitterness and bad faith to the contest in 2012, and on the other, because any loss after the monstrous alliances will be read, by the panistas themselves, as proof of a horrible negotiation.

I'm not sure if the problem is pragmatism per se, although I do agree with Merino that there is a problem. Following the PRI victories in 2009, Calderón's final stretch was bound to be difficult, but rather than responding by making certain concessions and seeking a series of small victories like Bill Clinton in the final six years of his term, Calderón's alliance strategy seems like a misguided Hail Mary attempt to recover ground irredeemably lost, at least for the time being. This isn't so much pragmatism as delusion and schizophrenia.

Obstacles

One of the proposals floating around Mexico that has the support of a great deal of commentators is a centrally controlled national police, which would replace the state police departments and perhaps the municipals departments as well. (More on that here, here, and here.) This is not a huge surprise, but the nation's governors are all opposed to ceding control of the state police forces, which complicates the unification push.

The above article makes reference to an October study from the SSP that found that 60 percent of Mexico's cops make 4,000 pesos (around $300) or less per month. Also, seventy percent of the same group has less than 10 years of formal schooling.

The State Department on Money Laundering

Here's what the State Department had to say about Mexico's anti-money-laundering activities:

Under the Law of Credit Institutions, Mexican financial institutions, including banks and other financial institutions (including mutual savings companies, insurance companies, securities brokers, retirement and investment funds, financial leasing and factoring funds, casas de cambio, and centros cambiarios) must follow know-your-customer rules. Regulations require enhanced due diligence for higher-risk customers including politically exposed persons.

[Break]

From 2006 through 2009, authorities have obtained 90 convictions for the offense. In December 2009, Mexican authorities arrested 11 suspected money launderers during raids on 17 finance companies in the northern cities of Culiacan and Tijuana. According to authorities, the money laundering ring operated through a series of companies, some of which posed as authorized financial institutions while others were simply shell companies.

[Break]

The lack of personnel—including more field investigators, prosecutors, and auditors- monetary resources, a comprehensive and modern database, technological equipment, as well as the vulnerability of its facilities undermine prosecution efforts.

The whole section leaves you with the impression that the legal tools at the disposal of Mexican law enforcement are more than sufficient, and that the reason for the lack of attention to dirty money is some combination of lack of political interest or will and a lack of resources. I can only assume that's even more true in light of the new asset-seizure law that seems to have been used very sparingly. By the State Department's own estimate, somewhere between $32 and $100 in drug money has made its way back to Mexico in the four years in question, and the Mexican government can't even arrest (which in Mexico is very different from "convict", mind you) 25 people a year? That's laughable. It's a tricky problem, because the distinction between clean and dirty money in Mexico is not a neat one, and a truly determined drive to punish money-laundering would necessarily step on a lot of essentially legitimate toes.

At the same time, considering that Calderón's crime policies are supposed to be more aggressive than any previous president's, what does arresting tens of thousands of low-level dealers amount to if you aren't touching the financial system that they are a part of? That's like declaring total war and then deciding not to use your air force. There may be a good justification for it, but it ain't total war.

Deeper Alliance

The PAN is moving toward an alliance with the PRD in Chiapas in local elections, despite the fact that there is no gubernatorial race this year. I think this is the first case of an alliance existing independently of a governor's contest. Furthermore, there is no claim whatsoever to an alliance being necessary to break the PRI's iron grip on local power; non-priístas have governed the state since 2000. There is a certain logic to the PRD and the PAN putting their differences to one side and uniting to defeat guys like Ulises Ruiz and Mario Marín, but an alliance in a place like Chiapas is hard to justify beyond the immediate electoral calculus.

Ignorance on ESPN

Here was a Sportscenter take on Mayweather-Mosley:

There's not a lot Mayweather has not done...undefeated in all 40 career bouts with 25 knockouts. Mosley not too shabby either, 46 and 5 with 39 knockouts.

This follows Gus Johnson's comment on a recent Showtime broadcast that Mayweather was better than Pacquiao because he was undefeated and Pacquiao had lost three times. Of course, you don't measure boxing greatness by the zero in the loss column, unless you are Floyd Mayweather or you don't know much about the sport. Consider: Muhammad Ali (five losses) is considered far and away a better fighter than Rocky Marciano (zero). Duran's on most people's top-ten all-time list despite having lost 16 times, including one of the most famous tank jobs in the history of sports. Sugar Ray Robinson is generally considered the best fighter in the history of the sport, despite losing 19 times.

