From Tabasco, AMLO appreciates Castro's praise

Following Castro's praise of AMLO and his recent book - Castro coincides, for one, that AMLO won in 2006 but that "the empire didn't let him assume power" - AMLO responded from Tabasco:

"I appreciate the comments and opinions of the distinguished personality of Fidel Castro, and whether or not we agree with his ideas and his political practice, he is without doubt one of the most important world leaders of our time, as were Gandhi, Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh, Salvador Allende and our beloved Nelson Mandela:"

As it were, in Tabasco, tierra natal of AMLO, the PRD is undergoing a massive internal turmoil. AMLO claims to not be part of it and that he stays away from the party organization in his home state, yet plenty of evidence exists to the contrary. Recently, the Tabasco PRD leader Javier May Rodríguez, frankly admitted that while the party has several candidates for the 2012 gubernatorial election, in the end the candidate will be whomever AMLO chooses. 


It is worth recalling that AMLO as well in 2008 imposed his brother José Ramiro López Obrador as PRD leader, who finally stepped down in  after wreaking havoc within the party, and is under investigation for embezzlement and criminal conspiracy following his stint as mayor of the municipality of Macuspana, though as coming from a new local government controlled by PRI, it might well be political in nature.


While on this topic, it is worth noting that another AMLO brother, Arturo López Obrador resigned from the PRD last May, yet unlike AMLO, who not casts his lot with PT, Arturo joined his brother's stated arch-enemy PRI to back Javier López Zavala as the PRI candidate to replace the protector of pederasts and harasser of journalists, outgoing governor Mario Marín. 
Despite AMLO's little brother Pedro Arturo campaigning for López Zavala, Marín's anointed successor lost badly, if surprisingly.

One famous admirer of AMLO's book: Fidel Castro.

In Oaxaca these days, AMLO declared that Mexico's ills of insecurity are a product of "the rotten fruit of a 27-year policy of predatory and speculative capitalism." Why 1983 was chosen as a cut-off year is not clear. Yes, that's when the first major neoliberal reforms under Miguel de Madrid started kicking in, but clearly Mexico's capitalist system had some deep structural flaws before then. Does AMLO really want to return to the era of extremely corrupt, overprotected, and bloated companies - whether they were private monopolies, as many of them were, or parastatal companies - of the preceding era? Is this what we might expect for economic program, should he win in 2012? State or private, Mexican industry was heavily overprotected through tariffs and import barriers yet consumers paid the cost, and corrupt and PRI unions delivered much of the votes to the governing party, in return for fat handouts to the privileged with a PRI-approved union card. This is not forward looking, but extremely backward looking and hence, conservative.


Hard to resist touching upon a minor yet noteworthy tidbit: AMLO's new book has seemingly gotten a reading from none else than Fidel Castro, who praised it and its author: "[AMLO] will be the person with most political and moral authority in Mexico when the system collapses, and with it the Empire." Castro deemed the book "a valiant and irrefutable  denunciation."
This is hardly the endorsement AMLO needs if he is to break away from his hardcore base.

Espino kicked out of PAN?

I've been pondering for a while who might be kicked out/renounce from their respective parties first: Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, or Manuel Espino of the PAN. Now it seems Espino might beat AMLO to the task, as an internal committee of the national PAN leadership is meeting next week to discuss whether Espino should be kicked out. 


The timing is hardly opportune, from a  personal angle: Espino's nephew was just murdered in Ciudad Juárez. 


Yet the decision to go ahead with the process that might very well result in Espino's expulsion is noteworthy for a range of reasons:
- Like AMLO, he is a former national president of the PAN
- In comparison with AMLO - who, for instance, in 2009 actively campaigned against his own party - Espino's transgression appear to me far from warranting expulsion, principally criticizing   the PAN alliances and their candidates in the recent elections. What he has been doing, however, is to be quite vocal in his criticism of president Calderón, and herein lies the key: There is much bad blood between the  president and Espino for a range of reasons, yet their feuds have very little to do with ideology, even though Espino belongs to the hard catholic right of PAN, yet about power, and vengeance. Espino, it should be noted, considers himself a serious contender for the PAN candidacy for president in 2012. It is a rather absurd situation: The man who might represent PAN as its standard bearer in 2012 (his chances are hardly stellar), yet hardly a new one in Mexico: AMLO was PRD party president 96-99 and presidential candidate, yet will most likely bow out if Ebrard gets PRD's nomination for 2112. And in 2008, Ricardo Monreal sought the PRD presidency, yet barely a year later ditched PRD (as he had earlier ditched PRI) for the PT. 


Take-home point: If Espino is kicked out, PAN will remain highly divided, and very unlikely to win in 2012. The fights are not chiefly of ideology, but personal vendettas, and of anger from the party organs for Calderón's blatant imposition of candidates the past three years over the heads of national and state party organizations, resorting to the dedazos he criticized so much when in opposition. Stay tuned for next week's decision. 

PRD: "The Great enemy of the Church"

Hugo Valdemar is one of the most sinister characters in the Mexican catholic church, which on its own should say quite a lot. Valdemar is the official spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Mexico, and usually takes the role as Cardinal Rivera's particularity mean attack dog.

PRD's response to Rivera's outrageous statements that questioned the decision of the Mexican Supreme Court in my eyes were highly measured: PRD's Ortega, to recall, kept his usual cool and noted that one "should be careful with words because deeming a constitutional right as deviant is serious."

