Frontera NorteSur Oct - Dec 2009

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

“Dinosaur” Resurrection on Schedule for 2012

Continuing on the path of a centennial reconquest of power, Mexico’s former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) easily won October 18 municipal elections in the northern border state of Coahuila. While the PRI has long been the dominant political force in Coahuila, even during the last nine years of National Action Party (PAN) governments at the federal level, the party born from the blood of the 1910 Mexican Revolution dislodged rivals from the key cities of Torreon, San Pedro and Ciudad Acuna in voting last Sunday.

Coahuila’s second largest city after the state capital of Saltillo, Torreon had been governed by the conservative PAN during the last seven years. Strategically located on highways leading to the US border, the old agricultural center has been the scene of violent competition for control of local and international drug markets during the past five years. Eduardo Olmos Castro will serve as the troubled city’s new mayor.

Situated across from Del Rio, Texas, Ciudad Acuna is a center for border factories called maquiladoras as well as an exit point on smuggling routes into the US. In Ciudad Acuna, Alberto Aguirre, the mayoral candidate for a coalition formed between the PRI and much smaller PANAL, beat Esther Talamas Hernandez, the wife of the outgoing mayor and the candidate of the Coahuila Democratic Unity party (UCD), a local organization which governed the municipality for a number of years.

The PRI also won hands down in the border city of Piedras Negras. Far from a sore loser, the PAN’s Dr. Angel Humberto Garcia Reyes literally embraced winning opponent Jose Manuel Maldonado Maldonado and announced his support for Piedras Negras’ new mayor. “Pepe is my friend,” Garcia said. “He beat me fair and square, and I join his project.”

Statewide, in an election with a turnout estimated at 52 percent of registered voters, the PRI tallied nearly 60 percent of the vote. The victorious party was distantly trailed by the PAN with about 25 percent of votes, the UCD with 4.63 percent and the Mexican Green Party with just slightly above 3 percent- barely enough for the pro-death penalty Greens to keep their legal registration.

Historically enduring a marginal presence in Coahuila, the electoral left was the biggest loser in last Sunday’s contest. In fact, three parties which supported opposition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the 2006 presidential election-PRD, PT and Convergencia- did not even separately draw the required 3 percent of votes to maintain their registrations and public funding. Coahuila’s election was the latest example of how the parties never managed to build on the surge of support for Lopez Obrador in Coahuila and other northern states in 2006.

Two other small parties, the Social Democratic Party and PANAL, also lost their legal status and were wiped from the current political map as a consequence of last weekend’s ballot count.

The PRD lost San Pedro in the Laguna region, one of its few pockets of support, to the PRI, but managed to eke out a victory in coalition with the PAN and UCD in Castanos, the scene of a 2006 incident in which Mexican soldiers raped dancers in a red-light district.

Local elections were also held in the southern state of Tabasco last weekend. Once again, the PRI swept the race, regaining some ground from the PRD, the second-strongest party in the state. A weaker force in Tabasco, President Calderon’s PAN nevertheless pulled off victories in two cattle-ranching municipalities. According to the state electoral institute, 58.12 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

Like Coahuila, Tabasco has been hit with a wave of narco-violence in recent years. Accusations of vote-buying and violent confrontations between state and local cops marred the Tabasco race. The Coahuila election proceeded without disruption, though the bodies of three murder victims were dumped in front of a polling station in Torreon just prior to its opening for voting.

In the wider political panorama, Sunday’s election results were more good news for the PRI as the old ruling party primes itself to retake the presidency in 2012. Almost like icing on the 2009 cake, October’s victories in Coahuila and Tabasco closely follow the PRI’s decisive win in the July federal elections.

In contrast, the October 18 elections were sour news for the PAN and bitter tidings for the PRD and other center-left parties.

In a time of economic and social crises, the PAN, and to a far greater degree, the left parties, have been riveted by internecine disputes, disunity and public scandals.

In an attempt to extract themselves from the political tar pit, leaders of the PRD, PT and Convergencia announced October 19 the reconstitution of the Broad Progressive Front for elections in 2010 and 2012. Manuel Camacho Solis, a former Mexico City mayor for the PRI and lately a prominent Lopez Obrador supporter, will act as coordinator for the reborn grouping.

Even though the PRI benefits from the current weaknesses of its rivals, the party could pay a political price for moves underway in the Mexican Congress to raise sales and income taxes as a way of staving off a worsening state fiscal crisis. In a grueling, nine-hour meeting on October 19, PRI federal lawmakers were warned of political consequences for backing higher taxes during a deep recession.

“You have to think about the poor people,” said Isabel Perez, a PRI representative from Veracruz. “What am I going to tell my indigenous people?”

Ruben Moreira, coordinator of the PRI group of legislators from Coahuila, voiced dismay at the prospect of having to face down voters who were told during the just-concluded local election campaign that the PRI did not support higher taxes.

“That’s why we won the election yesterday,” Moreira declared. “What do I tell them?”

At the end of the debate, the PRI lawmakers voted by a margin of 124 to 41 to up the national value added tax from 15 to 16 percent of purchases. For border states, the tax would increase from 10 to 11 percent if the proposal passes the full lower house of Congress. Also on the table are tax hikes on income, bank deposits, telephones, tobacco, beer, and liquor.

Sources: Zocalo.com.mx, October 19, 2009. Articles by Enrique Gonzalez Correa and Jose Luis Medrano. El Universal, October 18, 19, 20, 2009. Articles by Enrique Proa, Hilda Fernandez Valverde, Roberto Barboza Sosa, Alberto Morales, and editorial staff. La Jornada, October 19 and 20 2009. Articles by Rene Lopez, Roberto Garduno, Enrique Mendez, Leopoldo Ramos, and the Notimex news agency. Proceso/Apro, October 18, 2009. Article by Armando Guzman.

Fox Joins Drug War Fray

Continuing his break with the old Mexican tradition of former presidents refraining from direct engagement in politics, Vicente Fox has plunged into another controversy: the Calderon administration’s drug war.

In blunt remarks made in Vienna, Austria, over the weekend, Fox called on President Calderon to return the Mexican army to its barracks as soon as possible and leave the enforcement of drug laws to federal police.

“Using the army, using force against force hasn’t solved the problem,” Fox told the annual meeting of the conservative European Popular Party. “On the contrary, it has multiplied it.”

Mexico’s former president also had words for the United States, calling on his nation’s main trading partner to do a better job of controlling arms trafficking, money laundering and illegal drug consumption. Nonetheless, Fox questioned drug use prohibition as a realistic strategy.

“Drug consumption is a personal responsibility, not one of government,” Fox was quoted as saying. “Perhaps it is impossible to ask government to halt the supply of drugs to our children.”

Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use this year.

Fox’s Austrian comments could be a response to criticisms from Calderon administration officials and others that drug-tainted violence and corruption spiraled out of control during the former president’s term in office from 2000 to 2006. Entitled “The Farm,” a video song released this year by the musical group Los Tigres del Norte lampooned the Fox years and the explosion of narco-violence. The wildly popular combo performed the song before 35,000 fans at a concert in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, on Sunday, October 18.

The latest drug addiction survey sponsored by Mexico’s Health Ministry reported that between 2002 and 2008 cocaine use nearly doubled from 1.4 percent to 2.5 percent of the population in the 12-65 age group. By 2008, illegal drug use of any kind was reported among 5.7 percent of the age group in question, according the study.

Like all Mexican presidents during the last 40 years, Vicente Fox relied on the armed forces as the leading force against illegal drug trafficking. Significantly, the armed forces also expanded its role in immigration law enforcement and other civilian policing duties during the Fox presidency.

In the Fox years, the Mexican army was deployed in Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and other states after narco-related violence began intensifying to unseen levels in 2003. A review of Frontera NorteSur’s archives, showed that at least 1,395 people were reported killed in homicides linked to organized crime from January 1, 2005 to November 29, 2005.

Another 2,012 people were reported slain in similar circumstances during the same period of time in 2006. By contrast, nearly 2,000 people have been murdered in the narco war just in Ciudad Juarez this year so far.

A recent edition of the weekly Proceso magazine estimated that about 14,000 people were killed as a result of narco-violence from the time of President Calderon’s December 2006 inauguration to mid-August 2009.

“Not since the years before the Revolution and the (1920s) Cristero War has Mexico experienced homicidal violence as it has now,” wrote Proceso reporter Jorge Carrasco Araizaga in a story that compared Mexico with Somalia, Haiti, Brazil and Colombia.

In his piece, Carrasco noted the proliferation of paramilitary bands, self-defense groups, armed communities, and private guards of all sorts. Arturo Alvarado, researcher for the College of Mexico, was cited by Carrasco.

“We are in an era of unprecedented criminal violence,” Alvarado said, “produced by delinquent bands as well as by the military and police interventions of the federal government.”

Sources: El Universal/EFE, October 17, 2009. La Jornada/Notimex, October 16 and 18, 2009. Lapolaka.com, September 3, 2009. Proceso, August 17, 2009. Article by Jorge Carrasco Araizaga.

FNS Special Report: The Battle of Santa Fe

On a beautiful fall day before the cold weather set in, Santa Fe high school student David Dean wasn’t goofing off with his buddies. Standing in front of the New Mexico State Capitol building with a picket sign, Dean had words for lawmakers who will gather for an emergency session dedicated to a state budget deficit next weekend: “Cut Dropout Rates, Not Budget,” Dean’s sign read.

The 15-year-old Dean told Frontera NorteSur that a tight budget was already making study hard at the Monte Del Sol Charter School he attends. Class sizes have increased over last year, Dean said, forcing him to stand up in English class. Talk among students of quitting has been on the rise, he added.

“You know, we’re probably going to have a lot more dropouts if the budget gets cut,” Dean predicted. “I know I’m not going to sit in a roomful of 40 people.”

On Friday, October 9, the Santa Fe teenager joined about 1,000 other people in the opening salvo of a battle over New Mexico’s budget crisis. Organized by the American Federation of Teachers, the Better Choices New Mexico coalition and others, the rally urged lawmakers to spare education and other vital public services from the budget axe.

A crowd that included many youths like Dean chanted “Save Our Schools,” and ringed the Roundhouse with giant facsimiles of memos strung on a cord and addressed to absent legislators. “We need a edumucation,” satirized one message, while another simply stated, “You will be known as the legislature that changed our state motto from Land of Enchantment to ‘49 in Everything’.’”

But a ballooning budget deficit variously estimated to range from $444 million to more than $650 million has leading lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, imploring the state to swallow the bitter medicine of budget cuts.

Organizers of the Santa Fe protest favor raising new revenues for schools and services like Medicaid.

Sara Attleson, political action committee chair for the Albuquerque Teachers Federation and a librarian at Kennedy Middle School, said that the union and its allies have come up with an alternative plan to repeal 2003 state income tax cuts on people making more than $200,000 annually and begin collecting state corporate income taxes on Wal-Mart, Target and other out-of-state companies which currently do not pay such levies. “The profits do not stay in the state,” Attleson contended. “They make them off the backs of the people and take them out.”

Education advocates like Attleson maintain that coming on top of a 9 percent education spending cut and a 1.5 percent cut in the pay of state workers this year, slimmer budgets will further cut into the exposed bone of public education and its workforce.

The proposals for education cuts come hot on the heels of news that barely six of ten New Mexico high school students graduate in four years, a percentage well below the national average of roughly seven in ten students.

A 30-year veteran educator and librarian who describes herself as a “keeper of the first amendment,” Attleson said that Kennedy Middle School is already witnessing the consequences of fiscal restraint.

This year, Attleson said, she teaches an elective course at the expense of her librarian duties in order to relieve scheduling pressures from teachers who have not been replaced. In the Digital Age, the school’s computer teacher instructs 30 students with 20 computers; no new textbooks were on hand for students, according to Attleson. “I’d like lawmakers to see what shape our textbooks are in,” she added. “I would say it’s comparable to the Third World.”

The Border Bears the Brunt

Interviewed at the Santa Fe rally, state Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino (D-Albuquerque), said that additional, across-the-board education cuts could disproportionately impact smaller districts in the southern counties of Dona Ana, Luna and Hidalgo along the Mexican border. The region is already characterized by high rates of poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment. For instance, the 2009 Kids Count New Mexico report, sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and New Mexico Voices for Children, found that all three counties had child poverty rates exceeding the state average of 24 percent last year, even before the economic crisis struck New Mexico.

“(Border districts) are running very, very scared, because what was a budget cut was exacerbated by the reduced number of students in those schools.” Ortiz y Pino said. “A lot of the rural schools are losing population, and since the funding formula is based on the number of students a lot of those districts are taking major cuts.”

According to the Kids Count report, Latino students made up between 71 and 90 percent of all students in the major school districts of the three border counties in 2008.

Ortiz y Pino said that residents from the south are searching for jobs in the Albuquerque area precisely at a time when New Mexico is witnessing its worst unemployment crisis since 1944. Statewide, an estimated 30,900 jobs have been lost since last year, with 14,500 of them in Albuquerque.

Even the help wanted signs at fast food restaurants that attracted so many immigrant and youthful workers a couple years ago are long gone.
Conversely, enrollment at the state’s colleges and universities is way up, again at a moment when budget cuts for higher education are also on the table.

Ortiz y Pino argued that it did not make sense to create more joblessness and slash services such as Medicaid, which attracts federal dollars, at a time when tax revenues, based in part on consumer spending and sales taxes, are plummeting.

“When times are tough like this, we don’t need to be laying people off and reducing reimbursements,” Ortiz y Pino asserted. “We need to be increasing these so people can get through the slow-down.”

Currently, New Mexico has the second highest rate of medically uninsured in the nation, with 23.1 percent of the state’s residents lacking coverage in 2008 (up nearly two points from 2005-2006), according to US Census Bureau numbers which were compiled before the spike in unemployment. And again, Dona Ana County and other southern counties traditionally have proportionally greater numbers of uninsured residents than many other parts of the state.

In 2004, when the economy was better, the New Mexico Primary Care/Rural Health Bureau calculated that approximately 33 percent of Dona Ana County’s residents were medically indigent.

Sharpening Battle Swords

New Mexico lawmakers will mull different budget fixes when they meet this month. Overall spending cuts could range from 3.5 percent to as high as 16 percent, while salaries for state workers, which were already trimmed back 1.5 percent this year to replenish a retirement fund drained of more than $100 million lost in bad investments, could see another 2.5 hacked off from the total.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson supports protecting public schools and Medicaid but leaves the door open to slashing spending in the three percent range for other state programs including colleges and universities.

Richardson has reportedly worked out an agreement with some legislative leaders to keep tax increases off the agenda of the special session. According to the governor’s office, budget holes can be filled by using cash reserves, reprogramming spending and selling bonds.

Leading Democrats and Republicans favor cutting the budget instead of raising revenue from tax increases. Senate President Pro Tem Tim Jennings of Roswell and House Speaker Ben Lujan of Santa Fe, both Democrats, lean toward this camp. Republican House Minority Whip Keith Gardner, also from Roswell, likewise argues cuts are in order.

“The realists in the education community understand there is room (for cuts) without affecting classrooms,” Gardner told the Albuquerque Journal.

Democratic state Senator John Arthur Smith, who chairs the State Senate Finance Committee, recently met with New Mexico school superintendents to warn schools to be prepared for ten percent cuts.

Representing two of New Mexico’s three border counties, Smith cautioned that state finances could be in a worse position come January if legislators don’t make painful decisions now. “We don’t want a 10 percent cut, but the idea is to wake them up,” Smith was recently quoted. “We can’t hold education harmless.”

