Best Politics-Sports Comparison Ever

Courtesy of Jorge Chabat: Santiago Creel as Vicente Fox's Guillermo Franco. Brilliant.

Chabat argues that the PRI's arrogance, which is today comparable to what it was before the arrival of Vicente Fox, could be its downfall:

Without a doubt the PRI can win in 2012. But the elections are not won through a party's positive actions but through the errors of others. If the PRI wants to win it must not commit errors. Nevertheless, the seed of its error its being sown in the PRI: it's called arrogance. More than one person will say that surely the PRI will realize this. That's not right. Partial success is the most potent drink. It makes you lose perspective. And the PRI is already drunk on power. The victories have gone to their head. They already think that God is a priísta...

The Future of the Alliances

El Universal reported this morning that the PAN and the PRD would be together for next year's races in the State of Mexico, Nayarit, Guerrero, Baja California Sur, and Michoacán, although leaders from the latter state, where PRD control is very strong, have since counted themselves out of such a scheme.

Voting Rates

Abstention in Sunday's election topped out at about 65 percent in Chihuahua, with Tamaulipas right behind at around 60 percent. This has been attributed to violence in the states, which certainly may have played a role, but the fact that 60 percent abstention is not atypical for gubernatorial elections in Mexico argues against that supposition. So does the fact that Sinaloa and Durango, neither of which is a stranger to violence, had abstention rates of below 50 percent, while Quintana Roo, which has some organized crime elements but is not one of Mexico's most violent states, the figure was close to 60 percent.

I've not seen an aggregation of all of the race, but generally speaking, the abstention rates seem lower than those in recent non-presidential elections. In addition to Sinaloa and Durango, in Aguascalientes, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas turnout was above 50 percent of registered voters.

Still Up in the Air

The Durango governor's seat remains undecided. The initial results have the PRI's Jorge Herrera up by 10,000 votes, about 1.8 percent of the total. Not all of the ballots have been counted, but the PAN and the PRD have promised a fight in the electoral tribunals if the results don't swing their way, and they (of course) are planning a protest march. If they do have proof of wrongdoing and fraud, then by all means their case should be heard (though the electoral tribunals and the newspapers would be a more appropriate venue than the streets of Gómez Palacio and Durango), but it's unfortunate that anytime there is a reasonably close election, the losing party --whichever it happens to be-- immediately takes the fight to the courts. A margin of 1.8 percent is close, but it's not that much of a nail-biter. The amount of time, money, and effort lost to these challenges (which are almost always fruitless) is significant.

Lightning Strikes Twice

Just yesterday, I was writing about a World Cup replica trophy made of cocaine, understandably assuming it was a singular confluence of my interests in drug policy and the World Cup. Turns out, it was not so singular: evidently, some Peruvians used vuvuzelas to sneak marijuana into a private school in Lima.

More Election Analysis

Beatriz Paredes says that the PRI's performance yesterday was overwhelming. Objectively speaking, there's no denying that she's correct. The PRI came away with 75 percent of the governors races against the unified force of the parties that together won around 70 percent of the 2006 presidential votes. Beyond the results themselves, the mere fact that the alliances were hammered out indicates that the success of the PRI is the driving force in Mexican politics right now.

At the same time, the perception is that the PRI stumbled. Paredes, who was not long ago predicting a 12-for-12 on the July 4 scoresheet, is a culprit on that score. The fact that Oaxaca and Puebla --both machine states in every sense of the term, both entities where the PRI (or its ancestors) had ruled for eighty years, both races that received a lot of attention from PRI bosses-- were both lost also contributes to that sense of disappointment. All that explains why the satisfaction expressed by Ortega and Nava (the authors of the alliances) seems more sincere than Paredes'.

In terms of the political significance of yesterday's elections, I think the most relevant question is whether the PRI has peaked. There's no question that it today remains the strongest single force in the nation, and Peña Nieto, for all his shortcomings, remains a more attractive candidate than anyone the PRD or the PAN is likely to nominate. But the party seems a lot more vulnerable today than it did after the elections a year ago. Furthermore, the loss in Oaxaca and the likelihood of another alliance in Mexico State next year suggest that Peña Nieto could well fail to hand over his post to another priísta, which the conventional wisdom says would doom his presidential chances. If that happens, we could be looking at a presidential race every bit as wide open as that of 2006.

