El Yunque wins in Guanajuato: Miguel Márquez Márquez wins

Other key PAN candidates were elected this Sunday:

Guanajuato: Miguel Márquez Márquez won over former health secretary José Ángel Córdova Villalobos to be PAN's gubernatorial candidate in Guanajuato in 2012 - and given PAN's strength in the state, that makes him very likely its next governor. Márquez was the anointed successor of current governor Juan Manuel Oliva, and is also very close to the catholic extremist organization El Yunque, which nonetheless reportedly is  divided internally these days. It was also another defeat for Calderón and also Fox, who both backed Córdova.


Jaliasco: PAN chose Fernando Guzmán, a pure yunquista, as its candidate. PAN has run the state since 1992 but will also face two strong candidates:  Mayor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga (of the larger Guadalajara metro area) for the left, and Guadalajara mayor Jorge Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz of the PRI.

AMLO will introduce revocation of mandate

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said yesterday he would introduce the mechanism of "revocation of mandate," where his presidency could end prematurely if enough of Mexico's citizen in a referendum voted to "revoke" his mandate.

Yet AMLO would take this mechanism (as far as I know pioneered by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and one of the despairingly few positive institutional developments under his rule), one step further:

Not only would this exercise be allowed, but AMLO would make it obligatory, whereby every two years, he would submit to some kind of referendum on his mandate.

Obligatorily.

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