K-12 and higher education spending together account for approximately 60 percent of the state’s budget expenses.

Representing the state’s major companies, the Association of Commerce and Industry of New Mexico is against reversing tax cuts to bolster the state budget. According to Association President Beverlee McClure, repealing tax cut repeals would hurt businesses which have already grappled with downsizing in the three to five percent range this year.

Reported in the Albuquerque Journal, a telephone poll of 402 registered voters last month found that 58 percent of respondents preferred cutting spending over raising taxes; the survey question did not specify which taxes should be raised or which programs might be cut.

Is Another Budget Possible?

Lined up against budget cuts is a growing movement that encompasses public sector unions, child advocacy organizations, students, economists, and religious organizations. In a message against cuts, the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops cited a pastoral letter on Catholic social teaching and the US economy. The bishops asserted that charity can only go so far and it is up to government to adequately fund basic public services and “ensure fair business and wage practices and much more.” Las Cruces Bishop Ricardo Ramirez and other church leaders endorsed a rollback of the 2003 tax cuts.

The budget drama unfolding in New Mexico is, of course, a small part of the larger crisis rippling across the country and in the Americas. In the US, at least 25 states have cut K-12 spending while another 34 have dug into higher education outlays, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

On the same day of the Santa Fe protest, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman published an editorial blasting education cuts. Noting that 143,000 jobs were lost in the US education sector during the last five months, Krugman contended that decades of educational underfunding had left the US lagging behind other developed nations. Criticizing the “penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior” of “centrist” leaders of the US Congress for leaving out sufficient aid to the states in last February’s stimulus package, the Princeton professor called on Washington to step up to the plate and take a swing for education.

“We don’t have to call it stimulus, but it would be a very effective way to create or save thousands of jobs,” Krugman wrote. “And it would, at the same time, be an investment in our future.”

In New Mexico, meanwhile, the state’s political actors are readying for a historic meeting that will shape the future of the state.

Anti-budget cut activists plan to be on hand for the special legislative session. John Ingram, political action director for the American Federation of Teachers in New Mexico, vowed that his organization would support primary challengers against any politician who votes for education cuts. Santa Fe high school student David Dean said that he would also remember lawmakers’ votes when he reaches his 18th birthday and is eligible to cast a ballot.

Albuquerque Democrat Jerry Ortiz y Pino predicted that the atmosphere at the budget crisis session will be “ugly.”

The action begins Saturday, October 17, at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe.

Additional sources: National Public Radio, October 11, 2009. Story by Claudio Sanchez. Santa Fe New Mexican.com October 9, 2009. Article by Kate Nash. Las Cruces Sun-News.com October 9, 2009. Commondreams.org/New York Times, October 9, 2009. Article by Paul Krugman. Article by Barry Massey/Associated Press.

New Mexico Independent, September 28, 2009 and October 8, 2009. Articles by Trip Jennings and Marjorie Childress. Albuquerque Journal, September 11, 17 and 24, 2009; October 5, 7 and 10, 2009. Articles by Dan Boyd, Olivier Uyttebrouck, the Associated Press, and editorial staff. Deming Headlight, October 6, 2009. Article by Kevin Buey.

NAFTA Expands as Drug War Explodes

As Blackhawk helicopters buzz the Jalisco sky and Mexican soldiers scour the streets of Guadalajara in anticipation of tomorrow’s North American leaders’ summit, Mexico’s drug war drags on with no end in sight. In a sampling of incidents between August 6 and 8, soldiers killed four gunmen in Sinaloa, 13 people were slain in guerrilla-style assaults and running gun battles in the states of Hidalgo and Guanajuato, and at least 17 victims were reported murdered in Ciudad Juarez. In an attack compared to an old Western movie, assassins stormed the Far West saloon in Chihuahua City and gunned down four customers.

The drug war, terrorism and border security will likely dominate the policy discussions in Guadalajara beginning Sunday, August 9, when US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper initiate a two-day meeting.

The summit comes at a critical moment in the Mexican drug war. Despite record drug seizures and incessant proclamations in Washington and Mexico City about tactical successes, the situation on the ground tells a different story. In certain regions of Mexico, violence continuesworsening even as drugs keep on flowing.

Weariness of the drug war strategy, currently centered on the deployment of the Mexican army, is growing in Mexico. Waning support for the policy was evident last month when Mexican voters handed President Calderon’ National Action Party (PAN) a crushing defeat in mid-term elections. The PAN heavily based its campaign on a US-style get-tough-on-crime message, blasting the airwaves with spots in support of the President’s drug war. Some post-election polls showed that Mexican voters, battered by rising unemployment and soaring prices for basic commodities, considered the tanking economy the most important issue.

Criticism of the drug war is picking up steam in legislative circles in both the United States and Mexico.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations sub-committee, recently rejected a report from the US Department of State that declared Mexico’s armed forces respect human rights in the anti-drug campaign. The conclusion reached by the department headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton contradicted an avalanche of reports from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, independent Mexican human rights groups and international rights activists and observers.

Respecting human rights is a necessary precondition for Mexico to receive 15 percent of US funds earmarked for the binational, anti-drug Merida Initiative, but according to Senator Leahy,  “those requirements have not been fulfilled” by the Calderon administration.

“I continue supporting the objectives of the Merida Initiative,” the Democratic senator said, “but it is just that the military strategy is not the solution in the long run and it is not clear what could be gained in the short-run.”

For his part, a leading Mexican critic of the drug war declared the government’s Joint Operation Chihuahua not only was an outright failure but a threat to the institutional integrity of the Mexican armed forces as well.

“The Mexican army is being defeated in Chihuahua,” wrote Chihuahua state legislator Victor Quintana, who represents the opposition PRD party. “Not only is it being defeated by organized crime, but also by itself.” Sixteen months after the Mexican army launched its operation, Quintana added, “people ask why the soldiers are here if crime has shot up in all respects, and many officers and soldiers systematically violate human rights.”

According to Quintana, the military commander of Joint Operation Chihuahua has not responded to a request from the Chihuahua State Legislature to testify in front of lawmakers about the campaign.

Whether any changes in the drug war strategy will emanate from Guadalajara remain to be seen.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the economic agreement underpinning the relationship among the NAFTA nations will not be touched by the current leaders of the three member states.

On Friday, August 7, US President Barack Obama was quoted in Washington as saying that now is not the time to revisit NAFTA. The US leader pointed to adverse global economic conditions as well as Mexico’s problems with swine flu and sagging tourism as among reasons not to tinker with the treaty. “We are in the middle of a very difficult economic situation,” President Obama said.

If anything, recent developments indicate NAFTA will only get bigger. In addition to a new flurry of border port of entry expansion plans, some of which are being carried out with US stimulus spending, pressure is building for the United States to open up its highways to Mexican trucks as stipulated by the free trade accord. In the run-up to Guadalajara, Mexican trucking associations repeated demands for multi-billion dollar compensations to remedy US violations of the cross-border transportation provision of NAFTA.

A spokesman for the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico (Amcham) said momentum was building against US refusal to allow Mexican trucks north of border, a prohibition long favored by the Teamsters Union that backed President Obama in his election campaign last year.

“My assessment of the struggle between the groups is that it is much more balanced,” said David Hurtado, president of Amcham’s policy committee.

Other issues expected to be on the agenda in Guadalajara include the swine flu outbreak, environmental matters and the Honduran coup. Noticeably missing from the main agenda outlined by Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the immigration question. However, Canada’s new policy requiring visas of Mexican visitors could add a new sore spot to the meet.

In the lead-up to the summit, a few dozen activists associated with Greenpeace Mexico occupied an important landmark in Guadalajara.  The environmentalists demanded that North American leaders pay more attention to an issue which has been subordinated to the economic crisis and drug war: global climate change.  “Real Leaders back clean energy,” read a banner unfurled by the group.


Sources: Lapolaka.com, August 8, 2009. El Diario de Juarez, August 8, 2009. El Universal, August 7 and 8, 2009. Articles by Xochitl Alvarez, Dinorath Mota, Manuel Lombera, David Aguilar, Jaime Hernandez, Mae Lopez Aranda, and Silvia Otero. La Jornada, August 7 and 8, 2009. Articles by Georgina Saldierna, Blance Petrich, Victor Quintana, and the Reuters news agency. El Sur/Agencia Proceso, August 6, 2009. Article by Jesus Esquivel. Deming Headlight, August 6, 2009. Article by Kevin Buey. Washington Post, August 5, 2009. Article by William Booth and Steve Fainaru.

Mexico at the Crossroads: The Turbulent Race for the 2009 Congress

A voodoo-like doll left on a candidate’s doorstep. Political contenders jailed for shoplifting at Wal-Mart or receiving kickbacks for a garbage dump contract. A century-old cartoon character reborn as a write-in candidate.  Flying accusations of narco-corruption.  Deadly ambushes and killings. Such has been the stuff of the 2009 mid-term Mexican election campaign.

On Sunday, July 5, nearly 77.5 million Mexicans will be eligible to cast votes for a new federal Congress as well as new state and local governments in 10 states and the capital of Mexico City. Predictions abound of massive voter abstention, record protest voting and a victory by the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

In important ways, the federal congressional campaign in the northern border state of Chihuhaua was emblematic of the national race. A negative campaign tone was established early in the year when the Mexico City daily Excelsior published an explosive story that alleged money from the Juarez drug cartel helped finance the successful 2004 mayoral candidacy of Hector “Teto” Murguia in Ciudad Juarez.  Murguia is a 2009 congressional candidate for the PRI in a border district.

An graying institution of Mexican journalism, Excelsior cited a document from the US Drug Enforcement Administration as a source for its story. A DEA spokesperson, Janet Selzer, later denied the report in question was an“official” one from her agency.

The Excelsior story traced the alleged dirty financing to US convict Saulo Reyes Gamboa. A former Ciudad Juarez police chief during the latter days of the Murguia administration, Reyes was arrested in El Paso, Texas, last year by US government agents for attempting to smuggle a large shipment of marijuana.

Aghast at the story, Murguia called the piece a lie. The border politician repeated an earlier claim that Reyes had been recommended for the police chief job by Coparmex, the influential Mexican employers’ association.

“Neither we nor Coparmex had a crystal ball to predict that Saulo would be involved in trying to pass a shipment of marijuana three months after the end of the administration,” Murguia said.

Days prior to the July 5 election, the Teto-Juarez Cartel story was revived with the appearance of an anonymously published newspaper that circulated on the streets of Ciudad Juarez. The mysterious rag featured a reprint of the original Excelsior story in addition to related pieces.

Things Get Rude

Serious enough in its own right, the Teto affair was but the opening shot of a pitched battle between Chihuahua’s two dominant political parties, the PRI and President Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN).

In late May, PAN congressional candidate and former Chihuahua City Mayor Juan Blanco was arrested by Chihuahua state police officers and imprisoned
on charges of accepting kickbacks in return for granting the concession to operate the Chihuahua City landfill during Blanco’s tenure as mayor of the state’s capital city from 2004 to 2007.

According to one account, the money Blanco allegedly received from the Sirssa company could have been destined for a possible 2010 run by Blanco for the Chihuahua governor’s seat. The legal accusation smacked of the pay-for-play schemes that have increasingly stained politics in New Mexico across the border from Chihuahua. Besides Blanco, some observers have mentioned “Teto” Murguia as a possible 2010 Chihuahua gubernatorial candidate.

Declaring himself a “politically persecuted” individual, Blanco sat in the slammer for nearly a week while supporters rallied to his cause. But even as Blanco waited to be released for trial, a new incendiary spark torched the local political scene.

At a fiery press conference, Chihuahua PAN Senator Maria Teresa Ortuno accused the state’s PRI governor, Jose Reyes Baeza Terrazas, of protecting delinquents, drug traffickers and kidnappers.

“Political opponents are kidnapped in Chihuahua, while organized crime and drug traffickers are protected,” Ortuno charged. “We have hundreds, thousands of murders without clarification.”

Ortuno’s words were backed up by another PAN senator from Chihuahua, Senate President Gustavo Madero, as well as the national party president, German Martinez.

In response, Governor Reyes Baeza slapped a multi-million dollar defamation suit against Ortuno and demanded a public apology. The Chihuahua governor called Martinez’s own words “perverse, ” adding that blame for the public safety crisis in Chihuahua could also be placed on the shoulders of the PAN-run federal government, which has deployed about 10,000 Mexican soldiers and Federal Police in Ciudad Juarez alone but failed to stop crime and killing.

In an unusual but not entirely unsurprising development, several religious leaders backed Reyes Baeza.  The embattled governor’s new supporters included five Roman Catholic bishops and 19 pastors from Protestant denominations in Chihuahua. Words were then allegedly exchanged between Parral Bishop Jose Andres Corral Arredondo and the office of President Calderon’s private secretary, Felipe Bravo Mena, who is a former ambassador to the Vatican.

For her part, Senator Ortuno remained defiant. In a press conference held after the defamation suit against her was filed, Ortuno offered a “correction” to her earlier remarks about Reyes Baeza. The governor, she said, was guilty not only of negligence but inaction as well.

“We have more dead in Chihuahua in two years than 10 years of the Iraq War,” Ortuno hyperbolically proclaimed.

“Things got rude,” editorialized Ciudad Juarez’s Lapolaka newsite, in comments on the 2009 election campaign.

As of June 18, the Chihuahua PRI, PAN and PRD political parties had filed more than 60 complaints of alleged campaign irregularities with the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE).

Shadowy gun-slingers and Mysterious mud-slingers

Unproven charges of narco-infiltration and political corruption were far from unique to Chihuahua in the 2009 campaign. In some ways, Chihuahua’s weekly political scandals were tame in comparison with developments elsewhere in Mexico.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 13 candidates or their supporters have been murdered gangland-style in several states. Other candidates have been threatened or had their vehicles set on fire. The arrests of 27 public officials (including 7 mayors) accused by the federal government of serving La Familia drug cartel in the PRD-run state of Michoacan fueled public suspicions and press comments on the existence of a “narco-state” in Mexico.

The shadow of the narco also tainted political races in Nuevo Leon on Mexico’s northern border and in Colima on the Pacific Coast, among other places. A Mexican Internet news site, Reporte Indigo, posted scandalous audiotapes related to races in both Nuevo Leon and Colima. A recording featured Mario Fernandez Garza, PAN candidate for mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon, confirming the deep penetration of drug gangs in what was once considered Mexico’s richest and safest municipality.

“Infiltration by drug traffickers is real and it happens to all the candidates-at least the ones (narcos) consider have a possibility of winning,” Fernandez was quoted on the tape. “In my case, I let it be known that there would be no obvious agreement.”

A member of the Monterrey-area industrial elite, Fernandez is an experienced politician known for his taste in fine art and his proclivity for frankness, including the admission that he smoked the devil weed in his youth. Although he is a member of the center-right PAN, Fernandez claims a politically eclectic range of friendships, including Fidel Castro, former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, co-founder of Mexico’s center-left PRD party.

On May 27, Reporte Indigo set the fuse of another audio bomb. This one had Virgilio Mendoza Amezcua, PAN candidate for Congress in Colima, allegedly admitting to accepting dirty money.

“(Narcos) approached me like they do half the world, and they sent me money,” Mendoza allegedly said. Outraged, the candidate filed a federal legal complaint against whoever was responsible for fabricating a tape recording. Six rival political parties filed their own charges with the federal attorney general’s office, accusing Mendoza of accepting drug money.

The Reporte Indigo tapes were very similar to previous, anonymously-produced audio recordings and video tapes that involved Mexican politicians and other prominent personalities in scandals.

