PAN's Superbowl: Vázquez Mota wins primary for the presidency

She needed to win a majority of 50 percent plus one vote, or at least 37 percent with 5 percent difference to number two.

She did: With 55 percent to Cordero's 38.1, Vázquez Mota will be the presidential candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in 2012 (with around 90 percent counted).

Former interior secretary Santiago Creel, who was the first to declare his candidacy, had earlier conceded.
Now let's wait and see if Cordero does the same, or whether he will protest the outcome.

(While a national primary, PAN's strength and the brunt of its militants are found in 10 states: Veracruz, Estado de México, Jalisco, Mexico City, Puebla, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Yucatán, Sonora and Guanajuato.)

This was a remarkably dirty campaign, with very nasty labels hurled around (Cordero's description of JVM as "intolerant and anti-democratic" perhaps the most offensive of these.)

Now the question is, to be sure, who she will pull votes from. It seems to me that Enrique Peña Nieto will be the loser here; I bet a bottle of Mexico's finest that he would have preferred Cordero.

This is truly historic: For the first time, one of Mexico's major party will have a women candidate. Good for them!

The catholic church and the drug war

A recent article well worth reading from The Christian Science Monitor, entitled "Growing Catholic divide over Mexico drug war," portrays José Raúl Vera López of Saltillo, the very progressive-minded bishop of Saltillo:

Bishop José Raúl Vera López of Mexico has never shied away from controversy, defending unpopular minorities ranging from illegal migrants to prostitutes. 

Now, as violence between Mexican drug traffickers and security forces pushes the drug war's five-year death toll over 45,000, the Roman Catholic bishop is taking on the government. He claims that corrupt officials are allying with criminals to skim drug profits and using the military to murder criminals who might reveal any collusion

Roderic Ai Camp is cited as suggesting the main reason the church is generally staying out of commenting on the drug "war" is out of desire not to undermine Mexico's security institutions. Camp has few rivals when it comes to the breadth and scope of his research and knowledge of Mexico, but he has often gone way too soft on the church in his writing, and I think this claim only reflects one reason why the church is not saying/doing more - and not only that of the generous "narco donations," though that reason surely warrants mention.

35,000 teachers march in Mexico City

Teachers in Oaxaca, mostly "dissidents" in that they are opposed to the national teacher union SNTE and instead belong to the rival CNTE, have a bad fame for spending very little of their work hours in the classroom and instead out on the road protesting or operating for electoral purposes.

Now they've been joined by other, mostly CNTE-affiliated teachers, from Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán and other states in a huge 35,000-strong protest in Mexico City.

Some of their demands are just: Democratization of the ultra-corrupt SNTE teacher union led by Elba Esther Gordillo. They also have legitimate concerns over the overhaul of ISSTE, changing the terms for retirement pensions and health care to public workers, though this was passed more than four years ago and was arguably needed to avoid complete bankruptcy of the system.

Yet what is their major demand? They refuse to be subject to any tests of their qualifications whatsoever, as proposed in the Alianza por la Calidad de la Educación.  No comprehensive entrance exams, no tests later on to see if they are actually qualified to teach Mexico's children and youth, which Mexico's poor educational ratings suggest they may not be.

Is this really a fair and just cause, worth leaving hundreds of thousands of children without school, for as long as the strike last, and shutting down Mexico City in the process?

Strange days in Mexican politics

Some very unexpected pronouncements in Mexican politics the past days:

* Former president Vicente Fox lauds social programs pioneered by AMLO when he was Mexico City mayor, such as the monthly stipends for the elderly.  Fox, who ignominiously sought to bar AMLO from the 2006 contest, and on numerous times joined the dirty and often illegal media campaign against him. 

* Liberal intellectual Enrique Krauze, who coined the term "Tropical Messiah" and wrote a scathing essay in the high-brow Letras Libres magazine that likely greatly damaged AMLO ahead of the 2006 election, in a TV program with Sergio Aguayo deemed  AMLO a "clean man" untainted by corruption and  - the kicker - that he would even consider voting for him!

Strange days, indeed.

Mexico public sector debt: 32.4% of GDP

Milenio reports that Mexico's public sector debt has gone from 17.5 percent of its gross domestic product in 2007, to 21.2 in 2008, 30 percent in 2009, 30.5 in 2010, and for 2011, 32.4 percent of GDP.

Here's a graphic portrayal of the quite dramatic increase, more than a doubling:

Milenio

Outrageous brazenness of the Veracruz government

It's a plot out of a movie: A man carries a suitcase of 25 million pesos to the airport to pay off a dubious company, but gets arrested by the federal police in the last moment.

That person was Vicente Benítez González, treasurer of the Veracruz government of PRI Governor Javier Duarte de Ochoa. The governor first sheepishly stated there was absolutely nothing wrong here; the secretary was merely carrying out payment to "Industria 3," responsible for arranging some upcoming festivals in the state.

Really? Since when has it become common to pay debts in cash, which is unsafe and moreover illegal? Yet Duarte and Secretary of Finance Tomás Ruiz still maintained this line that nothing was remotely wrong, and that the payment was simply in cash because the company urgently needed the money, for festivals weeks and months into the future.

As PRD intellectual and pre-candidate for Congress Fernando Belaunzarán, put it in his blog,

Nothing adds up in this case, which goes against even the most elementary logic, Javier Duarte and Tomas Ruiz want to convince us that it was better and safer to send the money in a suitcase with one of his own rather than to type in the transfer in a computer. What a strange urgency that compels one to do everything more difficult! By the way, were they planning to spend the 25 million, including those of the festival 50 days later, during a weekend, or could they not wait until Monday?

After claiming everything was fully correct, governor Duarte then suddenly thought otherwise, and sacked his treasurer.

Where was the money really going? For Duarte's own benefit? For Peña Nieto's campaign? We will likely not know, unfortunately, but what is clear is that if this had been a legitimate transaction, it would not have been attempted carried out in this mafia-like manner.

On Elba Esther Gordillo's downfall: Denise Dresser

Denise Dresser, eloquent and sharp as she usually is, has a great commentary in La Vanguardia on the weakening power of Elba Esther Gordillo, but also on how Enrique Peña Nieto has far less power vis-a-vis the PRI than many has assumed. Read it here. 
The gist of the article:

"Yes, [Gordillo] has been an Iron Lady, but today she is perhaps little less than a dented tin can."