Michoacán: Governor Godoy names military replacement for Minerva Bautista

While many of the state secretariats of public security in Mexico are indeed led by military men, I still find it noteworthy that Governor Leonel Godoy named a retired general as the replacement for Minerva Bautista, who famously survived a 2700-bullet assassination attempt last April (her battered armored car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee,  can actually be seen displayed at the armored car maker Protecto Glass' workshop in Mexico City), and apparently decided to step down.

Large parts of Michoacán such as the port of Lazaro Cárdenas and the Tierra Caliente zone are certainly ground zero in the "drug war,", and the threat posed by the armed mafias is clearly huge, as illustrated by the massive yet fortunately failed attack on the state's top security official. However, members of the PRD, to which Godoy belongs, have been among the most critical of the militarization of security, yet clearly Godoy has as come to the conclusion that state security is best left in the hands of the military.

Today: International Day of the World's Indigenous People

Given that today is the International Day of the World's Indigenous People, it is particularly suiting to check out a highly welcome article from The Economist regarding the plight of indigenous people in Oaxaca. 

GUNFIRE rings out almost every day around the village of San Juan Copala, as marksmen in the woods take potshots into the town. Eight residents are recovering from injuries, including an eight-year-old girl who was hit twice as she tried to leave the village. The gunmen have cut electricity and blocked access roads, allowing only a single party of women out once a week on an eight-hour hike to fetch food. The siege is entering its ninth month.

PRD-PT-Convergencia agrees to common candidate in Guerrero.

The three left-leaning parties in Mexico, PRD, PT and Convergencia agreed on a common candidate for governor of Guerrero. This is important: The division among the left in Guerrero in last year's federal election was partly responsible  for the PRD's loss of 8 out of 9 majority districts, and the year before its loss of the all-important mayorship of Acapulco, which PRI  candidate Manuel Añorve Baños retook.

(on a side note, Añorve Baños' recently declared candidacy to be governor of Guerrero illustrates a practice I find absolutely abhorrent: That politicians, regardless of what party they belong to, merely serve a year or so [1.5. in the case of Añorve Baños] in the office in which they were elected, and then immediately use it as a trampoline for a higher office, in this case the governorship. I hope the Acapulco voters that were ditched by Añorve Baños will take note of this). 


"Pre-candidates" of the PRD are local deputy Armando Ríos Piter, a Zeferino-type perredista (like the governor, he refuses to become a PRD member), and Federal Senator David Jiménez Rumbo, who was very close to the murdered favorite gubernatorial candidate Armando Chavarría. One dark-horse candidate to keep an eye out for is former federal deputy Cuauhtemoc Sandoval Ramirez, which I find a much better pick than the other two. 


However, my hunch is that the eventual nomination will go to Luis Walton Aburto, current national president of Convergencia , a nominally left-leaning yet ultra-opportunistic party (it went with PAN in 2005 in the State of Mexico, yet jumped on the AMLO bandwagon in order to obtain enough votes to keep its national party registry), after Luis Maldonado stepped down this January.  (Both, to note, were lifelong members of PRI until ditching it to set up their current outfit, adding more anecdotal evidence  to the argument that most Mexican politicians carry a priísta within them). 

Norberto Rivera Carrera calls the Supreme Court "deviant."

Cardinal Rivera Carrera, the highest authority of the catholic church in Mexico and an extremely controversial archconservative cleric in Mexico - not only for his many blatantly partisan calls and interference in politics, but also for such transgressions as being more concerned with protecting pederasts rather than their victims -  came out swinging against the recent declaration by the Mexican Supreme Court that the gay weddings allowed in Mexico City are indeed constitutional. 


Rivera called the supreme court decision aberrante, which one may translate directly as aberrant, or even deviant. This is the same man who once declared, to the victims of pedophile priests,

"You will forget quickly what father Nicolás Aguilar Rivera did. Soon you will not even remember it. You must know how to forgive him. The father is a sick man."

Does Rivera Carrera have any moral authority to call for prayers against the enemies of the church, when, as far as I know the catholic doctrine, he appears its own worst enemy? Given the fantastic work performed in so many parishes by well-meaning, good-hearted catholics, priests or not, it is sad to see that the church is represented by a man like Rivera.




One personal comments on this issue, beyond Mexican politics:
I do understand and also respect that people oppose gay marriages due to their personal religious or moral convictions, as defined subjectively. For instance, Cardinal Rivera stated:

"These de facto or legalistic unions of persons of the same sex are intrinsically immoral, as they contradict the divine proyect, distorting the nature of marriage."

OK, I don't agree with it, but if that is Rivera's reading of the bible, fine. But it is what follows that truly puzzles me:

"Such immoral activity can never be equivalent to the sexual expressions of the love of married life, as it puts into danger the dignity and the rights of the family, which constitutes the common good of society."

This is what I can't understand: How is a christian, catholic marriage in any way threatened by gay marriage? How is allowing gay people to marry in any way connected to threatening their marriages, let along the "rights of the family"? From what I gather, allowing gay marriages, or civil unions for that matter, has to do exactly with giving gay couples the same rights as straight couples. Why is this so threatening? If the church is truly anticipating a flood of unraveling man+woman marriages as a consequence of allowing gay marriage in Mexico city, perhaps the foundations on which these marriages were built were not the strongest to begin with.