Typically, the tapes appear during an election season and reek of producers who most likely have experience with a state security agency of some kind. The ulterior motives of the tapes’ authors are almost never publicly revealed-at least at first.

Meanwhile, in another Colima race, the PRI’s gubernatorial candidate for governor, Mario Anguiano Moreno, has come under scrutiny because of relatives previously jailed for drug trafficking. Colima is home to the large Pacific port of Manzanillo,  one of the sites where Chinese-born businessman Zhenli Ye Gon allegedly imported large amounts of ephedrine used to manufacture methamphetamines prior to 2006.

Despite plentiful narco scandals and even scattered violence, the July 5 election is likely to proceed normally in the vast majority of Mexican electoral districts. However, violence and threats in pockets of the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guerrero could make voting problematic.

Additionally, an armed insurgency led by the leftist Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI) is underway in the mountains of Guerrero. Recently, the ERPI’s Comandante Ramiro told the Mexican press the guerrilla group’s rural base is fed up with politicians and political parties and will not participate in the voting.

As usual, the different political parties have levied widespread allegations of vote-buying, campaign overspending and unfair publicity by rivals.

Will Many People Even Bother to Vote?

The 2009 elections occur amid the highest unemployment in 14 years, creeping price inflation and falling tax revenues. Worse yet, the old escape valve of migration to the US appears to be wrenched shut for the moment.

Given the severity of the challenges facing Mexico, media spots run by the candidates appear frivolous to many observers. In this race, image is again the winner over substance; little serious debate about revamping social, economic and political structures has occurred within the official parameters of the elections.

Instead, citizens got spots from the PAN that cited very questionable statistics in support of President Calderon’s anti-drug war or observed messages from the pro-death penalty Mexican Green Party that advocated government vouchers for privately-run computer and English schools. Under fire from much of his party’s base, PRD leader Jesus Ortega, carried on with a small child on the airwaves about making Mexico a better place.

Although voter turn-out is typically low for mid-term elections, some observers predict a record abstention rate this year as perhaps the majority of Mexicans do not view any of the political parties capable of solving basic concerns like finding a job or paying for the kids’ school.

“I haven’t heard them,” said Ciudad Juarez accountant Armando Miranda, in reference to the political parties’ solutions.

Maria Carmen Alanis, president of Mexico’s Federal Electoral Tribunal, said this week that voter participation trends in Mexico and Latin America could result in an abstention rate of 70 percent or more on July 5.

An unknown number of Mexicans will turn out to vote but wind up casting ballots for write-in candidates or crossing them out in protest.

A collective associated with the Saturday cultural supplement of the Aguascalientes edition of La Jornada newspaper is actually promoting a vote for Chepito Marihuano, a century-old cartoon character invented by the legendary artist Guadalupe Posada.

“We’re tired of the candidates and the entire system, including the IFE and the people involved in it,” said award-winning poet and collective member Juan Pablo de Avila. “One answer is to promote genuine candidates and representatives of the people, and one of them could be Chepito Marihuano.”

In a similar but perhaps less colorful vein, an organized movement has emerged to encourage citizens to turn in blank or mutilated ballots. Associated with prominent intellectuals Sergio Aguayo and Denise Dresser, among others, the National Protest Vote Movement held its first assembly in Mexico City on June 30. According to Dresser, the goal of the movement is not to replace the political parties but force them to deal with national realities and take action on long overdue reforms.

Understandably, the party faithful are not keen on the protest vote movement. Puerto Vallarta resident Jose Felix Padilla disagreed with contentions that all parties and politicians are the same. “The only way to get something is by voting,” insisted Padilla, a member of the PAN. “If a person does not vote there is no way to make a change.”

The man in charge of organizing the July 5 federal election, IFE President Leonardo Valdes, pledged to a CNN interviewer that his agency would fulfill its duty of counting all votes, whether they are crossed out, marked for unregistered candidates like Chepito Marihuano or cast for an actual living candidate.

Different polls suggest that annulled votes, which usually fall under less than 3 percent of the total cast in any given election, could amount to between 7and 20 percent of the votes tallied this year.

If a high protest vote comes to pass, the “worthless” ballots could have an immediate impact. Under Mexican electoral law, recounts are required in a federal race if the number of annulled votes is greater than the difference of ballots between the leading and second-place candidates. In this scenario, resolutions of tightly-contested races could drag on for weeks if not months.

Meantime, most leading polls give the former ruling PRI an edge in the July 5 voting.


Additional sources: CNN en Espanol, June 30 and July 1, 2009. Proceso, June 14 and 28, 2009. Articles by Jesus Cantu, Arturo Rodriguez Garcia, Alvaro Delgado and Pedro Zamora Briseno. Tribuna de la Bahia. June 28, 29, 30, 2009. Articles by Agencia Reforma and editorial staff. Lapolaka.com, May 12, 2009; June 1, 6,11, 12, 15, 2009. Norte, May 31, 2009. Articles by Ricardo Espinoza, Jesus Batista and editorial staff.


La Jornada, May 24, 2009; June 10, 11, 19, 20, 22, 23, 2009. Articles by Sergio Ocampo, Misael Habana, Ruben Villalpando, Miroslava Breach, Gustavo Castillo Garcia, Carlos Fernandez-Vega, Mauricio Ferrer, Juan Carlos Partida, and David Brooks. La Jornada (Guerrero edition), June 27 and 28, 2009. Articles by Marlen Castro. El Sur, May 27, 2009. Article by Noe Aguirre Orozco. Apro, May 20, 2009. Article by Pedro Zamora Briseno. El Diario de Juarez,  March 18, 2009: May 4, 5, 13, 25, 2009. Articles by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, Horacio Carrasco and editorial staff. El Universal, April 12 and June 4, 2009. Articles by Francisco Resendiz, Ricardo Gomez and Jorge Ramos.

Immigrant Activist Runs for Mexican Congress

The swine flu might have closed Mexican schools and slowed the nation’s economy to a near standstill, but it didn’t stop the latest political campaign from getting off the ground.

Although campaign kick-off events mainly proceeded last weekend without the usual bluster, candidates from Mexico’s different political parties launched their bids for positions in the lower house of the Mexican Congress. In July, Mexican voters will go to the polls to elect new federal representatives.

Among the better known candidates running for Congress is Elvira Arellano, the deported activist from the United States who came to symbolize the face of the new immigrant movement. Taking refuge in a Chicago church in August 2006, Arellano defied a deportation order and US immigration authorities for one year in an unsuccessful attempt to remain with her young son. In August 2007, she was arrested and sent back to Mexico after appearing at
an immigrant rights rally in Los Angeles.

Almost two years later, Arellano is on the campaign trail in Tijuana, Baja California, where she is the candidate for Congressional District #4 on the ticket of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Keeping true to her word to keep the migrant issue alive in the public eye, the energetic activist is stressing immigrant rights issues in Mexico’s 2009 political campaign. In comments last weekend, Arellano said she is especially concerned about the fate of women migrants who pass through Mexico on their way to the US, a journey that is often fraught with sexual assaults and other abuses.

“I am going to seek laws in Congress that protect women, and also that protect undocumented Central Americans who are treated like criminals in Mexico,” Arellano said.

Noting Tijuana’s character as a city of migrants, Arellano said she expected her message to receive a positive response from voters.

Arellano’s election run is the latest instance of a one-time Mexican migrant jumping into the political ring south of the border. Individuals like Arellano, who have experiences with laws, governments and civil societies on both sides of the border, are gradually making their mark on Mexican politics.

Perhaps the best-known example of a migrant-turned-politician prior to Arellano is the late Andres Tomato King” Bermudez, who made good in California before returning to the state of Zacatecas and taking a stab at becoming mayor of the town of Jerez.

Initially denied a victory as a PRD candidate, Bermudez subsequently won the top job in Jerez as the representative for the center-right National Action Party in 2004. The flamboyant politician went on to win a Congressional seat for the same political party in 2006, becoming one of current President Felipe Calderon’s most virulent defenders in the post-election conflict that surrounded the contested presidential election three years ago. Bermudez died of cancer earlier this year while still
serving as a federal legislator.

Sources: La Jornada, May 4, 2009. El Universal, May 3, 2009. Article by Julieta Martinez. Lapolaka.com, May 3. 2009. Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2007, and February 8, 2009. Articles by Teresa Watanabe and Sam Quinones. Msnbc.com/Associated Press, August 20, 2007.

Mexico: The Buzz over Obama

In their Mexico City meeting scheduled for April 16, US President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon are expected to focus heavily on issues of border security and organized criminal activities. In the run-up to the meeting, Mexican academics, social activists and politicians urged the two leaders to roaden their agenda to include other issues of critical importance in the relationship between Mexico and the United States.

At a round-table discussion in the Mexican capital this week, academics warned the Mexico-US relationship runs the risk of being reduced to security issues as defined by the current administrations in power in Washington and Mexico City, especially the one in Washington.

The sudden US interest in Mexico, said international relations expert Gabriel Guerra Castellanos, stems not so much from “love” but from the US fear that Mexico is a “possible threat” to national security.

“While the US plays chess, we in Mexico play dominoes,” Guerra said. Guerra and other participants addressed the US-Mexico relationship at an event sponsored by the ITESM institute of higher learning in Mexico City. The foreign affairs analyst urged the Mexican government to be more proactive in its relations with the United States.

On April 15, Mexican Congressman Cesar Duarte Juarez, president of the lower house of the Mexican Congress, confirmed he will be present during the Obama-Calderon encounter. Duarte repeated contentions that US-origin arms trafficking was bolstering the power of organized crime, but said he hoped to hear Washington’s positions on other issues of common concern like migration.

Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores pointed to the relaxation of some US travel restrictions to Cuba as a positive sign that a new “synergy” could develop in Mexico-US relations to encompass public safety, migration, trade and the economy.

Grassroots citizens’ organizations plan to hold events in Mexico City to pressure the US and Mexican governments on a number of fronts. A network of Mexican and US activists plans to attempt to deliver a letter to President Obama that supports immigration reform, opposes border wall construction and demands the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. On the immigration question, the activists also demand no new contract labor or temporary worker program. The letter has the support of deported immigration activist Elvira Arellano, Fernando Suarez del Solar, father of a US soldier slain in Iraq, and several Mexican congressmen, among others.

Mexican Congressman Edmundo Ramirez, coordinator of the PRI party working group in the lower house of the federal Congress, also urged President Calderon and President Obama to oversee an immigration reform that is favored by the migrants in the US, and which will prevent family separations and deaths from dangerous border crossings.

For their part, activists affiliated with the Mexican “No Corn, No Country” campaign plan a press conference at the US Embassy April 16 to discuss the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the Mexican countryside.

Pro-immigration reform activists definitely have the ear of the new US president. In an exclusive interview with the US-based Spanish-language television network prior to his first state visit to Mexico, President Obama said he will set in motion an immigration reform process this year, though he could not guarantee a new law would be passed in 2009.

President Obama did not specify who will be covered in an immigration reform law or what type of visas or permits might be issued. In a chat with Univision host Jorge Ramos, President Obama linked immigration reform to border security.

The President also said US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was reviewing the mass round-ups of undocumented people in the US, a practice he said was no solution to the immigration dilemma.

The Obama-Calderon encounter caps several days of feverish activity around security issues on both sides of the border.Only in the last couple days, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano named a new “border czar” and announced tens of millions of dollars will be spent on new security programs, while New Mexico Democratic Senator Tom Udall said he’d support the stationing of 100 new National Guard troops on his state’s border with Mexico. The construction of a long-delayed section of the US border wall estimated to cost more than one billion dollars also got underway near Brownsville, Texas.

At the same time, it was revealed that the Mexican army will acquire six state-of-the-art French-built helicopters valued at nearly $300 million. On television and in print, national Mexican media featured photos of a nervous 20-year-old woman captured along with an arsenal of heavy weaponry in the northern state of Sonora.

As the presidential meeting drew near, more than 4,000 security personnel and US Secret Service agents flooded the Mexican capital. Demonstrators from Greenpeace Mexico displayed a huge banner from a Mexico City monument before police stopped them. In their message, the environmentalists urged the US and Mexican presidents to “Save the Climate.”

Sources: Univision, April 14 and 15 2009. Albuquerque Journal/Associated Press, April 15, 2009. La Jornada/Notimex, April 15, 2009. Lapolaka.com, April 15, 2009. Cimacnoticias, April 14, 2009. Article by Federico Campbell Pena. El Universal, April 13, 14, 15, 2009. Articles by Noe Cruz Serrano, Juan Velediez, Roberto Aguilar Grimaldo, and Notimex. Greenpeace.org.mx

Lopez Obrador Pushes On

Capping off a January swing through northern and western Mexico,opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador drew tens of thousands offollowers to a January 25 rally in Mexico City’s Zocalo square. Thepurpose of the ex-presidential candidate’s latest rally was to launch anew movement aimed at defending popular economic interests in a time ofdeepening crisis.

“Today, there is suffering because of unemployment, high prices, poverty,insecurity and violence, but above all, there is an uncertainty that isbeginning to manifest itself as anxiety and frustration,” Lopez Obradorsaid in a speech. “All of this exists in an environment of instability,indolence, incapacity, and cynicism on the part of the authorities.”The Mexico City demonstration followed a tour that took Lopez Obrador, or“El Peje” as he is frequently called, to numerous stops in the states ofChihuahua and Jalisco, where the former Mexico City mayor spoke aboutmigration, economic troubles, violence and insecurity, youth problems,and the US-Mexico relationship in the era of new US President BarackObama.

At a January 23 rally attended by several hundred people in El Pitillal,Jalisco, a working-class suburb of Puerto Vallarta, Lopez Obrador toldsupporters he sent
President Obama a letter a few days ago that warnedagainst cutting off the movement of people from Mexico to the US, amigration flow the charismatic political figure said was largelyresponsible for preventing a social explosion south of the border.“I told (President Obama) in this letter that the migration phenomenon isnot going to be solved by building walls and militarizing the border,”Lopez Obrador said. “The solution has to be cooperation between the twocountries, especially aimed at the economic development of Mexico.”The El Pitillal speech was preceded by a stirring message delivered by ateen supporter, Estephanie Villasenor. Largely turned off by politics,young people require real commitments and actions from politicians likeLopez Obrador, Villasenor contended.“Most people, especially young people, have forgotten the real meaning ofpolitics, Villasenor said. “We have to make politics a human activity thatis set up to govern or lead the action of the State in benefit of society…it seems the current political leaders have forgotten about this.”Politics, Villasenor said, should be among the “most noble” of human activities.

Visibly moved by Villasenor’s words, Lopez Obrador said Mexicans shouldnot give up on political change. Many youths are tempted into the criminallifestyle, he added, by economic desperation, by the absence ofeducational opportunities and by the consumerism promoted by mass media.“Things have come to the point in our country that some young people, whoaren’t stupid and know what they are doing, have proclaimed that theymight live one, two or three years, but it does not matter because they donot want to continue living in the same hell, the same misery, the sameabandonment,” the opposition leader said. “This forces us to reflect
onthe necessity of renovating public life in Mexico for all, and especiallyfor the young people.”

Although Lopez Obrador’s most recent events have been attended by farfewer people than during the 2006 presidential campaign and post-electionprotests, the politician retains a core following. At political events,supporters are encouraged to sign up for a credential that makes themrepresentatives of the “Legitimate Government of Mexico.” Lopez Obrador’ssupporters contend their man was cheated out of victory in thecontroversial July 2006 election, which current President Calderonofficially won by just over slightly 200,000 votes.

