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. 

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?