What Mexico Lacks, Jordanian Queen Edition

Jordan's Queen Noor says that Mexico needs a "political will and a civil society uprising" and to defeat organized crime. (I'm not sure if she knows a great deal about the situation or not, but she was rumored to be having an affair with Carlos Slim last year. Which really isn't particularly relevant, but gossip is fun. Also, Michael Douglas was among those appearing at the forum where Noor spoke.) I imagine she was speaking in English, so maybe the translation makes it more hysterical (the article used the word levantamiento, which is ordinarily translated as uprising, but maybe she phrased it differently). But assuming she did say uprising, I wonder if she couldn't have picked a less inflammatory label for what Mexico needs. Any calls for uprising of any kind in 2010 are probably best done in private.

Furthermore, there are aspects in which the Mexican public could be a more constructive force, but I don't think it's fair to say that public uprising (or public outrage or more public involvement) is the missing element from a successful anti-drug policy. (More on blaming the public here.) Any discussion of what Mexico needs to defeat drug gangs must start from the understanding that as long as prohibition exists, entirely wiping them out is impossible, and even knocking them down a few pegs so that they are more like the less violent and more defensive gangs in Italy or the US is something that will require an almost superhuman effort sustained over the course of many years. There's not one or two or even six magic bullets that will make this go away.

Voting Trends

Thirty-four million Mexicans voted in last year's mid-term elections, according to the IFE. That represents almost 45 percent of the eligible electorate, which is down from almost 60 percent twelve years ago and 66 percent in 1991, but is a jump of more than 3 percent from 2003.

Calderón's Column

Here's roughly the last 1.5 percent of it, after Calderón laid out the details of each portion of his ten-point proposal for political reform:

In summary, this initiative seeks to create a new relationship between the society and the authorities, between the three branches of government and different realms of government. In the coming days, Congress will be discussing and analyzing in a responsible way these and other proposals. That's why it's fundamental that citizens get involved in the debate about the political reform initiative; it's vital that society's voice is heard with clarity and force.

As with every initiative, what we have presented is perfectible. And that's why it would be very positive for diverse political actors, academics, and the civil society to be putting forth some proposals to enrich the debate. All of them will be welcome, because the initiative that we have sent to Congress can and must be improved with the pluralizing contrast of ideas and projects.

That's why the federal government has been convoking the participation of citizens and their organizations to the debate over political reform and it will continue to do so during the coming weeks. For the society, the Political Reform in favor of the Citizens initiative represents an opportunity to turn dissatisfaction into participation. This can't be a reform created, debated, and approved only by politicians, by the parties, and the governing class. It's vital that we listen to the voice of the citizens, especially because it's with regard to widening their rights and the realm of political participation.

That's why I invite organizations from civil society, academics and specialists, workers, students, students, businessmen, activists, and members of all the political parties, those who participate in the so-called social networks of the internet and all of the citizens to participate in the discussion of the political reform in different forums of opinion and expression that are being established.

The citizens are the true actors of the political reform. In this year of the fatherland [it's Mexico's bicentennial in 2010] let's open the debate to all of the citizens, let's spark the deep change that the country needs. Let's pass from Effective Suffrage to Effective Democracy. The Reform in favor of the Citizens seeks this goal.

Comments: I think it's fair to say that in the scheme of politician/writers, Winston Churchill he is not. How did he manage to squeeze four that's whys into five paragraphs? And a thesaurus would have been really handy after about the eleventh use of the word initiative. Other oddly repetitive phrases abound. Although regardless of whatever criticism Calderón earned here, he's still leaps and bounds above Beatriz Paredes.

Read the second sentence of the passage again. For someone who's been in office for three years, Calderón doesn't seem to know the makeup of Congress particularly well.

The Political Reform in favor of the Citizens is a delightfully uncreative and awkward title for a piece of legislation.

I understand the point he was trying to make, but for a president to say that a proposal of his own creation "can and must be improved" is a bit jarring.

And in all seriousness, the basic point of the piece --the more involved Mexican society is in the debate of the political reform, the better-- is sound.