Claiming about two million people have signed up with the “LegitimateGovernment,” Lopez Obrador commands what is perhaps the largest, cohesivegroup in Mexico outside the Roman Catholic Church. Followers call LopezObrador “The President,” and treat him accordingly. At the El Pitillalmeeting, for instance, a group of embattled landowners from Mismaloya, theset of the famed Hollywood classic “Night of the Iguana,” successfullypetitioned Lopez Obrador for his backing.According to members of the Mismaloya ejido, scores of families facepending eviction because of a land ownership dispute with a wealthyoutsider stemming from dirty business dealings.

Even though he is not presently running for office (Lopez Obrador recentlyturned down a proposal that he run for Congress in this year’selections.), the man from Tabasco has consolidated a movement that hasemerged as a key counter-force to the political establishment. Last year,the movement succeeded in delaying the passage of bill that proposedfurther prying open Mexico’s national oil industry to foreign investment.Social programs popularized by Lopez Obrador and other Mexico City mayorsfrom his left-leaning PRD political party like monthly pensions for theelderly were later partially adopted by rival administrations headed byformer President Vicente Fox’s conservative PAN party. Unveiled earlierthis month, President Calderon’s anti-economic crisis program containssome actions long advocated by Lopez Obrador such as a public worksprogram.

But Lopez Obrador keeps upping the ante in the political game. Hismovement has rolled out its own anti-crisis package that proposesincreasing spending on social programs, cutting electricity and energyrates and implementing emergency assistance programs for migrantsdisplaced from the United States, among other measures. To pay for aneconomic rescue estimated to cost more than $25 billion, Lopez Obradorproposes slashing high government salaries, eliminating official perks andtapping into excess government funds.

“We’re going to insist that all the social programs be expanded throughoutthe country,” Lopez Obrador said in his El Pitillal speech.Lopez Obrador’s supporters plan street demonstrations and other activitiesin the coming weeks. In many ways, Lopez Obrador’s movement complementsseparate mobilizations planned by farmers’ and other social movements,including the possible blockade of international bridges on the Mexico-USborder at the end of this month to protest Mexico’s ongoing agriculturalcrisis and food dependency.Many are skeptical that Lopez Obrador can deliver on his movement’s goalof transforming Mexico.“El Peje did not say anything new,” wrote columnist Jaime Castillo Copadoof Puerto Vallarta’s Tribuna de la Bahia newspaper. “There is no doubtthat basic products have gone up, but I don’t see how the Tabascan will beable to help basic products come down from the inflationary cloud thataffects all of us.”

According to Castillo, Lopez Obrador’s movement is long on rhetoric andshort on real solutions:“That’s how it is as long as people keep compensating for their lazinessto read and inform themselves of what’s going on in the country withcheers and applauses for a charismatic interlocutor whose trips costdearly the Congressional representatives of his party.”Others, however, are standing by Lopez Obrador and his movement as theanswer to the myriad problems confronting Mexico. “He wants a change forthe country,” said a woman at the El Pitillal rally who identified herselfas Ana Bertha.. “The change that agriculture needs, that education needs,and that the sciences need”-Kent Paterson

Napolitano Nomination Draws Strong Reactions  

Border and immigration activists responded with divergent assessments of the nomination of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the Obama White House. On the positive side, the directors of two Washington D.C.-based immigrant advocacy organizations gave thumbs up to the selection of the Democratic governor as the nation’s internal security czar.  

In a joint statement preceding the formal announcement of Napolitano’s nomination,  Ben Johnson of the American Immigration Law Foundation and Angela Kelly of the Immigration Policy Center praised Napolitano for taking measures to “secure our borders” while acknowledging  the need for creating a system to bring undocumented workers into the mainstream of US life.

“Her life of public service is a testament to her incredible integrity, aptitude and commitment to the American people,” said Johnson and Kelly.  

Frank Sharry, executive director of the America’s Voice immigrant advocacy group, offered a similar take on the Napolitano nomination.

“On the issue of immigration, Governor Napolitano gets it,” Sharry said. “She knows that an integral part of securing the borders and restoring control and order to our broken immigration system is enacting comprehensive immigration reform.”

But Napolitano’s nomination also inspired words of caution from other immigrant rights activists. For instance, border organizers for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) scored Napolitano for ordering the emergency deployment of the National Guard on the Arizona-Sonora border in 2005 as well as for implementing a widely-criticized  electronic verification system of workers’ legal status.

“Governor Napolitano has pushed for an employment verification program in Arizona that is largely ineffective and relies on erroneous information,” contended Caroline Issacs, director of the Tucson-based AFSC’s Arizona Area Program. “If we can expect this type of program on a national level, as has been proposed by outgoing President Bush, there will be no real ‘change’ from the incoming Obama administration, just further attempts to criminalize the right-to-work for migrant workers and their families.”

The AFSC called on Napolitano as the new homeland security chief to rectify abuses stemming from laws and policies the human rights group said should be repealed or eliminated, including the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the Real ID Act of 2005 and Operation Streamline, a Border Patrol campaign that jails and prosecutes undocumented migrants in Arizona and Texas. In the past, Napolitano has criticized the border fence currently under construction by the DHS.

On the other side of the immigration debate, the American Patrol organization, which supports  cracking down on undocumented workers and endorses the border wall, among other security measures, expressed alarm at the Napolitano nomination. The group contended that the Arizona governor did not know how to effectively deploy National Guard troops or protect the border.

“Janet Napolitano has demonstrated that she either does not understand how border security really works, or that she does understand it and works to subvert it,” said a statement on the American Patrol website. “Together with (Arizona Congressman) Grijalva at Interior we should be very worried about the security of our homeland with Janet Napolitano at the head of DHS.”

The reactions to Napolitano’s nomination suggest that hot button immigration and border security issues which were largely packed away in the political closet during the 2008 presidential campaign could come to the fore again in 2009 after the new administration assumes office.

Sources: US/Mexico Border Program (AFSC), December 1, 2008. Press statement. America’s Voice,  December 1, 2008. Press statement. American Patrol, November 28, 2008. Immigration Policy Center, November 21, 2008. Press statement.

Chihuahua Leaders Say, “Go for it, Big Bill!”

Political and business leaders in the state of Chihuahua responded with a gush of enthusiasm to news that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was under serious consideration for the post of commerce secretary in the incoming Obama administration.

Victor Valencia de los Santos, personal representative of Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baez Terrazas, said Richardson’s expected appointment was a “great opportunity” in light of the New Mexico Democrat’s grasp of border issues as well as his personal relationship with Governor Reyes Baeza. 

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz also greeted the news about Richardson with a positive reflection.

“When Richardson was a representative he was one of the principal promoters of the North American Free Trade Agreement in Congress,” Mayor Reyes said. “He is a person who has clear knowledge of all that is involved in the area of commerce between Mexico and the United States, and it would be great news for Mexico if he were named commerce secretary” 

Governor Richardson, who counts decades of experience in both Washington and New Mexico, has been busy cultivating economic ties south of the border since his election to the governorship of the Land of Enchantment in 2002.  

During the last six years, the Richardson administration has co-sponsored New Mexico-Chihuahua trade missions; promoted the development of a New Mexico-Chihuahua aerospace industry; supported expanded tourism between New Mexico and the Mexican states of Sonora, Jalisco and Chihuahua; and helped land a huge Foxconn electronics factory that is scheduled to open next year on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.

Most recently, the Richardson administration announced a new Aeromexico route between Chihuahua City and Albuquerque. Set to commence by January 2009, the flight will be the only direct air route between New Mexico and Mexico. Signed November 15 by different Chihuahua and New Mexico state government officials, a binational agreement provides $340,000 in New Mexico state monies for the air service’s start-up costs. Governor Richardson described the deal as a chance to “expand and strengthen the business and cultural ties between the border states of New Mexico and Chihuahua.”

Perhaps the biggest binational project promoted by Governor Richardson is the development of the new twin cities of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and Jeronimo, Mexico, northwest of Ciudad Juarez. With the planned relocation of train traffic from downtown El Paso-Ciudad Juarez to the Santa Teresa/Jeronimo area, the cross-border development could become an important nexus in the Asia-North American trade in future years.

Like Chihuahua’s two top elected officials, Fernando Uriate Zaueta, spokesman for the CCE business association in Ciudad Juarez, judged a US commerce department with Richardson at the helm as welcome news for Mexican business interests.

“He will surely have a vision of openness, of collaboration, and of cooperation with Mexico, something which is favorable for the country,” Uriate said.

Additional Sources:  El Diario de Juarez, November 22, 2008. Article by Blanca Carmona.  Governor Bill Richardson, November 15, 2008. Press release.

Immigration Reform in 2009?

Will Barack Obama’s historic election victory give new impetus to immigration reform in the United States? Analysts and political observers in the United States and Mexico have mixed assessments. Auguring against a quick fix are the economic crisis and the Iraq war, both of which the president-elect promises to prioritize early on his administration.

Speaking on the US-based Univision Spanish-language television network shortly after Obama’s victory, Chicago City Councilman Billy Ocasio said he did not think immigration reform would be possible within the first 100 days of the new administration, but he proposed the suspension of ICE raids and mass deportations until a solution to the question of illegal immigration could be further analyzed.

Gustavo Cordova Bojorquez, director of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, was likewise skeptical of any swift resolution to the US immigration question.

“In this regard, (Obama) isn’t going to make any substantial changes in the short run,” Cordova contended, “since (immigration) remained discrete and stayed at the margins during the campaign and he won without making any commitments.” Cordova predicted that immigration reform will reemerge on the US political agenda during the third year of the incoming administration, at a time when President Obama is seeking reelection and will have to revisit an issue that could aid him in winning a second term.

For most of the 2008 campaign, Obama, as well as Republican rival McCain, shied away from tackling the hot potato immigration reform issue on the campaign trail. A notable exception was in the Spanish-language media, where the two candidates blamed each other for the defeat of immigration reform in 2007. In an Albuquerque speech during the final days of the campaign, Obama, who was comfortably ahead in the polls by the time, reasserted his position that a path to legalization for undocumented residents was necessary. 

Calling for greater border security and crackdowns on employers who hire undocumented workers, Obama nevertheless supported  citizenship for undocumented residents who pay fines and learn English. “They broke the law and we can’t excuse that, but we can’t deport 12 million people,” he said.

A likely pivotal player in a revived immigration reform push will be President-elect Obama’s named White House Chief of Staff, Illinois Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel. Previously a strong supporter of immigration reform, Rep. Emanuel backed away from the issue after bills failed to pass Capitol Hill last year. More recently, he has been quoted as saying immigration reform won’t happen during the new Democratic administration’s first term. Emanuel also reiterated that the economy will be the burning issue to address.

Hard numbers from the 2008 election, however, strongly suggest that the Democrats will ignore immigration reform at the risk of alienating an important and growing part of their winning coalition.

In a post-election telephone press conference with Frontera NorteSur and other media, Miami-based pollster Sergio Bendixen credited new immigrant voters, who he estimated made up 40 percent of the 10 million-plus Latino vote in 2008,  for helping sweep Obama into the White House. Based on exit polls of 2102 new immigrant voters in Los Angeles and Miami,  Bendixen  said that 78 percent of the voters surveyed went for Obama and 22 percent for McCain.  Immigrant voters played key or decisive roles in the swing states of Indiana, Virginia, Florida, Colorado and New Mexico, according to Bendixen.

Univision proclaimed Latinos as the “new political force of the 21st century” in the United States. Overall, Latino voter turnout, immigrant and non-immigrant, exceeded many predictions and nearly doubled from 5.9 million voters in 2000 to more than 10 million in 2008.

While economic, health care and other issues were very important for Latino voters in general and new immigrant voters in particular, Bendixen said immigration was the catalytic issue that politicized the immigrant community.

The virulent tone the immigration debate assumed after the introduction of the 2005 Sensenbrenner bill that proposed criminalizing undocumented residents was perceived as an assault against the entire Latino community, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, Bendixen said, leading many Latinos to reject a Republican Party which was skewed as anti-immigrant and anti-Latino.

“I think we can conclude that the immigration issue was very important for all Hispanic voters and united them in this election,” Bendixen asserted.

“(Anti-immigrant sentiment) drove the Hispanic vote in a substantial way toward Barack Obama,” the political expert added. “It is clear that Latin American immigrants who voted, voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.”

In Illinois, home of a huge immigrant population, John McCain was tagged with the anti-immigrant camp, even though the Arizona senator was once a champion of comprehensive immigration reform, said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. The Republicans, Hoyt said, paid the price at the polls.  

“The Republican brand has basically been destroyed among Latinos,” Hoyt maintained. Illinois Republicans, he added, are beginning to resemble “the limbless black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.”

Although it is still too early to fully assess the impact and meaning of this year’s immigrant and Latino vote, a preliminary glance at the results indicates that such voters, many of whom voted for the first time, were crucial for not only Barack Obama’s victory, but also for the defeat of anti-undocumented immigrant Congressional candidates in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico.

In southern New Mexico, for example, Democrat Harry Teague beat Republican Ed Tinsley for a US House seat long associated with the GOP. Teague overcame Tinsley by healthy margins in the US-Mexico border counties of Luna and Dona Ana, both places with a large number of immigrant residents. In nearby El Paso, Texas, another entity with a huge immigrant population, no Republican won election to any state or local office.
  
While Latino and immigrant voters veered toward the left on economic and immigration issues in 2008, many steered toward the right on social issues. Latino and new immigrant voters backed gay marriage bans in California and Florida, according to preliminary reports. Otherwise, the landscape is hauntingly bleak for the Republican Party in US immigrant communities.

Speaking to reporters along with Bendixen and Hoyt, another prominent immigrant advocate said anti-immigrant stances seriously damaged the Republican Party’s prospects in a community it was beginning to make serious headway in by 2004.

“I think they are in a tough spot”, said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice. “It’s not clear to me the Republicans have gotten the message.”

In Sharry’s view  Republicans will have to disassociate themselves from “anti-immigrant extremists that have hijacked most of the party,” while Democrats will have to deliver immigration and other reforms favored by new immigrant voters if the party is to consolidate its new base among this segment of the electorate.

Separately quoted in the Mexican press, Hoyt said the Illinois Coalition would celebrate Obama’s triumph but insist that at least an immigration reform plan emerge within the first 100 days of the new president’s inauguration.

Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, took a like-minded view. “The Latino community demonstrated in this election that we are engaged in the democratic process; more than ten million Latino voters mobilized throughout the country to vote,” Murguia said in a statement. “This demonstrates our eagerness to work in partnership with this administration to address key concerns like the economy, health care and immigration reform.”

On the immigration front, additional pressures on the Obama administration are certain to emanate from migrant-sending nations like El Salvador and Mexico. In similar economic doldrums as the US, such nations are likely to argue that comprehensive immigration reform will achieve not only a measure of justice for immigrants, but also provide a modicum of economic stability for US neighbors dependent on migrant remittances. 

“We have maintained a position of  insisting on the importance of having an immigration reform,” Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinoza told the press on the eve of Obama’s election. “There should an immigration reform and a recognition of the  contributions that Mexican migrants make to the US society and economy.” 

Additional sources: National Council of La Raza, November 7, 2008. Press statement. Norte, November 6, 2008. Article by Luis Carlos Ortega. Americaspolicy.org, November 7, 2008. Article by Tom Barry.  Univision, November 6 and 9, 2008. America’s Voice, November 5, 2008. Press  release.  La Jornada/Reuters, November 3 and 5, 2008. El Universal/Notimex.  November 5, 2008. Albuquerque Journal, November 5, 2008. Newspapertree.com, November 4, 2008. KUNM-FM (Albuquerque), October 27, 2008.