More on the Tenencia

Courtesy of Macario Schettino:

Income from the tenencia for the federal government adds up to 21 billion pesos a year, five times more than the new car tax (ISAN). That's logical, given that it's a tax that is placed on all autos in circulation with less than ten years of use, which is about eight or nine times more than the number of cars sold each year. Furthermore, the states take advantage of the tenencia to tack on taxes for vehicular control, or services, which vary in each case, but which are not an insignificant sum.

Here is the problems of coordination: if the federal government eliminates the tenencia, are the state governments going to eliminate the right of vehicular control?

They can do so, but they will lose revenue that will not be easy to compensate. Additionally, there is a logic to the government charging for these rights, if with it they finance some indispensable services, such as pavement, stoplights, or even transit police.

Further still, the tenencia tax was totally distributable, in such a way that the federal government only raised that 21 billion pesos in revenue, but the ones who spent it were the state governments. During 2011, which is the year of advance notice for the end of the tenencia, which will in reality come to pass in 2012, the federal government is going to take those 21 million from the ISR [tax on corporate profits]...The following year, we don't know what's going to be done.

A Natural Culmination

All of the soccer and security blogging I've done over the past several months comes together in this story: a replica of the World Cup trophy made out of cocaine has been found in Colombia. It weighs 11 kilos, which is actually five more than the original. Reports like this one make you wonder: what can't be made out of cocaine? Can we be sure, for example, that the Cristiano Ronaldo who suited up for Portugal in South Africa wasn't a cocaine fake?

A Day Later

The newspapers continue to report that the PAN-PRD won the governor's seat in Puebla, Oaxaca, and Sinaloa, with the PRI taking the other nine states. For the PRI, this amounts to treading water (they held nine of the 12 states coming into Sunday), but because of the expectations of a clean sweep, this is a disappointing haul. Furthermore, many of the PRI's victories were less overwhelming than the polls had predicted. In only four states did the PRI pull more than 50 percent of the vote, which is just one more than the PAN-PRD's total.

Bajo Reserva says that the day's big winner was any and everyone in the PRD and PAN who bet on the alliances. Not only were the three victories the product of allied candidates, but they likely could have taken Tlaxcala and Zacatecas had a single candidate from the PAN and PRD been agreed to months ago. One big loser was AMLO, who spent a lot of effort slamming the alliances. (More on this and other electoral topics from David Agren here.) At the same time, while the alliances have turned out to be a mildly successful electoral gambit (and we shouldn't get carried away there, either; at the end of the day, the second and third political forces in the nation were together far from equal to the first. If you remove yourself from expectations, yesterday was also a sharp reminder of the PRI's nationwide superiority), it remains to be see how they affect governance in the states where they came out on top.

Exit Polls

Exit polls, which are of course famously imperfect, are presently showing the PRI winning in ten of the twelve governors races, with Puebla and Oaxaca being the only exceptions. More info to come.

Update: As July 4th turns into July 5th, Excélsior has added Sinaloa to Puebla and Oaxaca as PAN-PRD victories. If it holds up, this would be a surprisingly positive day for the allied parties.

Argentina's Failure

Some interesting stuff from Sam Kelly:

What happened in the absence of a playmaker was that Lionel Messi had to drop increasingly deep to pick the ball up, allowing the German midfield and defence to isolate the players beyond him, leaving him without much options. Messi played well - avoiding plenty of tackles and passing better than anyone for Argentina - but was unable to make the difference. Sadly, there are already signs that could be overlooked after his best performances for Argentina: Olé's website was running a story on his 'failure' at this World Cup within an hour of the final whistle.

Riding the wave of the Barça season, anything less than a trophy was going to be a disappointment for Messi and Argentina, but no one should consider this a Ronaldo- or Rooney-esque letdown. He didn't find the net, but Messi was at times brilliant, and never an empty shell.

Regarding the touches, this has long seemed to the biggest problem with Argentina (and a further illustration of how perfectly Xavi and Messi's talents fit together). Against the best teams, he either doesn't get the number of touches he does with Barcelona, or, as has seemed the case more recently, he gets plenty of the ball, but 40 yards from the goal instead of 20. The first two touches Messi had in the Germany game were illustrative: one was just over the midfield line, the other was just outside of Argentina's box. If he was going to score against Germany, it was almost going to have to be a repeat of Maradona's Goal of the Century, which of course isn't likely to be repeated very often. In other words, his performance was much better than it was consequential. Hopefully, in the next four years, Argentina can find or develop itself a brilliant playmaker.

