Norway honors bishop Raúl Vera López with Rafto Prize

Norway, the most secular of nations, honored Mexican Bishop Raúl Vera López of Saltillo with the Rafto Prize, given annually to defenders of human rights and democracy. The Rafto Foundation for Human rights deems Vera López "an uncompromising critic of power abuse and a fearless defender of migrants, indigenous peoples, and other groups at risk in Mexican society." How very true. Bishop Vera López has stood up not only against the Federal government in defense of particularly Mexico's indigenous, but also against powerful conservative sectors in the Roman Catholic church who loathes his incessant social activism.

Note that Vera López is originally from Guanajuato, home to many of the most reactionary, bigoted, anti-democratic elements of the catholic church. To paraphrase a line once attributed to Trotsky - if only more of the Mexican clergy were like him, I'd be a catholic too.

Senate approves PRD initiative to create Secretary of Migration

The Mexican Senate took an important step yesterday when it in a floor vote approved to pass on to senate committees a PRD initiative to create a national Secretary of Migration, elevating the head of the National Migration Institute (INM) to federal rank. This is a hugely important step, as elevating the institute to a federal position would not only create much more visibility for the migrant issue, but hopefully allow for much more resources and coordination between federal, state, and municipal levels, and would directly bring in governors from migrant heavy state to sit in on its council. The initiative also contemplates much improved public attention to human and labor rights of migrants in Mexico, as well as to Mexicans abroad.

Meanwhile, in Chiapas, the PRD-led state Congress a few days ago went ahead on its own to create a  "Commission to Protect Human Rights of Migrants" (Comisión para la Protección de los Derechos Humanos de Migrantes) and to guarantee passing through Chiapas the right to shelter, as well as rights to using health services and hospitals, and the protection of law. It's a but a step, as it will be a long-term process to put these rights into practice, but it is  nonetheless a very significant one for migrants' rights

"To hell with this alliance!" AMLO twists PT's arm to back off from PAN-PRD alliance

AMLO has started yet another "tour" of Mexico State, entitled, according to various banners, the "Loyalty Tour," which is both a thinly disguised pre-campaign for the Mexican presidency, as well as more immediately a mechanism to drum up opposition among the PRD base against an alliance with the PAN to present a common candidate for governor of Mexico State in 2011. The label is quite fitting: What AMLO is doing is to call for his followers within and outside the PRD to show loyalty to him, rather than the actual party leadership - to follow the man and his "cause" rather than to abide by the decisions of PRD's official elected party organs. AMLO has in general ridden roughshod over the PRD's official leadership the past decade, and if anything his dismissal of the party and the rejection of its positions when they do not correspond to his own, has merely intensified, and in his speech yesterday, in a direct attack on the current PRD leadership declared it "better that they once and for all remove the mask and go and join the PAN."

Despite the fact that the misnamed "Workers Party" PT (Partido del Trabajo), an unconditional AMLO ally since 2006, earlier appeared quite positive to a mega alliance of PRD-PT-Convergencia with the PAN in order to beat the PRI, AMLO again gave PT and its leader Alberto Anaya Gutiérrez an ultimatum: Either you reject the alliances, or else. 


The PT, to recall, is far less principled than it may appear - the party almost went with PRI in 2006, and its ultra loyalty to AMLO can best be explained from the fact that his support allows it enough votes to keep its party registry. Hence, just like AMLO forced the PT to leave coalitions it had entered where the PAN participated in this summer's gubernatorial election, AMLO now forced the PT to take a public stand against participating in any anti-PRI alliance in Mexico State in 2011 should it include the PAN. 


AMLO, for his part, declared he will not campaign for the PRD at all in Mexico State should its leadership join an alliance with the PAN, the party "that stole the Presidency from us."
Expect him to to everything in his powers the coming weeks to continue sabotaging such an alliance, and to call upon his followers to do the same. 


Enrique Peña Nieto must be smiling from ear to ear.