Will Immigrants Clinch the 2008 Election?

What a tremendous difference one year can make.  Only 12 months ago, many Washington-centered pundits and media myth-makers predicted that immigration would be among the hot issues for US voters in the 2008 elections. In fact, as the US presidential campaign moved beyond the primaries, immigration was decidedly consigned to the rear of the publicly-debated agenda, at least in English-language media.

Yet in a largely unnoticed way, immigration could well prove the determinant issue in 2008, especially if the race defies the polls and tightens at the end between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. A new study prepared for the Washington D.C.-based Immigration Policy Center (IPC), a non-profit immigrant advocacy group, outlines the potential power immigrant voters could wield in elections this year and beyond. According to the report authored by Rob Paral and Associates, “The New American Electorate,” naturalized citizens and their children constituted nearly one in nine registered US voters by 2006.

“The immigrant vote is going to have an unprecedented impact on this election up and down the ballot,” predicted Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, during a telephone press conference late last week. The emergence of a new electorate, Sharry said, “changes not only American politics but creates a tremendous momentum toward immigration reform.”

The IPC study found that “New Americans,” as the organization defines post-1965 immigrants and their children,  now make up more registered voters than the 2004 election victory margins in 16 states including the key battlegrounds of Nevada, Florida, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. IPC Director Angela Kelly told Frontera NorteSur and other media by phone that the economy and other bread-and-butter issues top the list of concerns for immigrant voters, as well as other US residents, but that immigration justice is an ideological and personal touchstone for the new electorate.  

“Immigration is a threshold issue for us, which defines whether candidates respect us as a community,” Kelly said.

Since the massive pro-immigrant rallies of 2006,  citizenship and voter registration drives sponsored by the We Are America Alliance and other organizations have encouraged more than one million people to swear oaths of citizenship and have inspired more than 500,000 to sign voter registration forms, according to organizers.

The Alliance credits its partners for registering more than 128,000 new immigrant voters in the swing states of  New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.

On a different level, Spanish-language media including the Univision television network and Los Angeles’ La Opinion newspaper have played critical roles in encouraging immigrants to become citizens and to become registered voters. 

Last week, the Alliance announced it was promoting early voting and its Get Out the Vote campaign aimed at “one million new Latino, Asian and immigrant voters who are poised to make a difference during the November 4 election.”

Some analysts point to anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies for inspiring much greater political interest in immigrant communities. “A lot of it you could definitely attribute to the anti-immigrant stance,” said Efrain Escobedo, senior director of civic engagement for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund (NALEO).

Democrats or Republicans?

Recent polls by NALEO and others show Obama far ahead of rival McCain in the preferences of the Latino electorate, which includes large numbers of new immigrant voters.  According to Tuyet G. Doung, director of the Asian American Justice Center, about one-third of Asian American voters remain undecided, though many are leaning towards the Obama camp. Of an estimated population of nearly 15 million people, more than 7 million Asian Americans are eligible to vote this year, Doung said.  

“We are a moving a growing force,” Doung said. “We are a force to contend with, and we are a force for immigration reform.” Asian Americans, she added, are now “highly engaged” in the political process.

In Escobedo’s view, the new immigrant vote is one of “opportunity,” which is not firmly moored in either of the two major parties that must earn votes based on concrete actions which address immigrants’ concerns. Latino immigrants have shown shifts from party to party in recent years, he said.

Apart from the Obama- McCain contest, immigrants could cast pivotal votes in local races and state ballot propositions, according to Escobedo and other activists. In Orange County, California, for instance, the large Vietnamese immigrant community “can turn things one way or another,” Doung affirmed.

The 2008 Swing Vote?
 
Strategically located in swing states, immigrants could mark the decisive ballots in the presidential election.  Colorado and New Mexico, states where newer Latino immigrants have been adding their names to voter rolls in increasing numbers, are two big prizes.  In Colorado, immigrants could also be important judges of the Mark Udall- Bob Schaffer race for the US Senate. A survey conducted by Public Policy Polling earlier this fall,  reported Democrat Udall leading Republican Schaffer among Latinos by a margin of more than three to one.

Schafer advocates deporting more undocumented residents with criminal records, limiting the number of relatives who can join immigrant family members in the US and militarizing the US-Mexico border.

In New Mexico, meanwhile, “New Americans” could wind up being the decisive force if data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections are considered. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore beat Republican George W. Bush by 336 votes. Four years later, President Bush defeated Democrat Kerry in New Mexico by about 6,000 votes. According to the We Are America Alliance, 58,217 new immigrants are on the voter rolls in the state.  

The major presidential candidates have made the once-forgotten Land of Enchantment a must stop in their campaign itineraries, with both Obama and McCain visiting New Mexico 6 times each during the campaign so far.  Vice-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin have likewise undertaken the now-obligatory journey to New Mexico; former Democratic presidential primary contender Hillary Clinton drew more than 2,000 people to an October 25 pro-Obama rally in Sunland Park, a small but growing border community with a high percentage of Latino immigrants. Clinton was preceded on the campaign trial in Sunland Park one week earlier by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.  On October 28, Michele Obama is scheduled to visit the town of Las Vegas in northern New Mexico.

In an unusual set of circumstances, New Mexico’s congressional delegation- save for the Senate seat held by Democrat Jeff Bingaman- is for grabs this year. Perhaps the most highly contested race is for the 2nd Congressional District in southern New Mexico, an area that encompasses Sunland Park and other Dona Ana County communities where immigrant voters could give an important edge to the victor.  In District 2, centrist Democrat Harry Teague is up against conservative Republican Ed Tinsley in a battle for a seat that has been in Republican hands for decades.

Teague and Tinsley both regard illegal immigration as a national security issue, but differ in important respects to the solution. Tinsley unequivocally opposes “amnesty” for undocumented residents, whom he blames for creating educational and social service burdens, while Teague supports a path to citizenship similar to the one advocated by Obama. Unlike Tinsley, the southern New Mexico Democrat maintains a web page in Spanish.

Obama, meanwhile, revived the practically moribund immigration issue at an October 25   rally in Albuquerque attended by a huge crowd estimated at between 20-45,000 people. Gathered on a cold but calm fall evening and jamming the University of New Mexico and its surrounding neighborhoods with rainbow streams of supporters, the Obama fest was the largest political event certainly in recent memory and perhaps ever in the state.  

In Albuquerque, a McCain rally featuring the candidate himself drew between 1,000 and 1,500 people on the same day, according to estimates.

To the enthusiastic applause of a majority non-immigrant crowd, Obama criticized opponent McCain for stepping back from proposed immigration reform. Blasting the use of immigration as a “wedge issue” to divide Americans, Obama said a “path to citizenship” for undocumented residents was a necessity. The Illinois senator advocated citizenship for undocumented residents who pay fines, wait in line behind legal applicants and learn English. Further, he vowed to work with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson to guarantee “secure borders” and comprehensive immigration reform.

Interestingly, Obama’s revival of the immigration reform issue wasn’t even mentioned in a front-page Sunday edition story in New Mexico’s largest daily. The Albuquerque Journal, however, included immigration among issues of comparison between Obama and McCain in a separate section of the same issue. In a front-page story on October 27, the University of New Mexico student-run New Mexico Daily Lobo also ignored Obama’s pro-immigration reform comments. 

By raising the immigration again in the waning days of the 2008 campaign, Obama re-visited an issue which was once framed as paramount by the US media
but  later relegated to the back burner as the US economy crashed and burned throughout the year. And for most of the 2008 campaign, immigration reform was a hot potato for both McCain and Obama.

Move Over Ohio Soccer Moms, Indiana NASCAR Fans

Immigrant advocates like Angela Kelly contend that the dominant molders of US public opinion have missed a sweeping story about new political demographics and electoral forces reshaping the nation’s political map.  

“The campaigns, pundits and press have spent this entire election cycle searching for a new and weighty voting bloc,” Kelly said in a recent press statement. “Their search is over. Step aside Soccer Moms and NASCAR Dads. New Americans are ready to vote. This group has been decades in the making and they are certain to flex their muscles this year.”

America’s Voice Frank Sharry also took issue with a media he said was largely oblivious to a new political narrative.  “This is not about the same old patterns of the past but an enlarged electorate,” Sharry said. The Southwestern states and Florida will be “key to who can win the presidency in the future,” insisted the immigrant rights activist.

Additional sources: New Mexico Daily Lobo, October 27, 2008. Article by Michael Westervelt. Albuquerque Journal, October 25 and 26, 2008. Articles by Jeff Jones, Michael Coleman, Colleen Heild and Rene Romo.  El Paso Times, October 26, 2008. Article by Darren Meritz. New Mexico Independent, October 21, 2008. Article by Heath Haussamen. We Are America Alliance, October 20, 2008.  Press release. El Diario de El Paso, October 19 and  26, 2008.  Articles by Nancy Gonzalez.  La Voz de Nuevo Mexico/EFE, October 3, 2008. Harryforcongress.com Edtinsleyforcongress.com   

Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the Resurrection of the PRI

Once the most reviled man in Mexico, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari presses ahead with his political comeback. On a July 31 visit to Chihuahua City,
Salinas was given a VIP welcome by high-ranking members of his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a good portion of the state’s political class.

“(Salinas) will continue being an important citizen for all of us,” said Antonio Andreu, president of the standing commission of the Chihuahua State Legislature.

Officially, the occasion of Salinas’ visit was to promote a new book he authored.   

On hand for the well-attended presentation in the state capital complex were Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza, former governors Patricio Martinez and Fernando Baeza and the rectors of the autonomous universities of Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez.  Previous to Salinas’ speech, Governor Reyes Baeza held a private meeting with the man who was Mexico’s president from 1988 to 1994.

In his presentation, Salinas blamed  former presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox for allowing Mexico to wallow in economic stagnation between 1995 and 2005. Massive migration was the consequence, Salinas contended.

“Five million compatriots left the country in search of a future in order to respond to their own expectations and those of their families,” Salinas said. “It’s difficult to encounter a country in times of peace that has a migratory phenomenon of this magnitude.” 

As is customary, Salinas accepted no responsibility for the peso devaluation and financial crash of 1994-95 that immediately followed his term in office and ushered in Mexico’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  

Alluding to his successors’ responsibility for the current public safety crisis and “moral tragedy” of the times, Salinas did not mention the consolidation of the Juarez, Tijuana or Gulf cartels during his presidency. Nor did he delve into the explosive events of the last year of his administration, including the slaying of Guadalajara Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas OCampo; the murder of Salinas’s likely successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas; and the Mexico City gangland-style killing of Salinas’ former brother-in-law and PRI leader Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu.  

Instead, Salinas’ speech followed the political line that the PRI is pushing to win the mid-term congressional elections in 2009 and re-conquer the Mexican presidency in 2012.

Flush with victories in state and local elections last year, the PRI is promoting itself as the alternative between the radical “populism” of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the “neoliberalism,” or unrestrained free market philosophy, of President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN).  

Critics of neo-liberalism, however, would be quick to point out that Salinas was the Mexican leader who pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement and pressured the Mexican Congress to enact a constitutional reform that permitted the privatization of collectively-owned farm lands known as ejidos.
 
Touching on the contemporary political scene, Salinas lauded Reyes Baeza as a “first class” governor and praised President Felipe Calderon for retaking the “reformist path.” Significantly, the Harvard-educated politician blessed President Calderon’s controversial Pemex reform proposal that is undergoing a bitter fight in the Congress and in the streets.

Sharing commonalities with Calderon’s legislation, Salinas’ PRI recently presented its own initiative. At this political juncture, it’s next-to-impossible for the president’s Pemex reform, opposed by Lopez Obrador as well as by other center-left political forces and many social movements on the grounds that it will privatize a constitutionally-protected public property, to make it through the Congress without the support of the PRI. 

Considering the PRI’s clout, the issue of who really calls the shots in Mexico will become even more interesting if the party that was born from the ashes of the 1910 revolution wins next year’s elections. In this sense, the PRI is working on different levels to guarantee the continuity of the political class that has governed Mexico for decades.

In 19 months of office, the Calderon administration has relied on the support of PRI governors and federal lawmakers to advance its agenda. Writing earlier this year,
political analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson predicted that not only will the PRI achieve a crucial electoral victory next year, but that the Calderon government’s dealings with leading Priistas could ultimately wind up handing over the presidency on a “platter” to the former ruling party in 2012.  

Politically, Salinas’ increasingly public profile should be viewed as a key element in the PRI’s steady resurrection and from its 2000 electoral defeat. Moreover, the Chihuahua speech was one more indication of the strategic role Mexico’s geographically largest but conflictive state will play in the reconsolidation of the PRI’S political and economic power in tandem with a sector of the PAN.

In the days preceding the Salinas speech, President Calderon conducted a brief visit to Ciudad Juarez, where he inaugurated new maquiladora operations, and former PRI leader and political operator Elba Esther Gordillo, who is widely credited for helping Calderon attain the presidency in 2006, made a visit to Chihuahua.  

Personally, Salinas’ Chihuahua appearance showed how far he’s bounced back since 1994-95, when an unfolding economic disaster and his older brother Raul’s legal problems influenced the ex-president to undertake a self-imposed exile to Ireland, Cuba and other places.

Jailed for 10 years in Mexico on charges of planning the murder of Ruiz Massieu and investigated in Europe for secret bank accounts that had the smell of drug money-laundering, Raul also prevailed, beating the homicide rap while escaping prosecution for the suspect funds. He has yet to be tried for pending embezzlement and illicit enrichment charges in Mexico.

Unable to sustain a criminal case, the Swiss authorities recently returned more than $100 million of the frozen funds to the Mexican government and Grupo IUSA headed by businessman Carlos Peralta.

In 2002, a Swiss judge provided documents to the Mexican government that purported to show the involvement of Mexican military, law enforcement and other public officials in drug trafficking during Salinas’ 1988-94 term in office. Some of the information came from protected witnesses, including one man who was reported tortured and murdered before he was scheduled to fly to Switzerland in November 2001. 

Allegations of turbulent European financial transactions also surrounded a third Salinas brother, Enrique, who was murdered in 2004.

Although he loudly protested the 1995 arrest of Raul, and even staged a brief hunger strike, Carlos Salinas de Gortari has always disassociated himself from his older brother’s activities.

For a sector of the political class,  Salinas’ political rehabilitation, which actually began when Vicente Fox took office in 2000, has now come full circle.  

Accompanied by his second wife, Ana Paula Gerard, Salinas signed autographs of his book during the Chihuahua visit. He took no questions from reporters and did not offer a press statement.
 
Sources: El Diario de Juarez, August 1, 2008, Article by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto.
Norte, August 1, 2008. Article by Angel Zubia Garcia.  El Heraldo de Chihuahua, August 1, 2008. Article by Samuel Garcia.  Frontenet.com, July 31, 2008. La Polaka.com, July 31 and August 1, 2008. Source Mex/Latin American Data Base, July 23, 2008.  Pagina 24/Notimex, April 18, 2008. Article by Gabriel Pourcel. El Sur, March 4 and 9, 2008. Articles by Miguel Angel Granados Chapa and Jorge Zepeda Patterson. New York Times, December 10, 2005.

New Questions Raised about 2006 Election

Nearly two years after Mexico's 2006 presidential election blew up in ahotly-disputed conflict, a Mexican researcher has added another twist to a controversial chapter of recent history. Jose Antonio Crespo, a professor at Mexico's CIDE research institute, contends that a careful review of the ballot tally sheets reveals widespread irregularities that make it impossible to determine the real victor of the election with any certainty."We cannot know who won," said Crespo in an interview with the Apro news service. "We don't know what was the majority sentiment of the citizenry."

