Cardinal Norberto Rivera takes a rare worthwhile stand

Statement: 

"It is a shame that they are always concerned about unimportant and trivial matters... ignoring human situations such gravity that require effective responses and solutions background."

This criticism might very well have been hurled against the Mexican church, which in the past weeks have been, among other things, remarkably preoccupied with the sex lives of others, and more seriously still hurling baseless insults at its opponents (including calling one of Mexico's largest parties "fascist"), whipping up hysteria among its followers,and rejecting the laws and institutions of the Mexican state itself. 

Yet the words come from Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, and were reported in the church's printed organ Desde la Fe. Rivera calls on the authorities to do more to protect migrants, criticizing the Calderón administration for not doing enough to punish those responsible for atrocities such as the recent massacre of 72 immigrants in Tamaulipas. 

Rivera declared, "A mute church does not serve god nor mankind." Yet this is exactly the point: Speaking out to defend immigrants and attacking the government for not following its own laws is clearly a very different issue than the spewing of hate-speech toward gay people, whose right to marry was recently declared constitutional by law, or outrightly rejecting the secular state and Mexico's laws, products of institutionalized democratic processes, even if the latter allow for practices adamantly opposed to by the church, such as abortion in Mexico City. 

It is a shame that the church apparently cannot easily or will not see the monumental differences between the two types of "speaking up."

Remarkable vote in PRD Guerrero state council

Yesterday, the state council of PRD Guerrero - its highest party authority - voted 103-1, with six abstentions, to confirm Ángel Aguirre Rivero as the PRD's candidate for governor next year. The vote is rather remarkable: Even though one might expect a brunt of Aguirre's detractors to want to jump on the band wagon  and side with the winner, the vote shows how little impact current governor Zeferino Torreblanca has over the party branch. It also displays, at least on the surface, a massive party unity behind Aguirre's candidacy.
Aguirre, to recall, is currently a PRI senator, yet ditched the party to run as the PRD's candidate. Aguirre was also a former interim governor of Guerrero, and retains a very significant following.

Very significantly, Aguirre agreed to creating a Truth Commission, a key demand of the left, in order to seek clearing up the many murders of party, social, and human rights activists in Guerrero, under Torreblanca's rule and previous governments. Like Gabino Cué in Oaxaca, Aguirre also agreed to support constitutional reform that will allow for revocation of the governor's mandate midterm.

And most important of all - if Aguirre sticks to his word and puts his friendship with Enrique Peña Nieto aside - he promised to work for PRD's presidential campaign in 2012, whoever the candidate might be.

Gordian knot cut, for now, in San Lázaro: Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín president of the Congress directorate

The crisis engulfing the Mexican congress regarding control over its key organs appears to be resolved, for now, yet the deal appears more than a bit shady: PRI will preside over the Congress directorate, while the PRD will get control over both the directorate and the coordinating junta the last year of the congress period.

To recall: PRI, reneging on previous accords, decided to go for the presidency for the coming year of the mesa ejecutiva or Congress directorate, a key organ, even though this corresponded to the PRD. Given that the presidency of both the directorate and the coordinating junta rotates among the three largest parties in congress, this would, given the cycle, leave the PRD in control of both of these organs the last year of congress, which would be unconstitutional. Then how was this possibly resolved?

The coordinators of the parties in congress agreed to a deal where PRD will get to preside the two organs, though a special vote of 2/3 majority will be held where the stipulations of the Organic Law regulating Congress will simply be "set aside" for that year. PRD will simply have to take their word for it, that this will actually come to pass.

Yet it gets fishier. Knowing that the part of PRD allied with Andrés Manuel López Obrador was strongly opposed to allowing the Nueva Izquirda faction obtain the Congress presidency, the deal that PRD's group coordinator and AMLO  incondicional Alejandro Encinas made appears a bit suspicious, given that Encinas himself loudly condemned as unconstitutional just a few days ago the outcome he now has apparently signed on to.

The new mesa ejecutiva president, Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín, is considered very close to PRI national leader Beatriz Paredes, who has not given up her own presidential ambitions, or at least to be mayor of Mexico City. Even though she will step down as PRI leader, her influence will thus clearly be felt in San Lázaro the coming session.

Enrique Peña Nieto's report to the Mexico State Congress: A freudian moment

Mexico is not only facing the threat of narcos:

"There is another serious threat: the struggle of power for the sake of power, which promotes ademocracy without content, and for the sole purpose of gaining power projects are negotiated between antagonistic alliances, which generate confusion and distrust in politics."

The words well be used to describe the alliances Enrique Peña Nieto has tied with the Mexican Church, which despite the PRI's historic role as a defender of the secular state has become a key ally in promoting Peña Nieto's presidential candidacy, as well as with a range of business interests of more or less shady character linked to former president Carlos Salinas. But no: the words were uttered by Peña Nieto himself, as he used the occasion of his fifth informe or report to the Mexico State congress to launch a full frontal attack on the PRI-PAN alliances. Peña Nieto knows well that should a PAN-PRD materialize for Mexico State in 2011, and should it win and thereby block Peña Nieto from leaving the state in the hands of an anointed successor, his chances for winning the presidency in 2012 would have received a brutal blow. Peña Nieto continued:

"Crime is not the only risk facing the country. Another serious threat to Mexicans is the lack of congruency in the negotiation of alliances between antagonistic visions, and this fight only leads to authoritarianism and reduced people's options and undermines the spirit of democracy."

