Bizarre commemoration of Juan Camilo Mouriño, two years after his death

The death of Juan Camilo Mouriño two years ago was spectacular. Not only was Mouriño, a close friend of President Felipe Calderón, as Minister of the Interior the closest Mexico had to a Vice President, but the manner of his death was the stuff of movies: His Learjet plunged to the ground in Mexico City, killing all eight on board, as well as a handful on the ground. The only reason this spectacular event, which many still believe was not an accident, didn't get more attention was that the world's focuswas elsewhere: The same night, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. 


Two years after his Nov. 4 2008 death, PAN held a homage to Mouriño, which was attended by a range of PAN bigshots, including outgoing party president César Nava and all five contenders to succeed him, and the president's wife, as Calderón got delayed. 


Notably, a bronze bust was revealed, and many a eulogy uttered. 

I just don't get it. One shouldn't speak ill of the dead, the exhortation goes (though it is not clear to my why), and while Moriño's death was a tragic event, no question, why does he deserve this honor? He even got his own model in Mexico City's was museum! 

Nava declared the party had "a debt of gratitude to preserve the memory of those who have shown us the way and have given until their breath in this fight. This is an elementary duty"


Margarita Zavala, the First Lady, hailed him as an "enthusiastic Mexican who left an economically convenient life for the benefit of his country."


Two comments:


1) Why on earth this excessive homage? Very few panistas have had the great honor of a bronze bust, located among far more prominent party members in  PAN's national headquarter in Mexico City. While Mouriño was very close to the president, what exactly did he achieve in these years? 


2) "Left an economically convenient life"? Let's not forget the massive scandal Mouriño was involved in that related exactly to how he had abused his political position to directly benefit his family! Many Mexicans, and not just AMLO, demanded that he resign from the post when evidence surfaced that he awarded petroleum contracts that directly benefited his family, while holding various political positions, most notoriously Undersecretary of Energy. His boss? Felipe Calderón.

Will Calderón impose his third party president of PAN? Gil grovels, but why?

Lest there should there be any doubt, any doubt at all, that Roberto Gil Zuarth is a calderonista, or Felipe Calderón's candidate to be president of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), here's Gil proclaiming to the world that he is... well, a calderonista:

"I am a calderonista, I have affinities for the President, I know him, I hold him in esteem, I have affection for him, he is part of my personal loyalties... I do not renounce nor deny my admiration for Felipe Calderón."

Even though some of the words used here in my poor translation sound perhaps less homoerotic in the original Spanish, this is just over the top, particularly as a main criticism of current PAN president César Nava, as well as his predecessor German Martínez, was exactly that they were mere impositions by Caldéron - and that in a party that always proudly proclaimed its independence and refusal to succumb to the powers-that-be, even if they were from the PAN.  


Should there be any more doubts that Gil is the anointed candidate of Mexico's president, Gil added for good measure that he would "preserve the legacy of Calderón." I find that disturbing on so many levels.


But there is also something here that doesn't quite add up. Why go to so extreme lengths to identify with Calderón? One possibility is that while Gil's afinidades for Calderón are probably real, he knows that his candidacy might be formally rejected as he only has 2 years and 4 months in the party, and in may step a Gustavo Madero, a man who is also a calderonista but who is not shouting it out like Gil, which may make him more palatable to more PAN councilors whose, well, affinity for Calderón is waning. This includes the 85-100 members of PAN's national council who those in the know reckon to be members of El Yunque.


(Yet I admit this is starting to sound a bit like El Universal's house conspiracy theorist Ricardo Alemám, who like an old clock who has stopped at least twice a day will eventually be correct)

PAN deviates from its usual script: Infighting over party presidency goes public

The Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), in stark contrast to, say, the PRD, has always been known for its orderly transitions from one party president to another. One of the major reasons for this, in this blogger's opinion, is the fact that PAN uses a majority vote by its 381-member national council, while PRD, despite attempts at reform, insists on open election by mass vote, which with no exception has turned into disasters.

However, even with such an institutional mechanism, the leadership fight within the PAN is looking increasingly bitter. The party has now five official candidates: Roberto Gil, Gustavo Madero, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, Cecilia Romero, and Blanca Judith Díaz. Last week, Senator Judith Díaz impugned the candidacy of Roberto Gil on the grounds that he has been a member of PAN for less than three years, and is such does not fulfill the requisite to be a leader of the party. According to party statutes, a minimum of three years is required to be a member of the national council, though no mention is made of the president - though given PAN's history as a highly institutionalized and follow-the-rules party, it is so obvious that the party president should also fulfill this requirement that it is not even put in writing. Why, after all, should this apply only to councilors, but not to the party's president? 


