Oportunidades spending doubled under Calderón

Amidst all the talk of rising poverty figures in Mexico, here's one case where I think Calderón deserves credit:

The highly successful conditional cash-transfer program Oportunidades saw its budget double from 2005 to 2011 - it jumped from 28 billion to 57 billion pesos. This is truly impressive.

While no magic bullet to end poverty, Oportunidades has proven vastly succesful in terms of enrolling more children in school, making sure they stay there, and improving nutrition for infants and children, among other gains.In Mexico it now covers almost 6 million households, or 29 million people. Most live on the countryside,  and not in the big cities.

There is a reason why this has been copied by so many other countries, most famously in Brazil's Bolsa Familia.

Graphic from El Universal of its component parts:

The cost of Mexico's 2012 election: 16 billion pesos. Church weighs in.

Mexico's federal electoral institute (IFE) has requested almost 16 billion pesos for the 2012 presidential election. This whopping sim is particularly notable as the 2007-08 electoral reform had as one of its main goals to reduce the cost of elections, principally due to only allowing parties to contract tv/radio advertisements through slots allotted to them by IFE, rather than purchasing themselves at a massive cost.

Head of IFE Leonardo Valdés defended the cost - 30 percent higher than in 2006 - as a  product of IFE's new functions that include, among others, much more expanded media monitoring, but also due to increased insecurity as a product of the fight with and between drug gangs. He also insists  that the institute is ready for 2012, though public approval of - and faith in - IFE has been dropping notably in recent months.

Some of this may be attributed to the Catholic church, which demanded that the institute be a representative of citizens and not of parties, while it denounced the IFE's rising operating costs. The church also attacked the "restrictive laws" of 2007 that it claims restrict freedom of expression, even though it was not passed by IFE but by Congress and IFE merely has to follow the new legislation. It also conspicuously made no mention of the recent IFE/TEPJF verdict that the Archdiocese broke the law in its attack on the PRD.

One of church's points is well taken, though: It criticized the lack of autonomy of state electoral institutes and their ease of manipulation vis-a-vis state governors. This is truly an increasing problem that was noted by several of IFE's councilors I interviewed last summer.

Internal PRI documents: Enrique Peña Nieto already has 90,000 operators

Internal PRI documents leaked to Milenio suggest that outgoing Mexico State Governor Enrique Peña Nieto already has, through the network Fuerza Mexiquense, more than 90,000 "political operators" around Mexico ready to promote his highly likely PRI presidential candidacy.

The  Fuerza Mexiquense grew threefold in 2010-11, and played key roles in particularly the elections of Veracruz, Quintana Roo and Nayarit, and above all Yucatán, essentially taking over Ivonne Ortega's campaign.

Followers of Mexican politics may recall that Fuerza Mexiquense is not, however, the creation of Peña Nieto , but was rather set up by former PRI governor Arturo Montiel, who lost the 2006 PRI nomination due to the massive corruption scandals of his government. Peña Nieto, to be sure, has done absolutely nothing to investigate Montiel, his political mentor.

Now, Peña Nieto's expansion of Montiel's Fuerza Mexiquense is merely yet another telltale sign that rather than representing anything "new," Peña Nieto represents continuity rather than any rupture with the "old" PRI.

PRD pays off debt from 2006 encampments

It took the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) five years to pay off the debt the party incurred when following the exhortations of its 2006 presidential candidate to "defend" his claimed victory by setting up a huge Mexico City encampment, as well as storming the congressional dais at several locations, actions for which the PRD was fined 52 million pesos.

The PRD was left with a crippling debt thanks to this as well as a massive debt contracted by former party president Rosario Robles, which ascended to 713 million pesos by 2008. Under party president Jesús Ortega (2008-11), it drastically reduced its debt, now down to 257. The PRD also sold off a building bought by Robles (with a loss - it was uninhabitable, an a monument over Robles's disastrous party presidency), and will now move back to its historic location on Insurgentes/Monterrey 50.

IFE gave the party a 94.4 out of 100 for transparency in its expense accounts - compared to 58.3 for the PRI.

AMLO's 5-year head start: 170,000 political operators

Given AMLO's propensity for exaggeration, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt, but given his 5-year head start - AMLO already in 2006 started the work of setting up the structure for the 2012 election - they appear accurate: His MORENA movement claims to have 34,000 electoral committees in the country, with a total of 170,000 political operators. In addition, AMLO has the support of the IDN faction of PRD, which overlaps with the "Movement for Hope" (MNE) of the discredited René Bejarano-Dolores Padierna couple.

AMLO's movement/electoral structure in turn builds on the Redes Ciudadanas, or "Citizen Networks" that operated in parallel to the three parties of his 2006 coalition.

Carlos Fuentes' presidential endorsement appreciated

It was an endorsement Marcelo Ebrard said he was very happy with: Carlos Fuentes said he preferred him to be the left's candidate in 2012, even when measured up against non-party candidates such as Juan Ramón de la Fuente.

For his part, AMLO minimized the endorsement.

Marcelo Ebrard's new girlfriend

Gossip, yes, but everything is political: Rosalinda Bueso might be Mexico's first lady, and as such is well worth a profile: She is the former Honduran ambassador to Mexico, and when some members of her own embassy who backed the 2009 coup in Honduras tried to keep her out from the embassy, Ebrard sent city police to back her. She remained in Mexico City after her appointment ended and now, six months after Ebrard confirmed he would divorce Mariagna Prats, she is officially appearing as his pareja sentimental.h 

This one is for the historians: When was the last time Mexico had a foreign first lady?

Here is a photo, courtesy of El Universal