What is the church's answer to this?

Reverend Valdeman: "It is clear to me, and clearer than ever, that the national PRD is the great enemy of the Church and a danger to the family."

What is one to make of this? How can one enter into a dialogue with the church, when the extremists have hijacked it, bent on unraveling any progressive move within the last 3-4 decades? How dare the church, which has been on the wrong side of history on almost every conceivable issue - from schooling for girls to suffrage for women to reproductive health classes in the classroom, to name but the tip of the iceberg - accuse the PRD of a "danger" to the family? 

The statements made by Valdemar are worth a read. They are truly Palinesque in their twisting of reality, let alone their internally contradictory and twisted logic.

Party leaders meet with president Calderón in "Security Dialogue"

The decision by Felipe Calderón to convoke a "Security Dialogue" with the leaders of Mexico's party  demonstrates at the very least a modicum of willingness to take their perspectives into account. All parties - PRI, PAN, Convergencia, PVEM, and PANAL - attended, with the exception of the ultra-pejista Partido del Trabajo, PT  - which also shows a certain level of maturity on their part. One cannot blame the president for refusing to listen and then reject an invitation to offer one's criticism in public. (That is, unless on is PT, which called for a national dialogue following the assassination of PRI's gubernatorial candidate in Taumalipas in June, yet now left the chair assigned to the party empty, recalling AMLO's empty chair in the first TV debate of 2006).

PRI and PRD were the most critical, and PRD offered harsh yet legitimate criticism of the government's handling of the "war on drugs." 


PRD party leader Ortega duly criticized the politicization of the Attorney General's office - that is, using its prosecuting power as a political instrument, and repeats its very reasonable demand that this institution, responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes, should rather be autonomous. 


Ortega also gets the quote of the day:
"Eliot Ness didn't defeat the liquor mafias in the United States; the legalization of alcohol did."


The national PRD is also now on the record, to my knowledge for the first time, as supporting legalization of drugs. While many of its cadres have expressed this view, I can't recall having heard this expressed in the name of the PRD proper. 


Update: As was to be expected, Dolores Padierna again called for Ortega's resignation for the umpteenth time (I've completely lost track of the number), this time for meeting with Calderón. 
She represents the worst sectarian and stalinist elements of the PRD.

PRD reacts to Cardinal Rivera's "excess."

Not unexpectedly, the PRD reacted to Cardinal Rivera's tirade against the Supreme Court decision to accept the constitutionality of the gay marriages in Mexico, in the form of national president Ortega and Senator Pablo Gómez. 

PRD President Jesús Ortega: "One should be careful with words because deeming a constitutional right as deviant is serious." 
This point was also very well made by MexFiles yesterday.


This is hardly the first time the cardinal or other members of the high clergy has expressed what is, when taken to its logical conclusion, a contingent acceptance of Mexican law, indirectly a consequence of democracy.
It also goes beyond the issue of law: It is worth recalling that in December 2009, the Mexico City Assembly voted 39-20 to allow gay marriages - a factor of nearly two to one. The church is therefore not only undermining respect for the law, but also the actions of the democratically elected local assembly of Mexico City.

These are dangerous waters for the church to tread. 

Four years later, PT still refuses to meet with Calderón: A note on the "Workers Party"

While both PRD and Convergencia agreed to join today's "Dialogue on Security" arranged by President Felipe Calderón, the Partido del Trabajo (Workers Party, PT) refused to sit down with the president of Mexico and contribute to a national debate of the current crises in Mexico.
The party thus continues its line established after the 2006 debacle to refuse to have anything to do with what it still claims is an illegitimate government. Yet this has nothing to do with principles, but is just  another indication that the PT, desperate to retain its party registry, continues to jump as soon as AMLO says so. The party is completely beholden to him, just as AMLO, seemingly paradoxically, is also very much reliant on the PT's official party registry. It is also irresponsible to reject even sitting in on, let alone participating in, such a national debate. 


The PT poses as a leftwing, more "radical" alternative to the PRD, a party it declared as its "electoral enemy" in the 2009 Federal elections yet has joined in an uneasy coalition called DIA, short for "Dialogue for the Reconstruction of Mexico," but the history of the party exposes it as an electoral outfit that is only challenged by the Green Party (PVEM) for the prize of Mexico's must utterly opportunistic and unprincipled party. Its support for AMLO has very little to do with ideology or programmatic affinity, but everything to do with practical matters. 


One can go all the back to the very beginning, when the PT was set up in the late 1980s-early 1990s by none other than Raul Salinas, the "inconvenient brother" of Carlos Salinas, in an attempt to siphon off votes from the left. While the PT eventually took on a life of its own, I think it is very much worth recalling that before the 2006 elections, it took months of hard negotiation to bring the PT on board behind AMLO's candidacy. The PT almost went with PRI, and only joined AMLO's coalition due to generous concessions from the PRD, as the PT was handed a number of secure seats for deputies and senators far beyond what its vote tally would warrant (this was part of the pre-2007 electoral reform coalition negotiations). It is no small irony that the party that is now in true Stalinist spirit ultraloyal to AMLO in 2006 almost joined the archenemy, the PRI. 


I find the PT's lack of willingness to join this national dialogue, far from reflecting anything resembling a principled ideological stand - the party doesn't have an iota of this - to be more of the same: Pure opportunism, and irresponsible politicking.