Calderón signs thinned-out political reform

Calderón's political reform - it is referred to as the political reform, as it was originally a relatively broad-reaching and comprehensive proposal when it was launched in 2009, and is the only major such during his sexenio - was signed by the president last week. It includes 8 components:

* Citizen initiatives (to be introduced into Congress)
* Independent candidacies (but not for president)
* Popular consultations allowed (referenda)
* "Preferential initiative" from the president (a type of fast-track authority where president can send two initiatives per congressional period to be voted on within 30 days)
* Review of the public accounts prolonged one month
* Senate will ratify regulatory organs of telecommunications, energy, and economic competition
* Presidential succession established if something happens to the executive (the Interior Secretary would take over until Congress names an interim or substitute president)
* Alternative ways for presidential swearing-in (recall 2006 here)

Key original components that Congress removed from the reform, and which interior secretary Alejandro Poiré designated "pending," are: reelection of lawmakers and mayors, reducing number of lawmakers, a second round in the presidential election, allowing Supreme Court to present law initiatives, presidential veto over budget, and others.

Here's a graphic from El Universal on the changes:

El Universal

Source:
Ocho cambios en materia política. El Universal, Aug. 9, 2012
Calderón firma decreto de la reforma política. El Universal, Aug. 9, 2012
Promulga Calderón la reforma política. La Jornada, Aug. 9, 2012

Former mayor murdered for refusing drug gangs

Former mayor Margarito Genchi Casiano of Florencio Villarreal, Guerrero, was murdered in June ahead of the elections when he sought to become a local deputy in the legislature.

According to authorities, which have now arrested six presumed culprits from the fittingly entitled outfit Comando del Diablo, Genchi was murdered because he "did not want to align" with them.

A sad story that again belies the charade that only those guilty of "something" are the ones who die in Calderón's war.

Source:
Caen seis presuntos asesinos de ex edil. El Universal, Aug. 9, 2012

Aguachile relaunch

Summer's almost gone, at least in Norway where I have stayed the past months working on my book on the PRD and the Mexican left, which I hope will be out on this side of 2012. The blog has very much suffered as a result, but with a book off to the publisher as of Friday night - duly celebrated with copious amounts of oak-aged tequila - it is a fitting occasion to take stock of this blog, which I've maintained and updated several times weekly for two years now, even if much neglected the past few months.

I made a big decision some months ago to resign from the college where I have been teaching for three years, and which hired me right after finishing my U.S. Ph.D. There were many reasons involved, but in essence my wife and I found that it was time to make a move after many years in the United States. I also wanted to pursue other interests beyond teaching at a liberal arts college, which in many ways was more exciting than I imagined, but in other ways also somewhat disillusioning from what I had expected. My two bases will now be Norway and Mexico. 

I've used the blog as a companion to my own academic writing on Mexico, and I've created it solely because of a passion for Mexican politics, which became my field of study. It has been a fantastic medium to reach and interact with others who share my love for the country and a deep interest in its politics.

I've been very happy to see the blog's view hits rise steadily the past years, and I've interpreted this, perhaps a tad pretentiously, to mean that it has helped fill a niche on blogging in English on domestic Mexican topics and particularly party politics. This, and the great conversations and new contacts and friends that have come out of it already, encourages me to keep on blogging, or essentially to share some thoughts on what I think are important topics in Mexico that deserves more attention, and that perhaps are overshadowed particularly by the ill-fated "war" on Mexico's drug gangs, more correctly the mafia.

I am a trained political scientist but no security specialist, and in any regard a range of excellent sources already exist on this topic - and I am not referring to Stratfor. Given a change of jobs, and the coming to an end of my book, I will also have more time available: What disillusioned me perhaps more than anything about working in a U.S. academic environment, wonderfully rigorous and professional as it is, was the extreme workload and lack of sufficient own time. I therefore plan to continue the blog in one way or another, though I have yet to settle on the coming format. In the meantime I only want to say thanks to those who have stopped by here already and who I hope to interact with even more in the future. 