To be able to state such nonsense with a straight face requires a good actor and Peña Nieto apparently has received some good acting lessons recently from his telenovela girlfriend. Yet to claim that the PRD-PAN alliances lead to authoritarianism and undermine democracy, when these alliances, in Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Puebla, recently succeeded in overthrowing authoritarian state governments that had been ruled by PRI for 80 years, is such a brazen distortion of political reality that I am only bracing myself for the next installment of Peña Nieto's "reality show," increasingly removed from reality. 


More here and here.

Why can't Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez stop talking about sex?

Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez of Guadalajara is taking a few pages out of the play book of the truly wackiest elements of the U.S. Republican Party. Remember when former Senator and now presidential hopeful Rick Santorum a few years ago compared gay marriage with "man on child, man on dog"? He was not reelected. Former Arizona congressman and possibly even more utter lunatic J.D. Hayworth a few months back resorted to the same argument, warning that a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling put marriage under threat and could lead to man-horse nuptials. 

Cardinal Sandoval has now joined the fray:

"If what the [Supreme] Court is defending is a right of adults, then, over time, adults could be entitled to claim the right to establish any relationship with anyone, person or animal. (And for the record, we are not equating homosexual relationships with the relationships between animals, because there are plenty of those who would want to interpret it this way)"

Exactly who would interpret it this way, cardinal? On what authority do you make these claims? 


Or rather, what explains Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez increasingly bizarre obsession with sex?

José Murat Casab could be expelled from PRI - and Zeferino Torreblanca "not going to eat shit"

It's the season of party purges. A mere days after Luis Armando Reynoso Femat was kicked out of the PAN - Manuel Espino may follow soon - PRI announced that it has started the process of expelling José Murat Casab from the party. 


Murat is also a former governor - he was the PRI governor of Oaxaca 1998-2004 - and is now accused of having assisted, or not having done anything to prevent, Gabino Cué from winning the governorship of Oaxaca this July. Despite having been a national senator and four-time national deputy for the PRI, as well as a range of other offices within the party, Murat has become somewhat of a loose cannon the last couple of years. In a book released in 2008, “La Agonía de la Democracia Mexicana," he attacked his own party for having kept a "complicit silence" during the "scandalous election" in 2006, which he openly rejected as a "fraud." (See an El Universal review of the book here). Murat Casab (of Iraqi origin) also condemned the TEPJF, the highest electoral court in Mexico, as accomplices in the operation - though it should be noted that he hardly produces any hard evidence for either this or the "fraud" in general in his book. 


Incidentally, another soon-to-be ex-governor will possibly added to the list of party expulsions: Zeferino Torreblanca of Guerrero. Zeferino recently launched an angry tirade against the PRD when he failed to impose his own candidate to succeed him as governor. 
He has since continued his criticism, declaring to a group of municipal mayors - all from PRI - 

"Out of convenience, some politicians eat shit. I'm not going to eat shit from nowhere, I promised not to get rich from the government and not go around lying; I will work to promote democracy in the [upcoming] vote;  it's up to you... why don't they explain why they handed over Guerrero, let's see what they'll tell the lower PRD members; here the PRD was the strongest"

Strong and quite peculiar words, in particular as Torreblanca has been strongly criticized for riding roughshod over the PRD and almost completely shutting it out of his own government. 
Now the kicker: The Guerrero branch of the PRD revealed that Torreblanca will not be able to compete on any PRD label in the near future as he has not paid his own membership dues since mid-2009; since 2005 he has moreover only paid a fraction of the peso amount party regulations state that an executive should contribute to the party. 


Even AMLO has paid his.  


The question remains: For whom will Torreblanca campaign in 2011?

2006, again: Errors, but no fraud, according to Woldenberg.

It was not the first time and I'll bet a Herradura Reposado that it will not be last time that the contested 2006 election will be subject of academic panels and conferences. 
Yet academic José Woldenberg's take on the 2006 elections are nonetheless significant. Woldenberg is a man who throughout his career has always been placed squarely on the political left; he was even a PRD member for couple of years, though he left it in 1991.   Notably, he was also the first IFE president (1997-2003), and the UNAM professor remains a man of very high credibility to many - to the point where not a few people, including many perredistas, have toyed around with the idea of "Woldenberg Presidente!" for 2012. 
(which probably would make him the first Jewish presidential candidate in Mexican history, though I'll defer to Mexfiles' expertise on that subject). 


Regardless: Woldenberg in a recent conference on the democratic transition in Mexico noted that nobody has presented any evidence that Calderón's victory was artificially engineered: The IFE commited mistakes" - "I emphasize, mistakes, not fraud" - Woldenberg dixit. 


The mistakes were, according to Woldenberg, a badly designed PREP, the Preliminary Electoral Results Program, and to only declare that the results were "close" but not giving any  figures from the quick count that night. 


(Actually, Luis Carlos Ugalde, the much maligned IFE president, dealt with this as well in his Así lo viví, now out in cheap bolsillo edition, , which is very much worth a read. Here Ugalde relates that he still wonders if this was a mistake, yet points out that giving out preliminary numbers that favored on of the candidates, where the difference was still within margin of error, might very well have led to the candidate apparently in the lead simply declaring victory.)


Yet here I agree more with Virgilio Andrade, who in my opinion is one of the brightest stars to have served on the IFE. Andrade accepts that the PREP was not clear, but that the real problem was the IFE had not explained properly in advanced that deals had been made in advance with the parties that no winner were to be declared if the preliminary results of the quick count (not to be confused with the PREP) did not give a clear winner.


Regardless, Woldenberg is hardly likely to score any points with the AMLO camp for his recent reaffirmation that while the elections were polarized and dirty, there was no fraud in 2006.