Notable vote in PAN's Mexico State branch: Yes to alliance with PRD with 104-1 margin

While the state branch of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was widely expected to endorse its alliance with PRD in Mexico State, the 104-1 vote in favor was nonetheless quite remarkable, given the rancor and bad blood between the PAN and PRD following the 2006 federal election. With the infamous Ley Peña or "Peña Nieto's law," as it has been nicknamed in Mexico, already in vigor, a PAN-PRD alliance faced a new significant obstacle in that the parties will have to come up with common candidates for all legislative lists and run under one label, but given the support from the alliances from the top leadership of PAN, including all the contenders for the PAN presidency, it was a done deal: Felipe Calderón is determined not to be the president that "returned" Los Pinos, or the presidential compound, to PRI.

A significantly bigger obstacle lies with the PRD. As noted on many occasions, AMLO and the movement-advocates in and outside the PRD are doing everything they can to avoid a vote in the PRD state council in favor of an alliance with PAN. The most recent antics, as Milenio reports, is that not only is AMLO calling personally PRD state councilors to "convince" them to reject the alliance in the upcoming vote, but that the internal PRD faction Grupo de Acción Política, which is based exclusively in Mexico State yet has declared its support for AMLO's 2012 candidacy,  is offering up up 6000 pesos to every councilor that will vote against the alliance. What's next?

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas seeks to place his son Lázaro as PRD president

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas will never, ever give up his presidential ambitions. Either he, or one of his sons, will be president of Mexico. While Cárdenas  is much more of a statesman than AMLO has ever been and likely ever will be, he has on a range of occasions displayed exactly the same stubborn me-or-the-highway approach. He has run 3 times for national president and was only blocked from doing so in 2006 as virtually the entire PRD pushed for him to decline. Yet rather than help AMLO win, he hardly lifted a finger in his native Michoacán for AMLO's candidacy, nor did his sons.

Now, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is eagerly jumping in the fray again - as if he ever really left - by backing the plans by the anti-Ortega crowd in the PRD to put his son, former governor (2004-2008) of Michoacán Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, as a new "unity" PRD leader between the pro-AMLO and the pro-Ortega groups, which constitute the most significant division in the party. Be sure that it is also part of the plan to present Lázaro Cárdenas Batel as a similar presidential candidate of unity in 2012, after Marcelo Ebrard and AMLO tear themselves and the party apart. Cárdenas met with the anti-Ortega group, nicknamed G8, and demanded the immediate resignation of Ortega, but refuses to state that he backs his son as the new party president. The old caudillo is fooling no one.

Former party president Leonel Cota renounces PRD to join the Green Party

 Leonel Cota's decision to abandon the party he as president to join the Mexican Green Party (PVEM), an extremely opportunistic electoral outfit devoid of any ideology or programmatic content, let alone care for the environment, is almost poetically logical. Cota, to recall, was a priísta until the late 1990s, but bailed PRI when the party failed to nominate him as its gubernatorial candidate for Baja California Sur. AMLO, then PRD president, encouraged Cota to join the PRD and run on its own label, which he successfully did. In 2005, with AMLO's presidential candidacy seemingly on tracks, he imposed Cota Montaño as PRD party president, a post he held until 2008. I have yet to meet any elite member of the PRD - either pro-AMLO or pro-Ortega, or anywhere in between, who had any good word to say about his leadership; he was universally regarded an absentee landlord, a caretaker president who took no initiatives on his own but followed any command of AMLO. He ended his presidency on a particular bad note, disgracing himself by directly interfering in the internal election to elect his successor, prematurely, and falsely, declaring Alejandro Encinas to be the winner. 


Now, Leonel Cota sought to be the PRD candidate for mayor of Los Cabos, but the PRD's Comisión Política Nacional, which represents all major party groups in somewhat of a council of elders, cancelled what was to have been a statewide poll to elect its candidates, due to disturbances and irregularities in the process. Cota, of course, huffed and puffed and accused the PRD of merely cancelling an internal election he was sure to win. He had earlier threatened to leave the party unless it made him its candidate, his decision to join the PVEM, a long-time enemy of the PRD and close ally of the PRI, is still more than bit shocking, yet given his opportunistic trajectory, ultimately congruent with his maxim: Your own interest first, always. 

