‘A Weak Weekly look at the Week’ – Mexico
The Third Estate strives to be at the cutting edge of politics from around the globe each and every week. And when that fails miserably, we can normally whack something together about mushrooms… However, in the pursuit of variety less culinary inclined, I would like to introduce a new section that will run every Monday from now until… well, until such time as the new mushroom growing season begins.
‘A Weak Weekly look at the Week’ sets out to provide a quick idiot’s guide to the history of countries you would normally only ever contemplate whilst sitting in the dentists’ waiting room, flicking through the back pages of ‘Take a Break’ (January 1982). This will then be followed with a discussion of their last week’s political comings and going, as irrelevant and bemusing as those random numbers the NHS cheating bastards reel off once you are finally in the chair. If all this leaves a bad taste in your mouth, feel free to rinse and spit all over the comment page. This week: Mexico.
Political History
Mexico’s politics was dominated for 70 years by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). A member of the Socialist International, but today a reformist centre-left Labour-like outfit, the PRI was born out of greater ideals during the Mexican Revolution (c.1910-1920 – resolved largely by the creation of the Mexican Constitution in 1917).
For the middle class, whose members typically had led rebellions in the past, the PRI provided upward mobility either through politics (a rule of no reelection opened frequent opportunities for public office) or through business during the high-growth period of “stabilizing development” that lasted from the early 1950s until the late 1960s. The PRI also integrated workers and peasants into the political system by claiming to be the only vehicle able to realise their demands for labour union rights and land reform. The party operated much like an urban political machine in the United States – a corporatist entity that weakened attempts to form horizontal class or interest-based political alliances within the lower class by dispensing services to individuals in exchange for their votes. The PRI emphasised personal relationships between individuals of the lower class and party and government officials. It distributed political patronage from the top down to members of organised labour, the agrarian movement, and the popular sector in accordance with each group’s relative strength in a given area.
Finally, it used electoral fraud, corruption, bribery, and repression when necessary to maintain control over individuals and groups. Elections in 1997 saw a resurgent opposition break what was in effect a one-party system with a democratic facade. But it was not until nearly ten years later, in July 2006, that Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party was declared the winner of a bitterly-fought presidential election, with a lead of less than a percentage point over his ‘Coalition for the Good of All’ (PRD) left-wing rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The PRI, who had lost power for the first time since the revolution, came third.
NEWS
Midterm Elections: Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s ruling party lost races throughout the nation in midterm elections as the opposition Revolutionary Institutional Party rolled to victories in the lower legislative house and state and local posts this week. With nearly 97 percent of Sunday’s votes counted, the PRI stood at 36.6% compared the to 27.9 % for Calderon’s National Action Party. The leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which nearly won the 2006 presidential election, came in a distant third with 12.2 percent of the vote.
500 seats in the federal legislature, six governorships, about 500 mayoralties and local legislatures in 11 states were for grabs on Sunday’s ballot. Though Calderon has three years left in his six-year term and was not on the ballot, analysts agree that the elections were largely a referendum on him and are fair gauge of public opinion in relation to his party’s nine-year hold on the presidency.
Los Zeta: Federal agents have arrested 92 municipal police officers accused of providing information and security to one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels. The arrests occurred in the city of Hidalgo in central Mexico after an investigation that started in October. Officials say the Zeta drug cartel, which is responsible for many of the kidnappings, extortion and drug trafficking in Hidalgo, were paying the Hidalgo police officers between 3,000 to 5,000 pesos ($228 to $380) every two weeks.
The Zetas’ founders were originally members of the Mexican’s Army elite Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales(GAFE), trained in locating and apprehending drug cartel members. It is believed that they were originally trained at the military School of the Americas in the United States but then, in the late 1990s, the drug Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen began to recruit GAFE members to provide protection and perform other vital functions. His top recruit, Lieutenant Arturo Guzmán Decena, brought with him approximately 30 other deserters enticed by salaries substantially higher than those paid by the Mexican government. Guzmán was known as “Z1″, and it was after him that Los Zetas was named.
Gang violence is surging in Mexico where 40,000 soldiers have been deployed to root out drug cartels. Beheadings, attacks on police, and shootings in clubs and restaurants are a daily occurrence in some regions. Mexico’s northern border towns are experiencing the worst of the violence, with Ciudad Juarez (just across the frontier from El Paso in Texas) standing out as the country’s most violent city. If the violence is judged by the number of homicides linked to organised crime, the situation appears extremely serious. There were approximately 6,000 such murders in Mexico in 2008. That figure is similar to the number of US soldiers and civilians killed in Iraq in the same year. The rate appears to be increasing in 2009, with Mexican media reporting that by mid-February, there had been 1,000 killings.
The Mexican government’s position is that the violence, however regrettable, can be seen as a reflection of the success of its policy of taking a hard line against drug-running. Others argue that the cartels have become so powerful that they effectively control some parts of the country. The cartel’s control of trafficking between South America and the is worth an estimated $13bn (£9bn) a year alone.
Abortion: Lawmakers in Mexico City recently voted to change the capital’s abortion laws, despite high levels of opposition in this what remains a traditionally very Catholic country. The action could have widespread repercussions for the better across Latin America. Following the vote, women will legally be able to have an abortion during the first 12 weeks of her pregnancy in Mexico City. Previously, women could be – and routinely were – jailed for having an abortion.
In Nicaragua recently, all abortions were outlawed. In the United States, the Supreme Court has just upheld the ban on what have become known as partial birth abortions. In Mexico’s region, only the much smaller Cuba, Guyana and Puerto Rico have anything like the more lenient laws just adopted in Mexico City. The vote puts Mexico, with its 100m population, at the forefront of a global campaign to give women more control over their bodies and their reproduction.
And Finally: An indigenous language in southern Mexico is in danger of disappearing because its last two speakers have stopped talking to one another.
The two elderly men in the village of Ayapan, Tabasco, “have drifted apart”, said Fernando Nava, head of the Mexican Institute for Indigenous Languages. He was “using the example to draw attention to the threat to indigenous languages across Mexico” he insisted, when asked why he had “scheduled a national press conference to discuss a quarrel between two 80 year olds”.