Grizzly Benchmark

El Universal says that 1,000 people have been killed this year in violence related to organized crime. The 34 days that it took to reach that benchmark represents the fastest time ever, down from 51 days last year, and puts Mexico on pace for slightly less than 11,000 murders this year.

Still More on Juárez

Authorities are repeating their initial assertion that the kids who were killed this weekend had nothing to do with organized crime, and are not members of the gang that they were believed to be.

Also, four witnesses to the crime, all students between the ages of 15 and 20 years old, were abducted from their homes today by a group of men wearing police uniforms.

More from Malcolm Beith here.

Distrust

According to a telephone poll in Juárez, only 8 percent of the city's residents believe that José Dolores Arroyo, who was arrested in connection with the massacre of 16 teenagers over the weekend, was in fact involved in the killing. In contrast, 31 percent said that he was part of a cover-up to mislead the public, and 34 percent said he was a scapegoat (not that those final two are mutually exclusive).

Changing Teams

The DEA is reporting that Osiel Cárdenas's heirs and Chapo Guzmán's Sinaloa gang have allied so as to squeeze the Zetas out of the drug-trafficking market. They are also working with the Family in Michoacán. On the other side of this federation is what's left of the Beltrán Leyva gang, Vicente Carrillo's group in Juárez, and the Zetas.

Long-Winded Executive

Felipe Calderón penned a long, long editorial defending his political reform proposal yesterday (2,300 words!) that ran in El Universal, Excélsior, and number of other papers. More on that in a later post (I haven't quite finished; I'm still missing like a chapter and a half). This comes after a recent piece in The Japan Times in defense of his security policies. Before that, I don't ever remember Calderón taking pen to paper to defend his policies.

Karma Comes Around, Allegedly

The alleged leader of the Juárez gang that killed 16 teenagers this weekend was killed two days ago in a shootout with soldiers.

Crazy Story

It turns out that Paul Roberts of the blog Living and Working in Mexico was part of the group that got stuck on Machu Picchu a couple of weeks ago. Here's the story, with photos.

Reasons for Opposition

Luis Carlos Ugalde runs down and rejects the various reasons for opposing the political reform:

1. The ad hominem fallacy. It consists of disqualifying an idea or proposal by attacking the author without analyzing the merits of the idea or propsal. "If the reform proposal is from Calderón, it's by definition wrong".

Counter-argument: Legislative proposals must be analyzed on their legal and political merits, not based on phobias toward the author.

2. The fallacy of omission. It says that the reform is wrong because it is missing things, for example, the ratification of the cabinet or the revocation of the executive. Some go even further and say that the proposal is wrong because it doesn't include fiscal or social issues.

Counter-argument: if the reform is missing certain issues, it should be improved with additions, not tossed aside because of what it lacks. Beneath that logic neither the fiscal reform of 2007 nor the oil reform of 2008 should have been passed because they had so little substance and that today have been demonstrated insufficient and irrelevant.

3. The fallacy of relative importance. It says that there are other more important topics, such as the economy or social issues, and therefore the political reform isn't relevant in this moment.

Counter-argument: the economic and social problems that Mexico has suffered from since independence are the result, in part, of a political system that permits political irresponsibility and impunity. Attacking it then requires new incentives because poverty and mediocre growth originate in a political machiners that limits new agreements, favors clientism and protects the status quo.

4. The smokescreen fallacy. It says that President Calderón launched his initiative as a smokescreen to cover up the problems of insecurity and unemployment.

Counter-argument: the political reform isn't a football game in which you can distract the citizens from their everyday problems. I don't see how the discussion of the political reform can grab the attention of the masses nor how it can alleviate the bad conditions in which millions of Mexico live today because of poverty and insecurity.

5. The fallacy of social uprising. It says that adopting legislative reelection would be to agitate society, which would rebel as was the case in the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Counter-argument: No one is talking about presidential reelection, which was the origin of the uprising of Francisco I. Madero in 1910, but rather the reelection of legislators and mayors. Madero never included in his revolutionary ideas the prohibition of deputies and senators.

6. The fallacy of the special interest. It says that reelection is wrong because the special interests have taken over Conress.

Counter-argument: diverse special interests have already taken over Congress and in other instances the Mexican state -- they penetrated it many decades ago. Combating that harmful phenomenon requires alternative methods, such as attacking oligopolistic markets and making the unions more transparent.