(Note, however, Federico Berrueto's groveling column where he bends over backward [or forward, if one prefers] in a pretty pathetic attempt to downplay and dismiss this criterion).


Following the last-minute declaration by Roberto Gil to be a candidate, all the other candidates have now teamed up against him, arguing that the membership criterion must be "analyzed." In response, outgoing party president César Nava said that the national executive committee will send the case to the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF), the country's highest electoral court, which also has rules on internal affairs of Mexico's political parties. 


As a side note, though an important one, the PRD and PRI are up in arms, and understandably so, after Gil's wife Carla Astrid Humphrey Jordan - yes, that is her real name - accompanied her hubby for the PAN registration event. Ms. Humphrey is also an electoral councilor of the state electoral institute in the Federal District (IEDF), who moreover is seeking to become president(!) of the institute - despite this quite blatant evidencing of her lack of distance to the PAN - which is quite literal, as she is sleeping with the man who might be PAN's national president!


As for the PAN's presidential struggle, by appealing to this external institution, it is quite notable that the party is deviating from its usual cool script in that it is no longer able to solve its own internal differences. Should his opponents succeed in blocking Gil, who is the candidate of Calderón, it will surely mean that calderonismo, already on the wane within the PAN, has lost its dominance over the party definitely. 

The caballada expands: Roberto Gil Zuarth registers for PAN leadership succession

The past weekend and week saw the additional registration for contenders for the PAN presidency of Senator Blanca Judith Díaz and Francisco Ramírez Acuña, former governor of Jalisco (2001-2006), briefly minister of the interior in Calderón's cabinet, and now a federal deputy. 


Yet it was the rather surprise announcement by Roberto Gil Zuarth yesterday that he would also seek the nomination that caused the greatest stir.  Roberto Gil Zuarth is considered quite a hot-shot in PAN and a quick riser - and he is barely 33 years old. Notably, former interior minister Fernando Gómez Mont, under which Gil served, accompanied him for his registration and declared he would consider returning to PAN, should Gil become its next president. Gómez Mont, to recall, loudly renounced from PAN over the electoral alliances with PRD, and then from the administration of Felipe Calderón this July. He has held a very low profile ever since. 


Until now, Senator Gustavo Madero and Ramírez Acuña have been considered the front runners, yet Gil appears closer to Calderón than any of them. 


There is one problem:  According to party rules, the party's national councilors, who will elect the president Dec 4-5, all need to have been members of at least five years of the party, and Gil only has about 2.5 years of membership in the PAN. His supporters retort that the rule only apply for councilors, and not the party president, and as such does not disqualify Gil. Yet  this is pretty disingenuous. Yes, the statutes may only stipulate the national councilors need five years of party membership and say nothing about the president, but a more plausible reading of this is simply that it would be even more unthinkable for a president to have less than five years militancy - after all, what is the logic of demanding it of the PAN council but not the president? Yet the time when PAN was a party that strictly adhered to the internal party rules or even obeyed the spirit of the statues, has long passed. To cite but the most obvious, Calderón himself blatantly intervened to  have his designates Germán Martínez and then César Nava appointed as party presidents.


In any event, should there be any doubt as to Calderón's preferences, Germán Martínez (2007-2009 PAN president) declared that Roberto Gil would represent calderonismo as well as post-calderonismo, as the tenure of head of PAN's excecutive committe would extend to 2013, after the presidential elections.  Ramírez Acuña and particularly Madero until now appeared the strongest contenders; now, many may place their money rather on Gil.

PAN nervous about losing Guanajuato

Prominent panistas are seeking to assure that there is no danger of a split in the PAN guanajuatense, following the firing of Gerardo Mosqueda Martínez from the state administration of Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez. National party President César Nava, who is holding a very low profile these days and will step down in a few weeks as PAN leader, broke his recent silence by declaring simply that "In Guanajuato the heard of  horses is large, how great, this is not a problem at all." Yet it certainly is: Mosqueda Martínez is not even a PAN member, represents the most reactionary wing of the PAN, and is loathed by prominent panistas that include the head of the state party branch, who already declared he would not vote for him.

Even former President Vicente Fox, who hails from Guanajuato and governed the state 1995-199, at the opening of a local PAN headquarter in León called for unity, "because we cannot let go of the governorship nor of the  Presidency." The growing Guanajuato schism between PAN and the catholic extremists of El Yunque may tear the party apart, and not only in this state.