Greatest joke of the day: Emilio González Márquez announces his presidential candidacy

Emilio González Márquez is decidedly one of the most unsavory and unpopular politicians within the Partido Acción Nacional. For many who were not familiar with Jalisco's governor, González Márquez leaped to international prominence when he appeared smashed - drunk, that is - at a banquet, and declared, to critics of his blatantly illegal act to hand over millions of pesos of taxpayer money to the ultra-reactionary Mexican Catholic Church, that they could "go fuck their mothers." To add, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez  was front row in the audience, and merely giggled to González Márquez' commentary. 


To recall, the governor's "gift" to the church caused quite a scandal, as it was revealed that he was in the process of handing out tens of millions pesos more for the church to build a sanctuary for catholics killed during the Cristero Rebellion. 

One would think this "Macrolimosna" scandal, as it became known, which caused widespread rejection among the populace, would have put a lid on the Jalisco governor's political ambitions, but think again: Emilio González Márquez just declared he is running for the presidency! 

Emilio, you certainly brightened up my day! Now let's see if you can stay sober for just one press conference...

(The famous drunk speech can be seen here)

Shame on Alejandro Encinas: A well-respected man adopts AMLO's reasoning on democracy

I've met and interviewed Alejandro Encinas, and I know well his trajectory in the PRD. The man has a past in the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), but has long been very far from a radical, ideological or otherwise. It is therefore really sad to see how his blind defense of AMLO has led to his adopting some of the same twisted logic on the value of democratic representation and institutions. Regarding the recent vote in the state of Mexico, where the PRD state council, elected in 2008 by mass vote, was just one short of a 2/3 majority in favor of allying with the PAN for 2011, until AMLO's supporters blocked the vote, Encinas has the following to say: 

"The size of the PRD is not measured by the size of its bureaucracy;  the bureaucracy does not necessarily represent the social base of the PRD, so that's why one shouldn't go for the illusion of the numbers."

This dangerous, irresponsible thinking should really be beneath Encinas. It is sad to read. Not only is this a pathetic attempt to preempt what may be a successful 2/3 vote when the state council reconvenes by already dismissing the vote outcome before it has taken place; it shows a profound disregard for accepting the results of democratic votes when they don't go your way. What Encinas calls "illusion" is a vote made by the PRD state council, which is elected by party base. In the worst of Stalinist fashion, it merely substitutes "the party is always right" for a "the party base is always right," allowing for the absurd implication that there is somehow a disconnect between the "real" party of the mass bases and the state PRD leadership, when the former duly elected the latter. 


But there is more: How far does this reasoning go? To hell with congress, to hell with the presidency, to hell with courts, to hell with democracy, because these are really just an "illusion" as opposed to the "people"? It is a very dangerous path to embark upon, especially coming from a man who is the PRD's parliamentary leader in congress. 

To what moral depths are Hugo Valdemar and the Mexican high clergy capable of sinking?

"Nothing's Shocking," was the title of Jane's Addiction's debut album, a reflection of its time.
I really thought I'd reached a similar level of resignation with the utterances of the high clergy of the Mexican catholic church, ever more outrageous, bigoted, homophobic, misogynist and hateful. Yet then there is Hugo Valdemar, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Mexico.


"Father" Valdemar now argues that PRD and Marcelo Ebrard - among the forces who have fought the most against discrimination of gays in Mexico - are actually guilty of homophobia. Yes, homophobia. By "irresponsibly promoting and approving the laws that endorse marriages of the same sex," Valdemar opines, PRD and Ebrard are provoking people who feel their marriage is under attack and hence, will take it out on gays. So, by promoting gay rights, PRD and Ebrard are guilty of homophobia. 


To assume for a moment Valdemar's thinking and put this horrendous logic, or the absolute lack of any, in perspective: Civil right defenders in the 1950s United States should not have promoted laws that allowed for civil rights for blacks, because this would only have provoked the white racists who burned crosses and murdered blacks. The real racists, then, were the civil rights campaigners. 


Is it really any wonder that the Mexican church is losing adherents,to alternative churches and the progressive forces of secularism, literally by the day?

Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo: "Either a single man decides or the collegiate organs decide"

Some PRD talkback after AMLO's increasingly aggressive attacks on the PRD: Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo responds to AMLO in an interview with Carlos Marin:

"Either a single man decides or the collegiate bodies decide, and I have always been a support of the idea that many heads, those of institutions, those of horizontal organizations, are better than illuminated men"

This is indeed the crux of the issue: Should the PRD follow a caudillo, or should it follow the institutional path of its own democratically elected organs. 

The interview is well watching in its entirety on youtube.