Church stabs Alejandro Solalinde, migrant defender, in the back

Alejandro Solalinde, tireless defender of Latin American migrants in Mexico, has been threatened and harassed by organized crime countless times, but nothing has prevented him from maintaining and running a migrants shelter in Ixepec, Oaxaca, the Hermanos en el Camino, and speaking their cause. Now he may be forced to leave the shelter after being stabbed in the back, figuratively speaking, by his own bishop, Óscar Armando Campos Contreras of Tehuantepec.

Solalinde said the bishop had asked him to leave the shelter by November:

"This how he put it, that I was a protagonist. He is a conservative for sure and that's no problem, the problem is that with his power he does to me what no criminal group had been capable of... I don't know if there is a hidden motive... I  can fight against cartels but not against the Church," he said in an interview with El Universal.

It seems the bishop of Tehuantepec got cold feet: In today's El Universal he said that he had never told Solalinde such a thing, and that it was a strange misunderstanding.

Let's hope it is.

Whoever is right here, I'll let Solalinde have the final word:

I do not think this is very evangelical. I was told to devote myself to the poor in my free time only, but the poor should get more than 'leftovers.' So I will not take a parish. 

Source:
Dejará Solalinde albergue; seguirá en el activismo. El Universal, Aug. 8, 2012.
Solalinde sigue en albergue: obispo. El Universal, Aug. 9, 2012.

Why is IFE's Valdes provoking the left?

Strange days at Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, IFE. Relations were already strained with the left given some quite erratic earlier comments from the president of IFE's general council, Leonardo Valdés, and they will not be better after this:

- The IFE president, highly unusually, took on the role as defender of Mexico's polling agencies, lauding them for their methodology and professionalism, despite the obvious poor performance of quite a few of them ahead of this election. This contradicted earlier statements from IFE that IFE had no role to play or nothing to say regarding the performance of pollsters.

- Valdés went on to directly respond to a criticism from PRD's representative, sarcastically pointing out that if the left was so critical of GEA-ISA, which consistently inflated Peña Nieto's real support upwards of 18 or so percent, why didn't it complain about its polls in Mexico City, where the left one? This is a complete non sequitur if there ever was one, on so many levels, and a frivolous question that the IFE head even repeated on two occasions.

Why is Valdés so bent on provoking the left?

Source: Defiende Valdés los sondeos de GEA- ISA y critica al representante del PRD. La Jornada, July 27, 2012.

7 of 10 teacher candidates failed, but it doesn't matter

The results are in from the Examen Nacional de Conocimientos, Habilidades y Competencias Docentes, or the obligatory exam for those aspiring to teach at Mexico's schools.

The results are just as bad as in earlier years: 70 percent failed, meaning 94,0400 of 134,704 exam takers did not even get half the questions of the exam right, which was the barrier to fail.

Yet the results will have absolutely no impact on whether they will be offered a teaching job or not.
And lest there remain any confusion: Just because Mexico's teacher aspirants have to take an entry exam, this does not mean they will ever need to take any other exams in their lifetime to prove they actually know any or all of the material they are educating Mexico's youth on.

Source:
Reprueban aspirantes a maestros. El Universal, July 23, 2012.

Great reportage on Mexico

Some great recent reportage on Mexico from U.S. journalists. The Los Angeles Times' Tracy Wilkinson:

The state of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City on three sides, has seen an "alarming" surge in the number of murders and rapes of women, according to several human rights organizations. Much of that increase occurred during the governorship of Enrique Peña Nieto, whose six-year term ended last fall before he went on to win this month's presidential election.

In Mexico state, violence against women has surged. Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2012.


From The Washington Post's William Booth:

Among the freshman class in the new Congress will be both the grandson and daughter of the second most powerful person in Mexico, Elba Esther Gordillo, the “president for life” of Mexico’s teachers union, who presides over a public education system where teachers buy and sell their jobs and student tests put Mexico’s kids at the bottom of developed nations.

 Mexico’s Congress presents the ‘unpresentable ones’. The Washington Post, July 14, 2012.