AMLO backers create Bloque de Izquierda Unitaria in the Senate

PRD and the PT announced the formation of new cross-party group in the Mexican Senate whose main mission is to promote the presidential candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The group include 12 out of PRD's 25 senators, though most of the names are hardly a surprise, but are rather those senators that AMLO managed to install as his candidates in 2006:
*Julio César Aguirre Méndez, Josefina Cota, José Luis Máximo García Zalvidea, Jesús Garibay García,  Arturo Herviz Reyes, Salomón Jara, Rosalinda López, Arturo Núñez, Yeidckol Polevnsky Gurwitz, María Roj, and lfonso Sánchez Anaya and Tomás Torres.

Two additional senators, Carlos Sotelo and Pablo Gómez, however, have never been close to AMLO; indeed, the latter did all he could to employ dirty tricks to prevent AMLO for running for the Mexico City government back in 2000, claiming he didn't fulfill the residency requirement. Gómez gained further noteriority in 2003 when the clumsy, stubborn, and utterly idiotic manner in which he negotiated with other parties in Congress basically led to the PRD having no impact on choosing the IFE councilors elected that year. I suspect his joining the AMLO camp has to do with  a promise that he will be a new Senate coordinator for the PRD's group. Carlos Sotelo was a big name in Nueva Izquierda, the majority faction to which national party president Jesús Ortega won, and his break with NI a while back was undoubtedly a blow to Ortega. Should he join with the pejistas to remove current coordinator Carlos Navarrete, of Nueva Izquierda,  Gómez is likely to lead the group (though  Tomás Torres has sought to do so as well).

It would be a major strike for AMLO if this were to happen.

Voices on the PRI's likely return to power

Many a personality has been commenting the past days on the likely return of the PRI to the Mexican presidency in 2012.  Fox, notably, seemed resigned to the idea that the PRI will win in 2012, declaring recently, "Right now, that's what dice are saying, the dice and the facts." As might be expected, Fox' predictions were hardly well received by the PAN; big shots such as party leader César Nava and PAN Senate group leader José González Morfín rejected the statements, and instead called on Fox to involve himself more in party politics rather than criticizing it from the outside. (After some heavy twittering, he now backtracked and said he "did not predict PRI's victory," but that it was to function as a warning call.

Be that it as it may, Manuel Bartlett, former PRI interior minister and governor of Puebla, somewhat estranged from his party and on good terms with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, affirmed that PRI would return thanks to the "disenchamtment PAN, but that the PRI lacks a national project and that its triumph would only be due to "mistakes and the disaster in which the PAN has occurred in the exercise of power." It is hardly a ringing endorsement of a PRI presidential candidate. Is Bartlett throwing his weight behind López Obrador?

Finally, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, defeated 2000 PRI presidential candidate, took offense at declarations made by writer Mario Vargas Llosa to the newspaper La Jornada, in connection with being bestowed an honorary degree by UNAM, where he noted that even if the PRI returns it would hardly have the absolute power of the past "perfect dictatorship," the felicitous phrase coined by the Peruvian writer to describe the 1929-2000 priiato. Labastida dixit:

"His [Vargas Lloosa's] political sympathies overtake him, his absolute conservative ideology of the right, and this prevents him from seeing that the party [PRI] has had many different governments. Lázaro Cárdenas belonged to the tricolor, as did Carlos Salinas the Gortari. PRI has not been uniform over the years. This is the first misunderstanding of this writer. The other is to claim that for 70 years one lived through a perfect dictatorship."

Really? If Labastida can come up with a better turn, I wish he'd share it. It is perhaps even more revealing that Labastida reaches all the way back to the 1930s to find a progressive PRI politician to contrast with Salinas. One would have liked to ask the senator, where would he place Peña Nieto - with the former or the latter? AMLO has the answer ready: As part of his "loyalty tour" (loyalty to him as opposed to the PRD), he gleefully exhibits a photo of an embracing Peña Nieto and Salinas. To AMLO, a victory of Peña Nieto and the return of PRI would be akin to "the return of Santa Anna."

Yet if that is the case, why is he so adamantly attacking the PAN-PRD alliances and claiming that PRI and PAN are all the same?