7. The fallacy of congressional weakness. It says that the initiative seeks to weaken Congress.

Counter-argument: far from weakening it, reelection strengthens Congress because its integrants will be more professional, more independent of the party structure and because their potential terms will be greater than that of the president of the country (up to 12 years).

***

The political reform is a rare opportunity for President Calderón to leave a transcendent legacy. The reform record of Calderón is mediocre until now --his fiscal and oil reform were insufficient and the electoral reform refressive. For the PRI this is an opportunity to make some of their demands a relaity, among them citizen candidacies and the possibility of including issues omitted, such as the plebiscite.

Some of these are more common than others, especially 2, 3, and 7. But I think the big thing Ugalde's missing is that the reasons for opposition are not primarily ones of governing philosophy but of political expediency. No one wants to hand Calderón a victory. The counter-argument to that is that it's in the PRD's and PRI's electoral interests to pass political reform. I guess you could make the case, but I'm not sure I really think it's true, at least not in the narrow short term.

Winning the Public Over

One of the ongoing barriers for Mexico's anti-crime strategy is that many regular citizens don't perceive them as the good guy, per se, but rather as the moral equal of the groups they are fighting. It's also worth pointing out that the ambivalence toward the government is well earned in many cases, and also the extent to which that sentiment permeates the society is often exaggerated, but it certainly exists. Anyway, one simple way that the PGR is trying to win over civilians is cash: Excélsior reports that it has drastically increased the size of its rewards for information leading to the capture of organized criminals, up to 30 million pesos in some cases (around $2.5 million). A year and a half ago, Mexican authorities were offering rewards of a maximum 5,000 pesos (about $400) for the capture of the biggest fish, which boggles the mind.

Politics Continues Well Beyond the Water's Edge

Enrique Peña Nieto, who often seems to be auditioning for the presidency more than preparing or campaigning, went to Israel to visit with that nation's Interior Minister and take a look at Mossad's Control Room. He said that it was time to reevaluate Mexico's security policies, and worried that combating organized crime could become a "bottomless pit" (or, more literally, an "endless funnel").

Explaining the Juárez Massacre

According to an arrestee who participated in the killing of 16 partying teenagers over the weekend, the murdered kids were part of a group called the Artistas Asesinos, which worked for Chapo Guzmán's forces in the city. The people who carried out the massacre are part of Vicente Carrillo's group, according to the detainee. The mayor of Juárez had previously said that there was no connection between those killed and organized crime.

Challenging Creel

Labor Secretary Javier Lozano says he's interested in being the PAN presidential candidate in 2012. So far, his two big moments in the spotlight came when he was accused of being the source of the $200 million in cash discovered in Zhenli Ye Gon's Mexico City residence (the story, which was not widely believed, was that the cash was left over from an illegal Calderón campaign slush fund), and when he became the focal point of anger when the Calderón administration liquidated LyFC late last year.

Mérida under Obama

Barack Obama has proposed a $310 million aid transfer to Mexico under the Mérida Initiative in his FY 2011 budget. A State Department spokesman said that the hardware portion of the agreement is done, and now it's time to focus on training and strengthening Mexico's agencies. That sounds good, and is certainly a nod to the primary criticisms of the agreement, but without any details, one wonders how true it is. (One also wishes to point out that hardware was never the key missing ingredient in Mexico, so the logic by which the nations are focusing more on institution-building was equally applicable three years ago.)

I'm by no means an expert on training programs, but $310 million on training and institution-building alone would seem to be quite a figure. Not that it wouldn't necessarily be money well spent, but it doesn't seem like such a huge chunk of change would be easily spent. (It's one of the many lessons Brewster's Millions provides for international aid agreements.) However, saying that it's time to change focus without actually adjusting the budgetary priorities a whole lot seems like a very easy thing to do, so we'll see how this plays out.