The smarter observers measure boxers by whom they beat, and, the anchor's comment notwithstanding, there is in fact a lot Mayweather hasn't done. Notably, he hasn't ever beaten a welterweight widely thought of as elite, despite fighting at 147 since 2005. For that matter, the closest he got to an elite fighter at 140 was Arturo Gatti.

Dangerous Prediction

South Africa's ambassador to Mexico yesterday predicted that Mexico would win the opening game of the World Cup, prefacing his prediction with the observation that his countrymen would be angry with him. I should think so! The diplomatic prognostication would be a hard-fought 2-1 victory for the hosts, followed by Mexico bouncing back in short order and advancing to the next round along with South Africa. He went in another direction, and in the process presumably installed an unbreakable ceiling to his career advancement.

The ambassador also said that between 10,000 and 20,000 Mexicans are expected in South Africa, and that those who arrive with a ticket to watch Mexico will not need a visa.

Also, for what it's worth, Mexico jumped into the top 15 in the Fifa Meaningless Rankings, three spots ahead of the US and one behind the Chileans.

Denied

PAN President César Nava attempted to resign from the Chamber of Deputies to concentrate on the upcoming wave of elections, but instead of provide the standard perfunctory approval to such, this time the Chamber, led by the PRI but supported by the PRD, voted to deny him his request. Nava blamed the move in the PRI's fear of electoral losses. Bajo Reserva says that the other parties, irritated that he didn't negotiate the move or even discuss it with anyone beforehand, said that Nava's own arrogance provoked the denial.

Opinions on Integration

According to polling from Excélsior, Mexicans favor belonging to an EU-style group with the US and Canada over a similar group with Latin American nations by a 65 to 21 percent margin. At the same time, 57 percent said that the group proposed in last week's meeting of Latin American leaders is a good thing, compared to just 31 percent who were opposed. Further confusing things, 38 percent said that they expected this new group to anger the US, and the US to respond by punishing Mexico in some way. Another 30 percent said that the US would get angry but do nothing. So despite the fact that 65 percent said that belonging to a group including the US was the best course for Mexico, and 68 percent said that the new group would anger the US, 57 percent said that it was still a good thing for Mexico to be involved.

The poll also includes perceptions of Mexico's importance in the international community, which have fallen off the charts under Calderón's term. To the question, do you think Mexico has more international prestige than it previously did, only 36 percent said yes, a 15-point drop from the high during Calderón's term. Under Fox, those responding yes fluctuated between 73 and 61 percent, while under Zedillo, the range was 54 and 74 percent. In other words, Mexicans think less of their nation's role in international affairs than they have in a generation. Calderón hatred can't answer for all of this: the 36 percent saying yes falls short of even the most pessimistic approval ratings for Calderón. Furthermore, thanks to the 1994-95 economic crisis, Zedillo was historically unpopular, and yet Mexico's image in the community of nations didn't suffer. Calderón has snagged a place on the UN security council and Mexico will host a major climate change meeting later this year, so it's not like the Calderón years have been without obvious demonstrations (empty though they may be) of other nations' awareness of Mexico. Maybe the comparatively Herculean influence of Brazil under Lula makes Mexico seem ever smaller. Or perhaps Mexicans are painfully aware of how much international press is devoted to stories about drug runners.

Good News

Salvador Cabañas has been released from the hospital. From what everyone is saying, he has a reasonable chance to play in South Africa in June. The journey from death's door to World Cup success, with a bullet lodged in his head no less, would make for a cool (though quite likely quickly overblown) story if Paraguay makes a run of any kind. It would also be a no-brainer for a cheesy sports movie, if Paraguay registered with Hollywood film-makers at all.

Update: Based on this article, where his doctor says a full recovery could take years, a World Cup appearence seems much less likely. In any event, Gancho wishes Cabañas a as-speedy-as-is-humanly-possible recovery.

Another Troubled Executive

I missed this earlier, but Berumen's most recent poll also had some bad news for Marcelo Ebrard. His approval rating in Mexico City dropped to 50 percent, the lowest of his term. Eight months ago, the same poll pegged his approval at 64 percent. We're still a long, long way from 2012, but the broader political trends, from Ebrard's fade relative to AMLO to the PAN's ongoing dysfunction, are increasingly favorable to Enrique Peña Nieto. Although if the PAN-PRD alliances continue in some meaningful way beyond 2010, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts the 2012 presidential calculus.