PAN going it alone in Guerrero: Marcos Efrén Parra candidate for governor

The PAN's National Executive Committee announced that PAN will not joint PRI in an electoral alliance for the gubernatorial elections in Guerrero in 2011. CEN president César Nava argued that the case of Guerrero was different from other states: In Oaxaca, Puebla, and Sinaloa, the PAN-PRD alliances were successful in kicking out the PRI for the first time in history. Guerrero, however, is today nominally run by the PRD, having won with Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo in 2005. The argument is a valid one, if the main purpose of the alliances were merely to achieve alternation, and as such the CEN is likely to continue pushing for a PAN-PRD alliance in Mexico State, which has always been governed by the PRI. Yet it is no secret that the PRD-PT-Convergencia coalition behind Ángel Aguirre Rivero had also hoped to enlist PAN, a party that in any case has little presence in Guerrero. It's local party branch, for instance, argued in favor of joining the PRD-led coalition behind Aguirre rather than to put forth a testimonial candidate with minuscule chances of winning

Marcos Efrén Parra Gómez is a former PAN mayor of silver town Taxco.

Much like in 2006, TEPJF condemns Durango election irregularities yet certifies election of Jorge Herrera Caldera

Less than three weeks after PAN leader César Nava and PRD leader Jesús Ortega went to the TEPJF to protest the Durango election - the first time in Mexican history that both party leaders together went to TEPJF to demand elections annulled - Mexico's highest tribunal nonetheless affirmed the victory of Jorge Herrera Caldera, PRI governor-elect. Ortega and Nava documented abuses such as the harassment of PRD activists, as well as the blatant interference by outgoing governor Ismael Hernández.

TEPJF, for its part, condemned the stealing of 6 ballot urns, and gunfire at one voting center with 18 other urns, ut, in an echo of its verdict in the tumultuous 2006 election, while it acknowledged irregularities it declared there was not evidence that this directly affected the outcome in the election, the court in other words venturing into the field of social science and likelihood estimation. In the end, Jorge Herrera Caldera will assume as governor the coming Wednesday. Now the next case to be decided by TEPJF is the equally controversial election in Hidalgo.

(Final vote tally: 293, 806 for Herrera, vs. 278,295 for the coalition behind José Rosas Aispuro, Durango Nos Une)

PRI anger, part II: PRI will push for impeachment

Francisco Rojas, PRI group leader in the Chamber of Deputies, announced that PRI would push for an initiative that would introduce a reform allowing for the impeachment of the Mexican president:

"The federal government has not tired of showing us that it is capable of anything, rather than to allow our electoral rise, because the spectacle cynically put on by him and his party to harass and try to shown by him and his party, to harass and to try to bring down the PRI, can not and should not be an option that we accept passively."

The PAN, meanwhile, through party leader César Nava declared its full support for the PRD to head the directorate of the Chamber of Deputies the coming legislative period. PRI is reneging on an earlier agreement where the PRD would take over the rotating presidency, yet in an act of vengeance against the PRD is now seeking control of the directorate for itself.

And to this, which on its own can lead to a serious climate of political instability, ungovernability and unconstitutionality, PRI has now added threats of impeachment.

Senator Gustavo Madero as PAN party president would signal continuity

Gustavo Madero, head of PAN's senate group, announced he would leave his current position in order to compete for the presidency of PAN, given that César Nava will not run for reeelection.

Madero is a very strong candidate for the position, and given his earlier support for the PAN-PRD alliances, his eventual party presidency will signal continuity.

PAN wisely chooses their presidency by a majority vote of its National Council, avoiding - as has happened on every single occasion - acrimonious and devastating mass elections by the party base membership, such as the case of the PRD.

(Not so) Friendly fire not always on the left: Espino compares Cálderon to... Chávez!

Manuel Espino, head of Organización Demócrata Cristiana de América (ODCA), or the "Christian Democratic International," and longstanding critic of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, ratched up the rhetoric a notch  yesterday by arguing Calderón could be compared to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in his "authoritarianism." The reason is Calderón's alleged interference in the process of electing Espino´s successor of this loose center-right organization of christian democratic parties.


Espino, one should note, is hardly a centrist, but a rather ardent rightwinger close to the extremist secret Catholic society El Yunque, and was one of the main responsible for the dirty campaign against AMLO in 2006. Yet ever since he was forced out as PAN party chief in 2008, he has been a bitter opponent of Calderón, publishing three books since 2008 bashing Calderón and his policies.

He certainly has a point regarding his ouster as party president: While Espino was duly elected president of PAN by its National Council (which is exactly the mechanism PRD should resort to, by the way), while Calderón resorted to a mechanism long practiced by PRI, and criticized by Calderón when he in turn was party president, namely where the president of he nation would simply select the party president by a dedazo, rather than through a vote in the party organs. Once president, Calderón threw this old conviction out the window and duly selected both Germán Martínez and César Nava as subsequent PAN presidents. Hence much of the bitterness toward Calderón, as well as programmatic differences: In my eyes Calderón is rather a centrist and far from as socially conservative as Espino. 


"Friendly fire" in Mexican politics thus does not always happen on the left.