Fox, no longer with PAN

Many in the PAN would like to kick Vicente Fox out of the party, above all given his increasingly public embrace of then-PRI candidate and now president Enrique Peña Nieto. Yet Fox might beat them to it: The former president (2000-6) said he won't renew his party membership, in protest over those who have "appropriated" the party - a not-too-veiled reference to ex-president Felipe Calderón.

Not that Fox was ever very close to the PAN - even though he was a federal deputy for the party already back in 1988 and won the presidency on the PAN label in 2000, he pretty much ignored the party when in government, an amazingly stupid approach given his infamous inability to get anything done as president.

That Fox will simply cease to be a member is also convenient for the party itself, as it will avoid the messy spectacle of a protracted expulsion process. Fox, for his part, will go down in history as the candidate who kicked the PRI out of national power, but then helped it get back in again in 2012. And not very much more.

Source:

Fox duda seguir en el PAN. El Universal, Nov. 26, 2012

Sharp Calderón response to Fox's "truce" suggestion: It is your fault

Recently, former president Vicente Fox notably called for a "truce" of some kind with the criminal gangs fighting the Mexican government, and each other.

Calderón yesterday offered a rebuke that could hardly be harsher, essentially stating that Mexico is in this situation because of the truce Fox gave these organizations: "to the extent that one did not act with determination against the criminals, they were expanding in networks all around the country."

Essentially: It is Fox' fault for not having taken them on.

So much for the party unity that prominent PAN members have been calling for: It is hard to image the relations between the current and former presidents being any colder.

Vicente Fox calls for truce with drug gangs

The reactions to the abominable attack in Monterrey, which Calderón understandably refers to as a terrorist act - what else is one to call a targeted attack on civilians, timed to inflict as many deaths as possible? - have of course been condemned by the national and international community, though former president Vicente Fox used the occasion to call for a "truce" with the drug gangs.

Long a proponent of legalization of drugs (though notably not while he was president), as far as I can see this is the first time Fox has made such a declaration, which certainly goes against the grain of other official declarations.

Alejandro Poiré of Mexico´s National Security Council immediately rejected the suggestion of a truce.

The Gordillo scandal, part one: Calderón responds - and blames Fox!

The scandal has been brewing for a few days now, ever since Elba Esther Gordillo, leader of the SNTE teacher union, confirmed some days ago what most suspected, namely that a dirty PRI-style horsetrading took place in 2006 between Gordillo and PAN, where Gordillo used her personal party PANAL to back Calderón and very likely ensure his victory in a tight race, in exchange for political positions.

As a great Associated Press rundown puts it, quoting  José Antonio Crespo - the story is getting international attention - "Political analyst José Antonio Crespo said the allegations show that the old way of doing politics in Mexico hasn't changed even with ouster of the PRI."

Calderón kept silent of the issue, until now, when he claimed that no, he didn't really negotiate any thing, he merely respected an agreement made between Gordillo and outgoing president Vicente Fox.

Do you believe El Señor Presidente on this one?
Nor do I. And I can't wait to hear Fox's response to these allegations.

Fox can't keep his mouth shut: "Venezuela facilitates narco trafficking"

Calderón doesn't exactly have swell relations with Venezuela - as the Wikileaks have demonstrated, he maniacally sought to convince the United States that AMLO was funded by Hugo Chávez, which was of course utter nonsense - but statements like these by ex-President Vicente Fox certainly don't help either: On visit in the Dominican Republic, he claimed, without as far as I can see offering a shred of evidence, that the government of Venezuela is facilitating (facilitar, even "helping" or "promoting") drug trafficking.

If you have evidence, Chente, cough it up. If not, ¡Cállate Chachalaca¡

10 years of PAN governments: INEGI figures offer damning indictments

The graph to the left, courtesy of Milenio,  shows the rise in informal employment in the first four years of the sexenio of Mexico's "President of Employment," as Felipe Calderón's 2006 campaign slogan went: In short, up from 11.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, to 12.85 million in the third quarter of 2010. The figures are from Mexico's national statistics institute, INEGI, although other organziations such as Centro de Estudios Económicos del Sector Privado (CEESP) argue that the real figure is far higher, given INEGI's restrictive definition of informal unemployment: According to CEESP, the real figure might be as high as 28 million, or upwards of 64 percent of Mexico's population.

On their face value, I find CEESP's numbers to appear too high, yet the main point from INEGI's figures is clear: Calderón has presided over a big jump in the number of people working in the informal sector, following a trend by President Vicente Fox (up 1.73 million) before him.

Regarding actual unemployment, in a La Jornada article along the same lines, calculations indicate that unemployment quadrupled in the 10 years of PAN rule: 2.6 million with no unemployment, and a further 5.4 million who, in INEGI's categorization, have "desisted" or basically given up on seeking formal work.
Those underemployed, according again to INEGI, rose from 3 million to 3.7 million.

The moniker "Presidente del Empleo" has long since turned into a joke. Following INEGI's statistics, it appears an increasingly cruel one.

Carlos Salinas 959-page book not on my reading list

As usually in Mexico I stock up on recent interesting books on current politics. So far I've aquired the most recent book by Carmen Aristegui on the child-raping fascist Marcial Maciel - great for bedtime stories - Soledad Loaza's recent collection of articles on the PAN, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas' recent memoirs. Yet speaking of memoirs, one book I will shy away from for many reasons is Carlos Salinas' recent desperate 959-page attempt to reinvent himself and defend his presidency. Yet my decision was not made merely to save a few pesos, or for ideological reasons: The book appears an absolute piece of junk, combining petty attacks on many of Mexico's intellectuals with an array of stuff that is simply made up.

A few cases in point:
- Salinas attacks the presidency of Fox and his first foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda for having voted in favor of the Iraq War! Where on earth does he get this from? First, as Castañeda points out, Mexico never voted - there was never a vote in UN, to recall, despite or in spite of Colin Powell's pathetic "presentation" of WMDs - yet more importantly, Fox was the entire time against Bush's war on Iraq.
- He is accusing Castañeda of having presented the thesis of Mexico as a "failed state" - though Castañeda has consistently argued against this view.

Now I admit I am not the world's greatest admirer of Jorge Castañeda, who, despite of many notable insights, in addition to being a bit of a pompous windbag has also opined far too often on topics of which he has very little knowledge. Yet compared with Salinas, he is an intellectual giant.

If Salinas can't even get such basic facts straights, or is as stupid as to knowingly and blatantly distorting them in this manner, his apologia is hardly worth anyone's time, and your 300 pesos should rather be spent elsewhere.

"He wanted to fuck him over" confirmed by Fox

Back in 2007, Proceso in an excerpt from the Jorge Castañeda-Rubén Aguilar book La Diferencia revealed that, according to his former functionaries, "He wanted to fuck him over": Fox wanted to do everything possible to destroy AMLO's presidential ambitions. With the failed desafuro, Fox certainly battered his own democratic credentials.

The battering continues, and yet again it is self inflicted: In an interview with Mario Campos, she asks the former president: "Did you load the dice against AMLO?" And Fox responds:

"Yes certainly, to whatever extent I could, and it is democratic, and for that I say, as I've said before, it was a second win for me."

Call it what you want, but don't call it democratic. It is simply remarkable how Fox himself continues to tear down what remains of his image as the harbinger of democracy in Mexico.

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.

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?