The author of a book on the historic race, Crespo reviewed 63,000 of the 130,000 tally sheets that were produced in the July 2006 election. The paperwork covered 150 of the 300 electoral districts in the country. In his analysis of the vote reports he examined, Crespo concluded that 316,000 "irregular" votes were tallied. Projecting the irregularities to the other districts, more than 600,000 improper votes could have been included in the official results. National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon was declared president by a margin of 233,831 votes over his main opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The tight results, compounded by the suspect votes, presented a situation in which either Calderon or Lopez Obrador could have been the genuine president-elect, Crespo acknowledged. The only real way of knowing, he added, was by means of a vote-by-vote recount, a demand which was raised by the Lopez Obrador camp but rejected by Mexico's high electoral court in favor of a limited recount. Crespo, Proceso magazine and prominent Mexican academic Sergio Aguayo have all attempted to gain access to the ballots, which are still guarded by Mexican soldiers, in order to carry out a full recount. The recount efforts have been blocked by Mexican electoral and justice officials who have cited voter confidentiality issues.

The Apro story that reported on Crespo's findings also raised newquestions about the possible intervention of former President CarlosSalinas de Gortari in the election. According to Apro, Salinas expressed annoyance at being refused an audience with Felipe Calderon after the election. Quoted in the Apro story, an unidentified member of the PAN said Salinas took credit for swinging the vote of Mexico's high electoral court, the TEPJF, in favor of Calderon. Voting 7-0, the TEPJF handed Calderon his victory on September 5, 2006.

Source: Proceso/Apro, June 9, 2008. Article by Alvaro Delgado.

The Press, the Narco, and the Border Governor

Entering the final stages of his six-year term, Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours Castelo finds himself at the center of multiple controversies. In 2008, he’s come under fire for dispatching state police to break a legal miner’s strike, for cracking down on environmentalists opposed to the razing of the Villa de Seris Park in the state capital of Hermosillo and for contracting a long-term public debt with a private bank. What’s more, Bours is fending off accusations that family members and associates are connected to illegal drug trafficking. In a major story published late last month, the Mexico City newsweekly Proceso outlined alleged ties between the large Bours clan and the Beltran Leyva branch of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

According to Proceso, the home of Gov. Bours’ chief bodyguard, Lazaro Gonzalez Cruz, was searched by agents of the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) last fall. The media outlet reported that Gonzalez was suspected of having ties to an operator for the Beltran Leyvas called “El Mochombo,” who was later arrested in January of this year.  The PGR agents found no incriminating evidence in Gonzalez’s home, and Gov. Bours publicly protested the conduct of federal officers in Sonora. He even suggested that agents leave the state. “You can’t enter a house in this way, just because of an alleged anonymous call,” Gov. Bours said.  

A second connection casting suspicion on the Bours has to do with the family’s Bachoco poultry and egg company. In less than two years, Mexican law enforcement officials have reportedly confiscated cocaine, marijuana and other illegal substances from 24 Bachoco trucks in Baja California and Sonora.  The Bours-owned company is the largest distributor of chickens in Mexico. Proceso also  indirectly quoted unidentified chicken producers who said Bachoco uses ephedrine, a precursor chemical for manufacturing methampetamines, to keep chickens awake and ravenously eating until the animals are dispatched to the butcher’s knife and shipped off to the supermarket.    

In response to the Proceso stories, Gov. Bours flatly denied any involvement with drug trafficking.  Vowing to file a civil lawsuit against the magazine for “moral damages,” he added that he would ask the PGR to investigate issues brought up in the stories. In a Sonora press conference, the border governor challenged details of the Procesco reports and promised to provide a point-by-point rebuttal, which he hasn’t done so far.

“There is nothing that involves me or my family with drug trafficking in any way,” Gov. Bours said. “Besides, there is a series of lies in the article.” Gov. Bours blamed Sonora’s anti-organized crime efforts for provoking slanderous attacks against the state’s leader and his family. He said old school, corrupt politicians were behind a smear campaign. In a separate interview with Televisa’s Carlos Loret de Mola,
Gov. Bours said that Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a member of Bour’s own  Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),  could have a hand in the negative publicity.  Admitting to Loret de Mola that four Bachoco trucks had been seized with drug shipments, Gov. Bours added that the company’s transportation fleet is outsourced.

“The transportation is sub-contracted, Bachoco does not do it,” he said, “and unfortunately organized crime has operated with different trucks. This is not the only company. Consequently, we changed the sub-contractor.”

The Proceso stories were not seen by many readers in Sonora.  Proceso reported that at least 1,300 copies of the magazine were confiscated from vendors before they could hit the news stands. The newsweekly did not specifically identify who confiscated its magazines, but it stated the action was undertaken “presumably by orders of the governor.”

Riveted by narco-violence such as last year’s bloody battles that left 24 dead in and around the mining town of Cananea, Sonora remains dangerous turf for journalists.
In the most recent incidents, an announcer for Radio Mujer in Ciudad Obregon, Laura Elena Ochoa Avila, was kidnapped April 30 and then released unharmed near a cemetery 24 hours later. A week earlier, two reporters for La Verdad newspaper in Caborca were beaten by men with bats. Allegedly carrying out a paid assault on behalf of an immigrant smuggler, two suspects were arrested in the Caborca attack.  

In recent years, the Sonora press has become more muted about powerful individuals and business interests operating in the northern Mexican border state of approximately two million people. But the Proceso stories raised prickly questions about the expansion of the Bours family’s business empire in Sonora. Proceso reported that members of the Bours family dominate or have a large hand in the fishing, aquaculture, real estate, transportation, fertilizer, mining and tourism industries.

An important enterprise linked to the influential Sonora family is the Ocean Garden seafood company, formerly a fishermen’s cooperative before it went into bankruptcy and was taken over by the Mexican government. With the backing of Mexico City, Ocean Garden financed a flotilla of 982 boats on the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Thousands and fishermen and other workers earned a living from Ocean Garden’s far-flung business. Kept alive with loans from Bank of America, Ocean Garden was peddled off to Bours family members by the administration of former President Vicente Fox in 2005. Nowadays, the company has ambitious plans to export shrimp to the US and Asian markets, according to Proceso.

Tourism is another key sector where the Bours name is established.  Family members own the Alma airline company, and some are involved in the development boom in the coastal resort of Puerto Penasco, a place often called “Arizona’s Beach” in the United States. If official plans move forward, the small but growing vacation destination might soon become landlocked New Mexico’s piece of paradise the Sea of Cortez as well. Early this month, the Sonora and New Mexico state governments signed an agreement to explore the possibility of a direct flight between Puerto Penasco and New Mexico.

In the first three months of 2008, Puerto Penasco captured 23 percent of all new foreign investment in the Mexican tourist industry, or about 2 billion dollars. According to Mexico’s National Tourism Ministry, Puerto Penasco even beat out Cancun in the scramble for foreign dollars that hailed principally from the United States and  Spain. Considering the economic morass overtaking the United States, the investment spike is an impressive one.  

 Rising steadily within the PRI and national political circles since he served as an advisor to former President Carlos Salinas de Gotari during the negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1991, Gov. Bours is mentioned more and more as a possible presidential candidate in 2012. Before he leaves office next year, Gov. Bours is determined to literally leave behind his stamp on the arid Sonoran landscape.

On a visit to Sonora this month, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said he wanted to know how Bours was carrying out a massive, new infrastructure development program of 160 projects called the Sonora Project Plan. “I want to do the same thing,” Governor Richardson was quoted as saying. The answer to the New Mexico Democrat’s question: borrow $400 million dollars from a private bank and enter into a 30-year payback agreement.

The Sonora Project Plan will be heavily financed by a $400 million dollar loan from Banorte, the Monterrey-based bank launched by Roberto “Tortilla King” Gonzalez Barrera, a billionaire who became famous as the chief of the giant Grupo Maseca corn flour and tortilla company.  Under the terms of the agreement, Sonora’s taxpayers will pay off the loan over three decades. Consisting of everything from new roads to tourist facilities, the total cost of the Sonora Project Plan is expected to reach at least $690 million. In addition to the Banorte loan, other monies from both the public and private
sectors will be tapped. According to Luis Nunez Noriega, president of the Sonora economists’ association, the Sonora Project Plan will elevate the total state debt to nearly one billion dollars.

Gov. Bours’ mega-development faces a constitutional challenge pursued by members of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) in the Mexican Supreme Court, “We are now the super leader in debt at the national level,” said Jose Enriquez Reina Lizarraga, president of the Sonora PAN. “We are in favor of public works, but not going into debt.” On the other hand, Gov. Bours justifies his mammoth public works project as an absolute necessity for the state’s social and economic future. The successful completion of the project, he insists, will transform Sonora into a world-class entity. Despite the pending court case, Bours recently announced the project will be speeded up to counter the soaring costs of construction materials, as well as to help shield Sonora from the effects of the US economic downturn. Firmly enmeshed in the border and larger global economy, Sonora is heavily dependent on commercial relationships with the United States. 

Sources:  Expreso.com.mx (Hermosillo), May 8, 2008. El Imparcial, May 8, 2008. Articles by Miriam Rodriguez and Hector Padilla. La Jornada, May 2 and 8, 2008.
Articles by Ulises Gutierrez Ruelas. Cimacnoticias.com, May 1, 2008. Article by Silvia Nunez Esquer. Nuevo Dia (Nogales), April 30, 2008. Critica.com.mx, April 29 and  May 10, 2008. Articles by Rosa Angelica Fimbres and editorial staff. Proceso/Apro, April 28, 2008. Articles by Ricardo Ravelo and editorial staff. El Universal, April 23, 2008. Article by Marcelo Beyliss.  

The Flap over McCain’s Mexican Connection

 Dr. Juan Hernandez knows how to play politics on both sides of the border. A former official of the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox (2000-2006), Dr. Hernandez is now serving as an advisor to and fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The founder of the Center for US-Mexico Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Hernandez’s involvement in the McCain campaign is stoking controversy in both Mexico and the United States.

In an e-mail circulated in the United States this week, Dr. Hernandez invited readers to a Cinco de Mayo celebration scheduled for McCain headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Potential attendees were urged to donate between $1,000 and $9,200 per couple.  Dr. Hernandez’s activism on behalf of the Arizona senator prompted negative reactions among some politicians in Chamber of Deputies, Mexico’s lower house of Congress.  Edmundo Ramirez, an Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) member and the secretary of the border and immigration affairs commission of the law-making body, said he was concerned that Dr. Hernandez’s activities in the United States could harm Mexico’s image.

“Who is Juan Hernandez?  He’s a person who’s always operated with the North American right and here in Mexico. He is one of the representatives of the most reactionary wing of the right,” Congressman Ramirez said. The PRI politician’s view was shared by legislator Alejandro Sanchez Camacho of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution.

Holding dual nationality, Dr. Hernandez has likewise drawn fire from conservative sectors of the US Republican Party and certain radio talk show hosts. Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo has labeled Dr. Hernandez a “man of divided loyalties.” The Colorado Republican once said, “We can’t trust a man who says Mexico and the United States are of the same region and not two countries.” There was no immediate response from Dr. Hernandez to the latest remarks concerning his involvement in the McCain campaign.

Clearly recognizing Latinos as an important voting bloc, McCain is counting on Dr. Hernandez to woo the swing vote. The presidential hopeful has set up a bilingual web site that features videos from Cuban-American Congressmen Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and others. On one video, McCain’s talk in English is translated in Spanish sub-titles. The web site emphasizes support for free trade, small business, border security and “pro-immigration” policies that are not spelled out in any detail. According to the web site, Senator McCain “recognizes the importance of building strong allies in Mexico and Latin America who reject the siren call of authoritarians like Hugo Chavez…”

In Dr. Hernandez, McCain has made an important partner for building bridges south of the border. Playing a strategic role in advancing Vicente Fox’s political career, Dr. Hernandez facilitated the exposure of Guanajuato Governor Fox to US television audiences in the mid and late 1990s. In the business world, Dr. Hernandez helped to boost the fortunes of Guanajuato-based enterprises in the US after the triggering of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Serving as Fox’s personal secretary during the 2000 Mexican presidential campaign, Dr. Hernandez then went on to head the Presidential Office of Mexicans Abroad during the Fox administration. The Dallas
professor’s name also surfaced in connection to the Amigos de Fox controversy that arose over the raising of money from outside Mexico for Fox’s 2000 campaign. Established as an independent fund-raising mechanism, Amigos de Fox existed outside the framework of Fox’s National Action Party.

The involvement of Dr. Juan Hernandez in the 2008 McCain campaign is yet another example of how Mexican and US politics are becoming intertwined. In recent years, US political consultants like James Carville or Dick Morris have advised Mexican presidential candidates, and the major US and Mexican political parties have set up branches north and south of the border. In 2006, Mexican migrants cast ballots from the US for their home country’s presidential election for the first time. Two years later, US Democrats organized a primary that even had polling places open in some Mexican cities.

Sources: El Universal, May 7, 2008. Articles by  J.Jaime Hernandez, Ricardo Gomez and Andrea Merlos. Fox and Company: An Unauthorized Biography, Miguel Angel Granados Chapa. Grijalbo, 2000 Thinkprogress.org. Reforminstitute.org.  Johnmccain.com/espanol/ 

Oil, Migrants and Santa Anna

The future of the Pemex nacional oil company continues to be at the center of  national politics in Mexico. Negotiations to lift the four day-old blockade of the Mexican Congress, which was carried out by legislators opposed to the privatization of Pemex,  were expected to take place, on Monday, April 14. Affilated with the Progressive Action Front (FAP), the legislators stormed and seized the tribunals in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies last Thursday after the administration of President Felipe Calderon submitted a fast-track set of proposals designed to permit the greater involvement of national and foreign capital in the government-owned company’s functions, many of which are already outsourced to both Mexican and foreign businessmen. Opponents of the Calderon plan argue that it violates the
Mexican Constitution, which reserves petroleum resources to exclusive government ownership, jeopardizes national security and cheats social services, which are heavily dependent on Pemex’s income for funding. A second group of  lawmakers opposed to the Calderon legislation announced a hunger strike on Sunday, April 13.  

Meanwhile, legisators from the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an organization which is not participating in the anti-privatization protests, proposed that Pemex bonds be sold to Mexican migrant workers as way of averting foreign investment while putting remittances earned in the United States to good use back home. The PRI proposal expands on an earlier one pitched by President Calderon that would allow Mexican citizens to buy Pemex bonds in order to strengthen the company’s finances and permit it to expand production, especially in deep ocean waters located in the Gulf of
Mexico where Mexican and US territorial waters converge.  

Noting that almost all migrant dollars sent back to Mexico go for basic survival needs, PRI Congressman Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, who serves as the secretary for the border and migrant affairs commission in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, said investing remittances in Pemex could uplift the quality of life for migrant families.

“If we offer them a return of 10 percent, many Mexicans who have gone to work in the US for lack of employment, could then have an important investment and an additional income for their families,” Martinez said.

Holding the decisive vote in legislative showdown over Pemex,  the PRI is torn over the Calderon initiative. Congressman Jose Aispuro Torres said the president’s legislation coincides with many PRI proposals,  but that party members have “serious doubts” about the participation of private capital in Pemex. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry in 1938 by then-President Lazaro Cardenas remains perhaps the key legacy of a political party that aims to recover the Mexican Congress in 2009 and the Mexican White House in 2012.  Clearly, PRI leaders are worried about being outflanked by opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, who is leading popular and legislative protests against the Calderon legislation.

