It is an open secret, which makes it no secret at all, that José Ángel Córdova Villalobos, federal secretary of health, is very interested in becoming the next governor of Guanajuato. A couple of days ago, ahead of the the Semana Binacional de Salud, or Binational Health Week, a major international health conference that just happened to be arranged in his native Guanajuato, Córdova Villalobos warned that the PAN could lose the state in 2012, due to internal "fractures" in the ruling Partido Acción Nacional, PAN.
What the health secretary is really saying is that due to the extremist policies of the state government, headed by Governor Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez, it might lose the state in 2012. The local state branch of PAN is in Guanajuato in hands of El Yunque, an extreme catholic far right falangist secret organization, and the public policies of Oliva Ramírez' government have been disaster: The state was recently forced, due to local and international pressure, to release scores of women locked up for having had miscarriages and abortions, and has an extremely retrograde education system that virulently fights any sex education or information on contraceptives. Not coincidentally, the state has Mexico's highest rate of teen pregnancy. It is also the only one of Mexico's 32 federal entities that has refused to pass a law to prevent violence against women. So much for "family values."
José Ángel Córdova is painfully aware that the backlash against these extreme policies may well cause PAN to lose the state, and this is the real reason behind his thinly veiled attack on the current PAN government of Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez. It would serve the PAN and Mexico well to rid its party organization of the rightwing extremists of El Yunque; a win for Córdova in Guanajuato in 2012 - he is both a PAN moderate, and as a health professional is painfully aware of the destructive effect on El Yunque's influence on policy - would only be a good thing.
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