Another interesting finding: 54 percent of Mexico City residents say that security is their biggest problem, compared to 13 percent saying the crisis and 8 percent who said unemployment. The 54 percent represents a nine-point jump from November. This despite the fact that the economy is by and large perceived as the more important problem across the country, and Mexico City is safer than the rest of the country on average. (Of course, murder rates aren't the only way to measure security, but you would expect them to broadly indicative of the general security climate.)

So what explains this cognitive dissonance? Is habitual complaining about crime in Mexico City inflating perceptions of how bad it truly is? Are the residents of Mexico City more protected from the present economic conditions? A bit of both?

Today in Malarkey

ESPN says that Landon Donovan is among the fifty best players in the World Cup.

Other international stalwarts like Alexandre Pato and Lucas Podolski were nowhere to be found. And this was the assessment of ESPN's own Jen Chang on Donovan's performance in England, which was overwhelmingly positive, a couple of weeks ago:

Finally, and most importantly, Donovan isn't the best player on Everton (he's the fifth- or sixth-best)...

So he's the sixth-best player on a third-tier EPL team, yet somehow the 50th best player in the World Cup. Right. This is not the way to sell soccer to the gringos.

The State Department on Drug Trafficking

The State Department's annual Narcotics Control Strategy Report has been released, and although it struggles to flatter Mexico, it's hard to ignore a few alarming facts. One, as Malcolm Beith points out, is the striking increase in poppy and marijuana cultivation in Mexico during Calderón term, coupled with a corresponding decline in eradication. This certainly contradicts the image of Calderón's government as going all out on all manner of drug trafficking.

I think it's worth pointing out that, as jarring as these numbers are, eradication is a suspect approach that has never yielded great results. All things being equal, it's better to focus on limiting the government-corrupting aspect of drug trafficking than the drug-producing aspect of drug trafficking. If these numbers existed alongside other concrete improvements, they wouldn't be particularly worrying. (Of course, they don't.) They are interesting for a couple of other reasons as well. First of all, one big story over the past year or so is that American marijuana growers are supplying an ever greater share of the American market, and thus squeezing out the Mexicans. If that's true, why is cultivation in Mexico jumping? Do the hectares dedicated to cultivation automatically indicate more marijuana being produced, or could it be that the 12,000 hectares are being divided among different crops in order to hide the marijuana plants? (I've read about that being a counter-eradication tactic in Colombia.)

Also, the report suggests that the greater cultivation is a result of greater vertical integration of Mexican gangs. That may be true, but there is no evidence to support it and it goes against pretty much everything I've read about the broader industry trends in the past five years. It's also not clear to me why greater vertical integration would automatically lend itself to greater production.

More on Part 2 later.

Blame for the Hermosillo Fire

The investigative commission of the Supreme Court published its conclusions on the fire that killed 49 toddlers last year at the ABC day-care center in Hermosillo. It placed responsibility for the woefully unsafe conditions on the shoulders of Eduardo Bours (the former governor of Sonora), Juan Molinar (the IMSS boss), and Ernesto Gándara (the former mayor of Hermosillo). The report says that although it has long been standard practice for IMSS to award day-care contracts, it has no legal faculty to do so. It also reported that only 0.3 percent of day-care centers "fulfill the requirements" necessary for their operation, a truly staggering number.

More Bad Polling for Felipe

El Universal's pollster, typically less favorable to Calderón than Mitofsky, measures the president's approval rating at 40 percent. This represents a nine-point drop in three months. The article includes the following explanation from Alberto Aziz:

It would seem that his bets such as political reform aren't being taken into account. The people care more about their economic condition, for someone who can't find a job, despite the fact that toward the end of November in 2009 the government declared the end of the economic crisis, then there is a difference between the reality and what the government says.

Great Name

His politics seem abhorrent, but I'd love to see Mexico's reaction to the election of a man named Laurence Verga to the presidency. The fits of laughter that this would provoke could conceivably cause macro-economically visible losses in productivity for the duration of his tenure.

Some Good News

Milenio says that a slightly lower number of Mexicans were killed in acts stemming from organized crime in February than in January. The overall decrease was from 904 to 799 according to the newspaper's count, which is typically slightly higher than other organizations' tallies. Of course, the three fewer days in February account for virtually all the difference; the per-day average dropped only 29.2 to 28.5 persons killed. At the same time, though it might not be cause for champaign, anything other than an increase is good news at this point.