Compared by the media to the “Adelitas,” or women combatants of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, pro-Lopez Obrador brigades led by women are spearheading the anti-privatization movement across the country. Posters with a picture of the revered President Cardenas backdropped by an oil rig and pointing a finger at passerby have begun appearing on Mexican streets. “Now it’s your turn: Mexico needs you,” they read, in a direct appeal to patrirotism. Adding a blast at Mexican electronic media coverage of the Pemex issue, which Lopez Obrador’s partisans accuse of bias in favor of the federal government, the posters urge citizens to “Turn off the television, and turn on your mind.”

On Sunday,. April 13,  tens of thousands of demonstrators once again turned out in Mexico City’s Zocalo Plaza to hear Lopez Obrador speak against the Calderon plan. It was the third large anti-privatization demonstration in the Zocalo since last March 18. To counter negative media coverage, Mexico’s leading opposition politician announced that his followers would distribute information about the Pemex issue door-to-door. “Everyone of us will be a medium of communication,” Lopez Obrador vowed. Comparing President Calderon with 19th century President Santa Anna, the leader who ceded Mexico’s northern territory to the United States, Lopez Obrador said it was “almost a certainty” that the actions of the FAP legislators and  the “Adelitas” had rendered the Calderon legislation a dead letter for the current congressional session, which ends on April 30. Joining others, he called for a broader national debate over Pemex’s future.  

In response to the growing anti-privatization mobilization, Mexico’s federal government is stepping up its own publicity offensive. Running ads on national television that say reforms  are meant to strengthen Pemex and not privatize it, the oil company is making its own brand of appeal to Mexicans’ futures. If it is reformed, Pemex promises, enhanced oil and gas revenues will translate into better educational opportunities, improved social services and universal health care for all Mexican citizens.
 

Additional sources: AFP, April 14, 2008. El Universal, April 14, 2008. Article by Ricardo Gomez and Andrea Merlos. La Jornada, April 14, 2008, Article by Enrique Mendez and Alma E. Munoz. Televisa, April 14, 2008. Frontera, April 13, 2008. Proceso, April 13, 2008. Articles by Jenardo Villamil and Rosalia Vergara.

From North to South: Zapata Vive!

Although the Mexican media was focused on the occupation of the nation’s congressional tribunal April 10 by opposition legislators protesting the
Calderon administration’s proposed PEMEX oil company reform, other events of national significance unfolded on the 89th anniversary of the assassination of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Across rural and urban Mexico, farmers and their allies held protests, conducted highway blockades, convened meetings and staged marches to vent their anger over current agricultural and other policies.

“If we were to deliver a report to General Zapata today, we could say that poverty in the countryside continues,  that migration to the US grows daily and that the agricultural branches of production are not profitable,” said Federico Valle Vaquera, national director of the CIOAC rural advocacy organization. 

Involving thousands of people, and encompassing political forces ranging from the revolutionary left to the centrist National Campesino Confederation, numerous activities were reported in the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, Guerrero, Veracruz, and Chiapas, among other places.  In Chiapas, members of the National Struggle Front for Socialism blockaded an international bridge connecting Mexico to Guatemala.

In the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, hundreds turned out for a march to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),  social security and energy reform initiatives, the Lomas de Poleo land conflict, and the presence of the Mexican army in the border city. 

Ciudad Juarez’s El Diario newspaper ran a photograph that showed a Mexican soldier with a camera allegedly snapping pictures of protestors and journalists from El Diario and TV Azteca.

Demonstrators also blasted last month’s assassination of farm leader Armando Villareal Martha and the recent arrests of social activists Cipriana Jurado and Carlos Chavez. Attending the event, Jurado reported that charges against her for allegedly participating in the blockade of an international bridge in Ciudad Juarez in 2005 had been dropped.

While Zapata anniversary protests are nothing new in Mexico, a noteworthy development in this year’s actions was the linkage between agricultural, water and energy issues. In the northern border state of Sonora, for instance, forty farmers blockaded the state office of the federal Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries to protest what they said were excessive electricity and water rates. In the coffee-producing highlands of Veracruz, an estimated 500 growers demanded $150 million in government subsidies as an answer to 80 percent price hikes for petrochemical-based fertilizers.

Soaring fertilizer prices also prompted farmers in Guerrero to seize state and federal agricultural agency offices and blockade for one hour the Highway of the Sun that connects Mexico City to the tourist resort of Acapulco.

Small growers in the indigenous La Montana region of Guerrero have complained of fertilizer price hikes in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 percent in recent months. Schooled in the practices of the Green Revolution, most Mexican farmers still rely on petrochemical-based fertilizers to grow their crops.

Agriculture and energy was a theme picked up by Mexican Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas yesterday.  Speaking at an official Zapata anniversary ceremony in the state of Morelos, Cardenas implied a direct relationship between improvement in the rural economy and passage of the Calderon Administration’s controversial energy reform package in the Mexican Congress.

“(Rural Mexico) can’t be removed from the issues related to the energy reform,” Cardenas said. “We can’t bet on populism or on deceit,” Cardenas added in an indirect poke at opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s movement against the privatization PEMEX.   

In recent weeks, the heated debate over PEMEX has diverted public attention away from Mexico’s ongoing rural crisis, which resurfaced as a pressing national issue in the wake of the mass farmer protests against NAFTA earlier this year. Negotiations between farm groups and the Calderon Administration have since broken down. To the chagrin of many farmers, Calderon administration officials insist that renegotiating NAFTA is off the table. Consequently, more rural protests are almost certain in the weeks and months ahead. It remains to be seen to what degree the anti-NAFTA movement will coalesce with the campaign against the privatization of PEMEX.

Sources: La Jornada, April 11, 2008. Articles by Andres T.Morales, Matile Perez U., P. Munoz, C. Gomez, J. Aranda, and correspondents. El Diario de Juarez, April 11, 2008. Article by Pedro Sanchez Briones. El Sur, April 11, 2008. Articles by Zacarias Cervantes.

NAFTA Back on the Political Agenda

Following in the footsteps of Mexican farmers and other free trade critics, US Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are calling for renegotiating aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The candidates' statements have special relevance in two upcoming primary states, Texas and Ohio, that could be pivotal in deciding who wins the Democratic nomination.

According to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, Ohio lost 50,000 jobs from 1993 to 2004 due to NAFTA. In relation to NAFTA, the United States Department of Labor certified 75 Ohio plant closures from 1993 to 2002, the EPI said in a press statement late last week.

While taking on NAFTA is likely to score votes in Ohio, it is less certain how the free trade issue will play out in Texas. A recent report from Texas A&M University contended that NAFTA was responsible for increasing the state's trade with Mexico from $25 million in 1990 to $332 million in 2006. According to the study, border communities especially benefited from NAFTA, with 35,000 new jobs created in Laredo, Texas, alone during the last 16 years.

"I am convinced that NAFTA has been the conducive force behind this phenomenon," said Michael Conchas, director of the Laredo Chamber of Commerce."  

Meanwhile, as the Democratic presidential contenders are taking pot shots at NAFTA, others are rising to defend the treaty. In an important development, pro-NAFTA politicians and government leaders increasingly argue that free trade, border security and the war against terrorism are inextricably bound together for the public good.

Responding to Clinton's and Obama's NAFTA comments, Republican presidential frontrunner John McCain said this weekend that renegotiating NAFTA would anger the Canadians and jeopardize their support of the Afghan war. NAFTA and national security are "interconnected with each other," McCain said.

Making free trade an essential ingredient of a larger political and economic package emerged as a prominent theme at the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America meeting last week between Canada, Mexico and the US held on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. The participating nations lauded NAFTA, crediting the pact with increasing trade between the three countries to nearly $900 billion dollars by 2007.

"(NAFTA) has contributed significantly to economic growth and the quality of life in the three nations," said the Baja declaration. According to US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, the US gross national product has increased by 54 percent and 26 million jobs have been created since NAFTA went into effect.

NAFTA'S critics would take issue with Gutierrez's rosy assessment of the trade deal. The EPI, for instance, blames NAFTA for the loss of 1 million jobs in the US between 1994 and 2004, including 659,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs. According to the think tank, real hourly wages for Mexican manufacturing workers fell 12 percent between 1993 and 2006, while one million jobs related to the production of corn in Mexico were lost during the same general time period.

Yet NAFTA's worst impact, argues the EPI, was its success as “the prototype of hundreds of corporate-backed trade deals negotiated by the Clinton and Bush administrations," including China's joining of the World Trade Organization. Far from creating jobs, trade deficits with China displaced 2.7 million US workers by 2006, the EPI contends. 

Sources: Associated Press, March 1, 2008. Article by Libby Quaid. La Jornada, February 29, 2009. Article by Fabiola Martinez and Raymundo Leon. Tribuna de la Bahia/Notimex, February 28, 2008. El Sur/Agencia Reforma, February 29, 2008. Article by Ariadna Garcia.  Economic Policy Institute, February 29, 2008, Press statement. 

Super Tuesday in Mexico

On Tuesday, February 5, Democrats in the US states having presidential primaries or caucuses won't be alone in helping select their candidate for the 2008 fall face-off with the Republicans. In Mexico and other foreign nations, US citizens abroad will also have an opportunity to cast ballots for their standard-bearer. Organized by Democrats Abroad, the Mexico primary will help choose 22 foreign-based delegates who will participate in the Democrat's 2008 nominating convention. A part of the Democratic Global Primary for US citizens abroad, the Mexico primary is scheduled to run between February 5 and 12. Other Latin American countries where the primary will take place include Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic.

In an e-mail interview with Frontera  NorteSur, Nancy Evans,  Mexico representative for Democrats Abroad, said the US immigrant community was showing an "overwhelmingly positive" response to the electoral initiative.

"The first ever Global Primary put on by Democrats Abroad-International allows each and every one of us to have an impact upon the candidates who are running for US president on the Democratic Party ticket," Evans said.
"The global primary is not merely a 'straw vote' or a 'beauty contest,' it's a way to express our US presidential candidate preference. The concept of one person-=1 vote is truly in play here."

Starting on Super Tuesday, the Mexican primary will allow expatriates and other US citizens abroad the opportunity to cast ballots via the Internet and fax. For the first time, polling stations, or voting centers, for US citizens are scheduled to open on February 5 in and around Puerto Vallarta, Lake Chapala, San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, all areas with high concentrations of US immigrants. Evans said any US citizen who will be 18 years of age or older on November 4, 2008, is eligible to participate in the primary. 

According to primary rules, prospective voters can register on-site at one of the voting centers but must provide an acceptable picture identification.  Additionally, each voter will be asked to sign a declaration foreswearing participation in any other US primary or caucus.

Evans framed Super Tuesday south of the border as a concrete way for expatriates to overcome the sense of powerlessness they feel about their ability to influence the US political system. Expatriates care deeply about developments in their native land, she said, but “don’t feel they have much impact on the political process from hundreds of miles away.” According to the Democratic Party activist, she’s received complaints from US citizens about not receiving requested absentee ballots on time or at all during previous elections.  

"It's a really fascinating development in the nature of US politics and how they are affected by globalization," said Dr. Sheila Croucher, professor of
political science at Ohio's Miami University. "This is a unique circumstance because the Democratic National Committee treats Democrats abroad as a
51st state."  The author of a forthcoming book from the University of Texas Press about US immigrants in Mexico, Croucher called the Mexico primary an example of the "political transnationalism" of the times. She cited both the 2008 US Democratic primary in Mexico and the 2006 Mexican presidential election in the US as indicators of this trend.

Although widely-criticized for its costly price-tag but ultimately low degree of voter participation, the 2006 Mexican presidential election allowed Mexican immigrants residing in the United States to cast absentee ballots in a presidential election back home for the first time. On an ongoing basis, all three of Mexico's major political parties maintain offices and representatives in the United States.

In a phone interview with Frontera NorteSur, Croucher   challenged the issue of "dual allegiance" expressed by critics of expatriate voting, whether in Mexico or in the US. The Ohio professor criticized the “potential hypocrisy” of politicians critical of Mexican nationals who vote in Mexican presidential elections from the US while US citizens cast ballots in US presidential races from Mexico. 

Both Croucher and Evans concurred that US-born residents of Mexico are concerned about issues, including the Iraq war, impeachment, Medicare and taxes. Many expatriates want Medicare payments, a system which they have paid into all their lives, extended to Mexican doctors and hospitals. Another hot topic is taxation. "Many people complain that the US is one of the few developed countries that levies taxes based on citizenship and not residence," Croucher said.

Though virtually ignored by the US media, the Democratic primary in Mexico has received some nods of attention from the party’s presidential aspirants. According to Croucher, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who dropped out of the race last month, made a phone call to a Democrats Abroad regional meeting in Mexico City last October. Hillary Clinton’s  campaign sent a video to the same meeting, Croucher said. Other candidates have e-mailed answers to policy questions from Democrats Abroad, she added. 

It's still a hard guess how many US-born immigrants currently reside in Mexico, but some estimates put the number at one million-strong. The US Census Bureau does not count US citizens in Mexico or other countries, and US Department of State does not make public its own calculations based on security reasons.

Depending on the closeness of Tuesday's election results, the Mexico primary could end up being a surprising factor in choosing the Democrats' 2008 candidate. "We hope, in fact, that Democrats Abroad members voting as a bloc worldwide will have a major impact as "the 51st state upon the US presidential candidates and make our presence felt at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado in August 2008," Evans affirmed.

For Croucher, the Democrats’ Global Primary is a watershed in modern politics. The event, she noted, "steps up institutionalization of (expatriate) voices and involvement in the American political system from abroad."

-Kent Paterson 

The Commotion in Coahuila

As the winter holidays crawl near, many news outlets on both sides of the border focus on soft news stories of non-stop shopping, holiday recipes and travel conditions. They deliver ritualistic appeals to help poor people who are largely invisible in the media the remainder of the year. But in the northern Mexican border state of Coahuila, December provided plenty of hard grist for the journalistic mill. In the days leading up to the Christmas holiday celebrations, Mexican soldiers were gunned down gangland-style, the office of an outspoken bishop was burgled, the Cimari hazardous waste dump went up in flames, the state governor staged a splashy wedding in Franciscan ruins, and even Carlos Salinas de Gortari came to town.

Commotion reigned in Torreon on Tuesday, December 18, when as many as nine gunmen ambushed four Mexican soldiers in a cell-phone store located in the downtown section of the city.  Three of the soldiers were killed while a fourth was sent to the hospital with injuries. Almost immediately following the attack, a convey of Mexican troops riding in Hummers, tanks and other vehicles was spotted moving toward the city. The brazen assault was among the worst episodes of violence to strike Coahuila, which has been the scene of a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels on one side and the Gulf Cartel on the other during 2006 and 2007. Once relished for its cotton, mining and dairy industries, Coahuila is now defined by an economy revolving around migration, maquiladoras and marijuana.  Strategically wrapped around routes that lead  to the US border,  Coahuila’s highways move jeans, dope and people. As in Ciudad Juarez, violent attacks against women have paralleled the rise of the legal and illegal global export industry. From 1998 to 2006, the bodies of at least 7 women were found scattered near the city of Saltillo. Showing signs of bite marks and sexual abuse, the women’s bodies were found naked and wrapped in plastic bags. A US national, William Wade, was once arrested for some of the crimes but later released.