Reform's Opponents

José Antonio Crespo on the opposition to political reform from the PRI and the PRD:

The PRI and the PRD have questioned Calderón's reform for being small and insufficient, so we would then expect that both present proposals for a true reform of the state. If not, it will be confirmed that their rejection of Calderón's initiative responds to a systematic negation of all that comes from the executive (as happens with frequency) or because of the political-electoral backdrop. If the initiative didn't go far enough, if it is stingy and insufficient, the opposition legislators (as even those of the PAN) can modify or adjust it based on what is missing. We wait to see, then, the great reform of the state that the PRI and PRD will propose, so as to not remain only with what they consider the insufficient and scattered proposal from Calderón or, worse still, with nothing.

Mexico and Haiti

I'm not sure if it's because of the short distance between the two nations or the press leaping on more so than normal, but the Haiti earthquake has seemed to occupy a larger place in the Mexican consciousness than comparable foreign disasters. Here's Daniel Hernandez on Mexicans' attempts to adopt Haitian orphans.

On the Michoacán Releases

Here's Jorge Fernández Menéndez:

The PGR didn't object to these releases because they assured off the record that there isn't sufficient evidence to convict them. That these people were detained based on testimony from protected witnesses and that those accusations couldn't be supported by documented proof, even though this was considered sufficient by the former PGR administration, and also by the federal judges, to summon the arraigo of the functionaries and then initiate the judicial proceedings. In reality, the PGR would be changing its criteria to investigate cases related to organized crime and everything indicates that they will no longer give credence to testimony from protected witnesses: this is no small issue, some 70 percent of the drug-trafficking cases include such testimony.

But there are also those who think that these releases are a reflection of political and electoral agreements being sewn together by the PAN and the PRD to compete in various states and spur some reforms in Congress. If this is all about revising the behavior of the PGR, the issue of the protected witnesses is debatable, although it would be acceptable, but if people's detention or liberation winds up depending on electoral agreements, this would be the worst side of justice.

Reaction to the Juárez Massacre

The Senate is demanding that political reform take a back seat to security reform following the murder of 16 youngsters in Juárez. Calderón is also promising to improve security in Juárez.

At Long Last, a Statistical Goal

The mayor of Juárez says that the goal of the recently initiated Federal Police action in the city is a 50 percent reduction in the number of murders in the city. Setting such an explicit goal is a bit dangerous, because the most important players --i.e., the killers-- act for the most part independently of the government. Consequently, even with a competent police force and well designed strategy in place, if the gangs want to keep killing each other, they will. Authorities can influence the calculus that is motivating gangs to keep fighting, but in a situation as anarchic as Juárez, it is demonstrably no easy task for authorities to know which levers to push.

At the same time, the absence of goals has left Mexican officials adrift, grasping at any factoid as evidence of improvement. Even if the 50 percent goal is unrealistic, it's nice to have a clear objective.

Michoacán Update

A handful of the officials arrested in the big anti-corruption sweep in Michoacán last May have been released, while another handful have been convicted and sentenced. The tally thus far is as follows: of the 31 officials arrested, twelve have been released without charges (and only eight months after they were originally arrested!), ten have been sentenced, and nine remain in limbo (I repeat: and only eight months after they were originally arrested!).

Both the convictions and the releases were announced the same day, which created an amusing contrast in emphasis from different papers: the headline to the El Universal story read, "Jail sentences for 10 ex-officials", while the Excélsior headline was, "Michoacanazo loses strength; 12 are exonerated".

Another Reminder of the Journalistic Dangers

Another journalist was killed on Friday, this one in Guerrero.

While we're on the topic, a couple of bars were shot up here in town last night or early this morning, and there hasn't been a word of it in the local papers, their internet pages, or, from what I've seen, on the TV news shows. I heard one rumor that 20 people were killed and that the local hospital was teeming with wailing family-members this morning. Both stories seem unlikely to be true, especially the first, but this is an example of how if the professional media outlets aren't working on a story, the stories that gain credibility via word of mouth exponentially inflate the gore and the danger.

Update: The story was finally broken, not surprisingly by an out-of-town paper: Excélsior reports that 10 were killed and 15 wounded. The gore, as it turns out, wasn't exponentially inflated, though it was inflated, or so it would seem. To my knowledge, no local media has mentioned the event, though I wouldn't be shocked if a local news program has covered it. What a horrible time and place to be a twenty-something who likes a good nightclub.