PAN's Superbowl: Vázquez Mota wins primary for the presidency

She needed to win a majority of 50 percent plus one vote, or at least 37 percent with 5 percent difference to number two.

She did: With 55 percent to Cordero's 38.1, Vázquez Mota will be the presidential candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in 2012 (with around 90 percent counted).

Former interior secretary Santiago Creel, who was the first to declare his candidacy, had earlier conceded.
Now let's wait and see if Cordero does the same, or whether he will protest the outcome.

(While a national primary, PAN's strength and the brunt of its militants are found in 10 states: Veracruz, Estado de México, Jalisco, Mexico City, Puebla, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Yucatán, Sonora and Guanajuato.)

This was a remarkably dirty campaign, with very nasty labels hurled around (Cordero's description of JVM as "intolerant and anti-democratic" perhaps the most offensive of these.)

Now the question is, to be sure, who she will pull votes from. It seems to me that Enrique Peña Nieto will be the loser here; I bet a bottle of Mexico's finest that he would have preferred Cordero.

This is truly historic: For the first time, one of Mexico's major party will have a women candidate. Good for them!

Santiago Creel, youtubeando

In a time were ever more Mexican politicians are youtubeando in order to try to circumvent  restrictions on "pre-campaigning" or the promotion of their political candidacies before the official start of the election season, Santiago Creel Miranda is the most recent addition to this practice. Creel is using YouTube to promote his money-laundering reform, in the process seeking to breathe life in a rather stagnant bid for PAN's nomination of presidential candidacy in 2012.

Beyond Creel's rather wooden appearance, the proposal at first hearing does seem to make quite sense to me, including a registrar for any transaction above 10,000 pesos, to combat organized crime.