Kelly also says that for all of the silliness from Maradona, and all of the team's struggles in qualifying, Argentina didn't underperform. Anything beyond a quarterfinal exit (and a mostly competitive one until the final stretch) would have been a lot to expect for a team of Argentina's midfield and defense. Great teams can't just be great on the attack.

Happy Fourth

Happy Independence Day Americans! Last year, I took it as an occasion to celebrate an expression of American culture that I miss most: the bagel. Continuing that tradition, here's a photo of perhaps the best neighborhood bagel and coffee shop I've ever had the opportunity to frequent:

Beans and Bagels, below the Montrose stop of the Brown Line El. Everything there was delicious.

Getting Out the Vote

Miguel Carbonell says that the big conflict today is voting Mexicans versus Mexican mafias:

The strategy of organized crime has had a lot to do with the dissemination of terror, whether as a message to the authorities charged with chasing and punishing criminals, or as a way of frightening the general population. This is probably the intention of many of the "narco-banners" or "narco-messages", which appear on streets and boulevards with relative frequency. And the same can be said of the executed people hung from highway bridges with lots of traffic or other similar activities. The message is: be afriad, we are present.

Before this message the population must demonstrate that there are rational arguments through which we can settle our differences. The best that we have been able to invent is called democracy and we have to nourish it periodically through the exercise of our citizen rights, such as the right of suffrage.

Going to vote on Sunday is no longer a symbolic act and has turned into a bet on the most essential values of our social interaction. Voting is the most direct response for terror, criminal blindness, the threat that looms over all of us.

Not voting means letting the criminals win. They seek to paralyze the society with fear, impose their ferocious law of the jungle, traffic with our hopes, and profit off of the pain of millions of families harmed by criminality.

I'm not sure if the conflict is quite so cut and dry, but there is no question that more apathy equals weaker mandates and less attention on those in government, which encourages corruption and also makes it harder for an anti-crime crusader to make an impact.

Relatedly, as Chihuahua heads to the polls today, four dead bodies were hung from bridges this morning in the state capital.

Captured

A suspect in the killing of a Juárez consular employee and her husband has been captured:

Jesús Ernesto Chávez, said to be a leader of a binational gang that supplies contract killers to the Juarez drug cartel, was arrested on charges that he masterminded the March 13 daylight ambush and murder of U.S. Consulate staffer Lesley Ann Enriquez and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, an El Paso sheriff's deputy.

Enriquez, who was four months pregnant, and Redelfs were killed by a squad of commandos as they were leaving a birthday party. The attack occurred within sight of the international bridge, and their deaths raised fears that U.S. officials were being targeted by warring drug traffickers. The couple's uninjured 7-month-old daughter was found crying in the back seat of their car.

Chávez told police that Enriquez was targeted because she was providing visas to members of the rival Sinaloa drug cartel, the chief of the federal police anti-drug unit, Ramón Pequeño, said at a news conference.

U.S. law enforcement officials said Chávez is a leader of the Barrio Azteca organization, a violent gang born in Texas prisons that has members on both sides of the border.

Chávez, who was known as the Camel, was linked to more than a dozen other murders. It goes without saying that this was a horrible crime and, assuming Chávez is their guy, it's of course good news that he's been caught. But I'm also curious if the belief that Enríquez was dealing favors to a criminal gang was accurate, and I wonder what kind of steps American officials are taking to ensure that their officials are protected and isolated from organized crime.

Attack in Sinaloa

Someone tossed a pair of molotov cocktails at the campaign headquarters of the PRI's candidate for governor in Sinaloa, Jesús Vizcarra. No one was hurt.

This seems like the proper occasion to say: here's to a safe and happy July 4, which is election day in Mexico, and of course Independence Day in the US. In the latter nation, that means lots of colorful explosions, while in the former, it means the absence of them.

The Amazingly Short Half-life of World Cup Narratives

A few days ago, it was the fall of Europe, and the rise of the Western Hemisphere. It made some sense, what with all of the teams from Conmebol or Concacaf except for Honduras advancing, Italy and France going down in flames, England looking very flat, et cetera. Now, South America's two best were eliminated by European teams (one of them decisive in fashion), and three of the four semifinalists (and quite likely both finalists) will probably turn out to be European.

