Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar calls for mass elections for PRD. When will they ever learn?

It sounds all wonderful and democratic: To elect a party leader, why not open it up to all citizens, not just PRD members, in a completely open mass election? This is exactly what Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar is proposing should be the manner in which PRD elects its new leader. Yet given the history of PRD's internal elections by party base, which without one single exception has been a dirty cohchinero and led to destructive infighting, chaos, even violence - and we're here only talking of PRD members, not a completely open election to all, party cadres and non-members alike - why on earth would Ramírez Cuéllar expect the next election to be any different? How many times do you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result? It's simply stunning to hear such a proposal, as it is still less than two years since PRD ended its last internal leadership feud, when the Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) ruled that Jesús Ortega had won the PRD presidency. The fight had been going on for 8 - eighth! - months, yet now Ramírez Cuéllar is arguing the party should do the same thing, even upping the ante by allowing non-party members to participate?

The initiative if nothing else demonstrate that Ramírez Cuéllar has come down on AMLO's side: PRD's former presidential candidate would clearly be able to use the movement around his Legitimate Government as muscle to vote in the election and elect a more pliant leader than Ortega is. To recall, this is exactly what Alejandro Encinas, who was AMLO's candidate but lost to Ortega in 2008, wanted at that time.

When it comes to leadership elections, PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) gets it: Let the National Council, which is elected directly by members, have a vote on who is to be the next party president.

 If PRD is serious about avoiding debilitating internal feuds, and if its factions really are willing to submit to a democratic majority, namely the National Council elected by the PRD base, the PRD should discard the mass-base election fetishism of Ramírez Cuéllar and others, and go for a similar mechanism when choosing its next party presiddent.

Mexico State may hide ticking budget bomb

While clearly Enrique Peña has very tangible electoral benefits to gain from handing over Mexico State to a PRI successor, there might be other motives lurking as well: According to an investigation by Jenaro Villamil in last week's Proceso, there is a 10 billion peso discrepancy between what what the Mexico State Congress has approved as the state's budget, and what Peña Nieto's government has spent.


(Villamil has written extensively on Peña Nieto both in Proceso's pages and outside, such as his 2009 book A subscription is required to access the full article, but he also has a most interesting blog, where a version of it can be accessed).

Basically, using the state's transparency laws to gain access to information (quite ironic, one should add), Villamil finds huge differences between what the State congress allocated for spending for 2010, and what the government's own secretariats report as being spent, in some places up to a seven-fold overspending. 


I've yet to see any reaction or comments from the Mexico State government on these claims, which are most serious: If we are to take this story at its word, it may appear that Peña Nieto has seriously cranked up on spending that has not been approved by the legislature, and for which there may simply be enough funds. And we're not talking small change here: 10 billion pesos equals a possible budget shortfall of close to 800 million dollars.