Sunday, June 26, 2011

PRD reminds PT, Convergenicia of pledge - which will most likely be broken

PRD president  Jesús Zambrano felt compelled to remind its notoriously unreliable alliance partners PT and Convergencia of their agreement that all three will rally behind whomever is deemed ahead in a poll - AMLO or Marcelo Ebrard, given that both PT and Convergencia quite openly express that they have already decided.

I wonder if even Zambrano believes what he is saying.

Legionaries of Christ banned from using internet, mail

Luis Petersen Farah informs us that members of Legionaries of Christ recently received a decree banning them from using internet, email, social media, etc, unless supervised by, well, their superiors.

Petersen's argument is that despite the Marcial Maciel scandals, nothing has changed in this paranoid and authoritarian. It makes perfect sense though - how can organizational unity be achieved if the members would find out, through reading online, that their founder was a pedophile psychopath who raped and abused small children and was defended the entire time while doing so by the high clergy of the Mexican Catholic Church, and  even protected by Pope John Paul II himself?

No, better to pull the plug.

Initiative by Benito Nacif of IFE to safeguard voters's party membership

Benito Nacif, a councilor of Mexico's Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), proposed an initiative to further safeguard the privacy of those who are members of political parties.

Currently, apparently anyone can technically access a party's padrón or membership lists, with the names of the members, thus depriving them of their right to privacy and keeping their party affiliation secret.

I interviewed Benito Nacif for a paper I am working on, and he struck me as one of the absolute most reasonable of IFE's current councilors - as is the current proposal.

Baja California Sur: Anti-abortion initiative blocked in state congress, of sorts

The state congress in Baja California Sur failed to pass an extremely prohibitive anti-choice legislation of the "life from conception" type, though hardly thanks to any brave stands from progressive forces: While 11 deputies from PAN, the local PRN party, and Convergencia (the nominally left-wing party allied to AMLO) voted in favor, nine deputies - five from PRI, four from PRD - simply abstained, rather than having the guts to vote against the legislation

Stopped, for now.

Academic analyses of the 2011 Guerrero election

Issue 167 of El Cotidiano, a social science-politics journal published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, has a special issue on the 2011 governor and state election of Guerrero.

Email registration is required, but the site is entirely free - learning of the perspectives of Mexican political scientists and analysts is a a refreshing alternative to the U.S.-centered political science literature.