Similarly, the US was moments a way from an embarrassing three-and-out in the final stages of the Algeria game. Then Donovan banged home his rebound, and the US had a golden opportunity to make a historic run to the semifinals. Of course, they coughed up that chance with some strange personnel decisions and poor defending, and exited against Ghana. So it turned out to be a mildly disappointing trip to South Africa, but not out of line with the US's typical results at the World Cup.

Perceptions of Mexico's performance were similarly topsy-turvy. First, the France win was historic, a dominating win over a defending finalist that doubled as a giant leap toward world-power status for Mexican soccer. Then the Uruguay loss meant that Mexico had Argentina in the round of 16, and the French fell apart, which made that win a lot less impressive. The Mexicans wound up eliminated by Argentines in the second round, just as they were in 2006, and exited after four games, as has been the case in every World Cup since 1986.

World Cup Lookalikes, Playalikes

I've always thought that Mexican singer Kalimba and Brazilian winger Robinho might have same the same (ultra-talented) bloodline.

And though he doesn't much look like him, I realized during today's game that Arjen Robben reminds me of no one so much as Claude Lemieux.

Ten Years

A decade ago, Vicente Fox was elected. July 2, 2000 remains a landmark day in the history of Mexican democracy, but there's no denying that the interim has not strengthened the nation's faith in the governing class. Today's example of that: according to Latinobarómetro, only three nations' citizens in Latin America have a more pessimistic opinion on the course of their country's course than do Mexicans, and one of them is still recovering from a coup last summer.

Not Perturbed

According to a poll from BGC-Excélsior, Mexicans do not look poorly on illegal recordings that catch politicians in illegal or unflattering situations. Seventy-one percent say that it's a good crime-fighting tactic, with less than half saying that such activity could constitute a violation of privacy. The most recent example of such recordings are the tapes of Fidel Herrera, but the practice has a long history in Mexico.

Explaining the Tenencia Removal

Last week's big announcement from Calderón, that the tenencia on new cars was to be removed as of 2012, was reportedly sparked by a similar plan in the works in the State of Mexico. Not to be out-shined weeks before an election day by his likely successor, Calderón's cabinet raced to preempt Peña Nieto's announcement with own of their own. This may not be entirely true, but if it is and you have a presidency making such a decision based entirely on a governor's possible course of action, you have to wonder about the quality of his advisors.

Another Assassinated Official

An assistant state attorney general in Chihuahua was murdered last night. She worked on internal affairs, which in a state like today's Chihuahua with no shortage of dirty cops would make you a target. One way we'll know that Mexico has progress on security issues is that people like Sandra Ivonne Salas will no longer be murdered with regularity.

Somewhat relatedly, Mexican authorities arrested a member of la Familia known as the El Tyson in Morelia. El Tyson, whose real name is Miguel Ortiz and who is a former member of the state police's special operations group, is accused of orchestrating an attack on the state director of public security in April. Assuming the charges are legit, good on the government for his arrest. If Mexico can't yet eliminate attacks on public officials, the next best thing is to arrest those responsible in short order.

Small World

Evidently one of the Russian spies arrested earlier this week was a classmate of Felipe Calderón's at Harvard.

More Reaction to the Torre Assassination

The papers today are focusing on Paredes' speech last night as a clear rejection of Calderón's call for unity. It remains to be seen how much of an influence the speech and its author have on the PRI's relationship with Calderón with regard to security policy, but insofar as Paredes' speech is a reflection of the PRI's intentions, it's a real shame. Mexico's last great opportunity to establish a cross-party security alliance came in late 2008, and policy-makers (with a lot of help from certain media sources) completely blew it.

One thing I've read or heard dozens of times in the past several years is that Mexico's politicians don't care about security because it doesn't really affect them, they don't feel the fear that the average Mexican does. Well, they certainly should now. If they can't pull it together and articulate a lasting, unified approach to security (and that's not something that can or should be hammered out in the next couple of days, but the headlines indicate an unwillingness to even take steps in that direction), it's not because they aren't affected by crime. It's because there's too many narrow-minded clowns among them.

Also, Torre Cantú's brother Egidio is to take over his candidacy.