Two Coahuila residents appear on a list of disappeared women issued by the Federal Office of the Attorney General.  In June 2003, 17-year-old Adela Jazmin Solis Castaneda vanished in Torreon after leaving for school. A Moncolva resident, Mayela Paola Muzquiz Aguilar, disappeared in August 2004 while going to a corner store near her home. The mother of the 21-year-old woman has since reported receiving strange phone calls with no one speaking on the other end of the line.
As Coahuila was coping with the Torreon slayings, word came December 21 that the offices of Saltillo Bishop Raul Vera were ransacked by two hooded suspects who attacked a secretary before departing. A well-known human rights activist, Vera was apparently on his way to the 10th anniversary commemoration of the Acteal massacre in Chiapas when the assault occurred. “This is part of the harassment that the father has been suffering, we can’t interpret it any other way,” said priest Pedro Pantoja, coordinator of the Saltillo diocese’s social and migrant program. “They went through files, electronic apparatuses, and no money was missing…”
Bishop Vera has been a prominent advocate for families of coal miners killed in the 2006 Pasta de Conchos disaster as well as for the 14 sex workers gang-raped by soldiers in the Castanos red light district last year. The bishop’s criticisms of Judge Hiradier Huerta, who found only three  soldiers guilty of  crimes, recently prompted the judge to write the Vatican demanding Vera’s removal. Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira and other political leaders sharply condemned the attack on Vera’s office. Not all the recent news coming from Coahuila had a somber streak. Ample coverage was devoted to the December 21 wedding between Governor Moreira and Irma Vanesa Guerrero Martinez in the ruins of the St. Bernard Mission south of the border town of Piedras Negras. Bride Guerrero is a relative of prominent TV Azteca personality Paty Chapoy. Protected by hundreds of federal police and soldiers, the guest list read like a Who’s Who of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its allies.  Enjoying champagne and whiskey, hundreds of invitees danced to the live sounds of Camila, Grupo Pesado, Rondalla de Saltillo, Napoleon, and Celso Pina. Overwhelming the Piedras Negras airport with dozens of private jets, the wedding was an economic boost for area hotels including businesses in the Texas border cities of Eagle Pass and Del Rio. Well-known PRI politicians topped the list of guests, including Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza and Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto. El Universal publisher Francisco Ealy Ortiz, Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster and businessman Alfonso Ancira Elizondo attended the festivities. Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari served as a witness for the enamored couple. In some ways, the Moreira-Guerrero wedding could be viewed as an end-of-the-year celebration for the PRI, which won many local and state elections in 2007. It could also prove to be an early coming out for an eventual Moreira presidential candidacy in 2012. Perhaps standing out among the wedding guests was Rosario Robles, who once served as mayor of Mexico City for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Robles was a close associate of the enigmatic, Argentine-born businessman Carlos Ahumada, whom supporters of 2006 PRD presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador accused of scheming with Salinas de Gortari, Vicente Fox and others to deny Lopez Obrador Mexico’s presidency. Released from prison earlier this year, Ahumada quickly faded from the limelight but not before making the comment that he had put in his “two cents” to stop AMLO dead in his tracks. Interviewed by reporters, Robles denied that divisions plague the tribalistic PRD, and she praised Governor Moreira of the ostensibly rival PRI for being a man committed to the poor and social equality.   Immersed in his  wedding day, Governor Moreira declined to comment on political matters, only saying that his new wife “stole my heart.” The newlyweds asked guests to donate wedding gifts to a bank account set up to aid low-income residents of  Piedras Negras.  Preliminary reports indicated that at least $200,000 had been rapidly collected for the fund.

Sources: Zocalo.com.mx, December 22 and 24, 2007. Articles by Hilda Aguilar and Juan Ramon Garza. El Diario de Coahuila, December 22, 2007. Frontenet/Notimex, December 21, 2007. La Jornada, December 19 and 21, 2007. Articles by Leopoldo Ramos. El Universal, December 21, 2007. Articles by Alberto Morales and the Notimex news service. Cimacnoticias.com, December 20 and 21, 2007. Articles by Hypatia Velasco Ramirez and Sofia Noriega. La Voz de Nuevo Mexico/Agencia Reforma, December 7, 2007. Proceso/Apro., November 10, 2006 and December 21, 2007. Articles by Arturo Rodriguez Garcia.

Chihuahua Voter Participation Plummets

With each passing election in the northern Mexican border state of Chihuahua, less eligible voters are inclined to turn out to the polls. New vote numbers reported by the head of the Chihuahua State Electoral Institute (IEE) show a steady trend of abstentionism in state and local elections from 1992 to 2007, a period of time when Mexico was officially moving from an authoritarian one-party state and approving democratic reforms at all levels.

According to IEE President Fernando Herrera Martinez, voter turnout in Chihuahua state gubernatorial elections reached 63.5 percent in 1992, decreased to 57.1 percent in 1998 and slid to 44.2 percent in 2004, the year the current governor, Jose Reyes Baeza, was elected. Abstentionism was even more pronounced in elections for state legislators, mayors and city councils, which are held in different years than the governor's race. According to the IEE's numbers, 55.1 percent of voters turned out in the 1995 elections, 43.2 percent cast ballots in 2001 and 37.5 percent voted  in last July's contest.

In comparison to voter participation in other Mexican states, Chihuahua ranks below Tamaulipas, Baja California, Sinaloa and Michoacan, among many others.

In comments to the Mexican press, Herrera said the IEE plans to work on increasing voter participation by means of civic education and media publicity. Part of the funding for the campaign could be drawn from the IEE'S 2008 proposed $7 million budget that will be considered by state lawmakers, Herrera added. 

"The proposal is to involve all the political actors in the task of increasing citizen participation in the coming electoral processes: political parties, media outlets, educational institutions and other groups with a broad social  presence," Herrera said.

Herrera’s IEE faces a daunting challenge. In conversations, many would-be Mexican voters express a profound distrust of politicians of varying political stripes, characterizing all of them as hopelessly corrupt.  In border states like Chihuahua, migration could also be a factor in explaining the high rates of electoral abstentionism.

Source: El Diario de Juarez, November 28, 2007.  

President Felipe Calderon: Year One

Marking his first year in office, Mexican President Felipe Calderon delivered a state-of-the-union speech on Saturday, December 1. Speaking in an optimistic tone, Calderon expressed confidence the political divisions that characterized his highly-challenged election in 2006 had been overcome. "Today, after one year of government and in before  a truly different panorama, I am more convinced than ever that Mexico's problems have solutions, but that they require unity and the solidarity of all," Calderon said.

In his address, Calderon emphasized economic, education, anti-crime and anti-poverty initiatives. Missing from his speech were recognitions of the special problems faced by Mexican corn farmers, tortilla consumers, battered women, indigenous groups, and Mexico-US border residents.

Calderon failed to make any mention of Mexican migrants in the United States and Canada.  Accounting for nearly one of every ten Mexicans, migrants help fuel the Mexican economy with more than $20 billion annually in remittances. The president's omission of the migration and remittance issues from his speech was even more striking at a moment when immigration is emerging as a key, contentious issue in the 2008 US presidential election, a development certain to affect Mexico-US relations one way or another.   

President Calderon lauded the creation of 800,000 jobs, the passage of new social security and tax reforms and the expansion of anti-poverty programs rooted in old Institutional Revolutionary Party governments. He emphasized the landing of $18 billion in foreign investment, an amount thirty percent higher than the previous year's figure, and  pending federal investments to the tune of  $5 billion in roads, ports, airports, energy installations, re-gasification facilities, telecommunications, and refineries, all part of the federal government's 2007-2012 national infrastructure program.  

"Despite the stagnation that threatens the economy of the United States, upon which we are dependent and which limits us, our growth of a little more than three percent this year, from December 1 of last year to now, (shows) the confidence in Mexico that permitted the creation of formal employment," Calderon said. To keep the economy on track, he reiterated an announcement made days earlier in Monterrey to slash electricity rates by 30 percent for an estimated 44,200 enterprises beginning on January 1, 2008.   

"We are going to reform and reinforce the dynamic of the internal market," Calderon vowed. "We are going to promote key sectors including construction, tourism, agriculture, housing, energy, and telecommunications, and we will diversify exports outside the North American market that grew at a rate superior to 25 percent this year."

The Mexican president devoted considerable time in his speech to detailing the expansion of anti-poverty and health insurance programs initiated by the Fox administration. According to Calderon, the federally-supported Seguro Popular health insurance program now covers 7 million families, one-third more than in 2006.  Calderon also cited the 70 and Older Program that gives the elderly, marginalized poor about fifty dollars per month. The program mimics one pioneered by former Mexico City Mayor and Calderon nemesis Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The Mexican federal government will spend about $100 billion on  health,  education and public services in 2008, Calderon added.

Completing a year in office dramatized by big drug seizures and the extradition of some leading drug traffickers to the United States, Calderon hailed the detention of 15,000 people linked to organized crime, including 20 regional drug cartel chiefs. "With each drug confiscation, with each criminal behind bars, with each zone  we recover from organized crime, we drive away our children from addictions, from violence and from delinquency," Calderon declared.

Noticeably, Calderon did not directly refer to the central role of the Mexican Armed Forces in the anti-drug campaign. Indeed, President Calderon's second year in office began just as his first did- with the deployment of the army.  Last year, shortly after taking office, he sent troops to Baja California and Michoacan. On the eve of his presidential speech this year, Calderon authorized the dispatch of army special forces to the northern border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, where the Gulf drug cartel has particular sway. In recent days, the region has been struck with new outbreaks of suspected narco-violence,  including the November 29 murder of former Rio Bravo Mayor Juan Antonio Guajardo and five companions.

Briefly mentioning the recent natural disasters in Tabasco and Chiapas, Calderon’s speech treaded lightly on the environment. In terms of climate change, Calderon stressed the addition of new land into natural protected areas,  as well as PROARBOL, a program he said has achieved the planting of 217 million trees. Calderon boasted that PROARBOL’S accomplishments account for one-fourth of the United Nations’ global tree replanting goal. However, Mexico’s chief executive did not speak about mass transportation or other strategies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On the thorny issue of human rights, Calderon was silent. No comments were made by the president about ongoing political and social conflicts in Chiapas and Oaxaca states. Weeks before his speech, the European Parliament passed a resolution that put the unresolved femicides of Ciudad Juarez and other places in Mexico squarely back on the international agenda. As a presidential candidate, Calderon pledged justice for the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez. It was a campaign promise many victims' relatives say is far from fulfilled.  

Even as Calderon was speaking, new human rights crises were brewing. A violent eviction by the Federal Preventive Police of protesting students who had occupied a highway toll booth near Acapulco November 30 left one student gravely injured and 56 others detained. Three reporters from La Jornada and El Sur newspapers were allegedly roughed up by police in the incident.

Two days before the president’s speech, the Mexican Supreme Court rendered a decision that many human rights advocates contend will go down in infamy. By a slim majority, court justices ruled no evidence existed to investigate Puebla Governor Mario Marin and other members of his administration for violating the rights of Cancun journalist Lydia Cacho, who was irregularly detained and threatened with rape in 2005 after she published a book exposing an international pedophile ring. The court also declined to investigate  Cacho’s well-documented expose of the ring, which allegedly included prominent businessmen and officials.

Stunned by the turn in her case, Cacho found herself at the huge Guadalajara International Book Fair as the Supreme Court’s decision was steadily condemned in the Mexican press. Surrounded by thousands of people from across Latin America and the world, Cacho vowed to take her case to the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights and “two important European organisms.”   

In Washington, meanwhile, human rights are emerging as an issue in the Bush administration’s Plan Mexico anti-drug legislation under consideration by the US Congress.

As his first year in office closed, President Calderon maintained high levels of popularity,  according to a poll conducted by the Mexico City newspaper Reforma and disseminated in the electronic media. The poll reported that 64 percent of Mexicans surveyed approved of the president's record, while 23 percent disapproved. An additional 13 percent said they did not know how to respond. Paradoxically, Calderon's purported popularity has done little for his conservative National Action Party, which fared badly in state and local elections across Mexico this year.  

Sources:  El Universal, November 28 and 29, 2007; December 1, 2007. Articles by Sergio Jimenez, Francisco Gomez,  Natalia Gomez, Justino Miranda, Silvia Otero, and editorial staff. Univision, December 1, 2007.  La Jornada, November 30 and December 1, 2007. Articles by  Jesus Aranda, Juan Carlos Partida and Misael Habana de los Santos. El Sur, December 1, 2007. Article by Xavier Rosado. Proceso/Apro,November 27, 2007. Article by Luciano Campos Garza.

Narco Politics, Video Bombs and Political Spying

Refusing to follow Mexican presidents before him into quiet retirement, former President Vicente Fox continues to make waves. In the latest controversy involving the ex-president, Fox claimed during an October 25  California visit that Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones had been linked to illegal drug trafficking. The Guanajuato-based Fox Center, an organization established to promote Fox's conservative brand of politics in Mexico and abroad, issued a statement the following day repeating the accusation.

"Mr. Manlio Fabio Beltrons should dedicate himself to being a senator and not promoting his current aspirations to be President of the Republic. Manlio Fabio Beltrones has a record with the DEA connected with drug trafficking," the explosive missive claimed. 

The accusation followed remarks made last week by Beltrones, who said the sons of Fox's wife, Martha Sahagun, were connected to a contractor for the national oil company PEMEX that was involved in an October 23 accident in Campeche state which left at least 22 workers dead.

A former governor of Sonora state, Beltrones is a prominent politician who served as a federal deputy and then as a senator during the Fox administration. Beltrones' alleged involvement in drug trafficking was not made a public issue by the Fox government during its 2000-2006 administration. Indeed, a recent article in Proceso magazine recounted how Fox's former presidential secretary and trip coordinator were both suspected of involvement with organized crime.

In response to Fox's accusation, Beltrones charged that the ex-president was trying to confuse public opinion with a "smokescreen" designed to "hide corrupt acts of his family." In October, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies approved a special commission to probe the legality of personal property acquired by Fox during his presidency, a move Fox blasted as being politically-motivated. Beltrones said he would not sue Fox for libel, but suggested that the outspoken former president needed to visit a psychiatrist.

The Fox-Beltrones flap was just the latest public scandal swirling around politicians and their alleged ties to drug trafficking. The hoopla comes amid President George W. Bush's unveiling of a $1.4 billion drug war economic assistance package for Mexico known as Plan Mexico. If the financial assistance approved by the US Congress, Mexican senators and congressmen will have a role in deciding how the money should be spent on the ground.

A likely focal point of Plan Mexico spending is the northern border state of Tamaulipas, where intense bouts of narco-violence have erupted during the last four years. Tamaulipas is also currently the scene of a highly charged state election campaign that culminates on November 11. Threats,  reported acts of violence and mutual accusations of lawbreaking between the PRI and Fox's National Action Party (PAN) have characterized the contest so far. At one point, bomb threats against PRI offices in Matamoros were called in to the local police command and control center. 

Recently, Tamaulipas PAN leader Alejandro Saenz accused political opponents of carrying out acts of physical aggression against PAN candidates. "In previous days, the PAN mayoral candidate for Reynosa, Gerardo Pena, was kidnapped by presumed drug traffickers who ordered him to renounce his candidacy," Saenz said, adding that his party's mayoral candidates for Ciudad Mier and Nueva Ciudad Guerrero were forced to drop out of the race because of threats from criminals.  

Earlier this month, Saenz demanded that the Federal Office Attorney General (PGR) investigate purported ties between drug traffickers and PRI candidates. Saenz's demand came after a video was publicized that showed a meeting at the Laguna Madre restaurant in which an alleged drug dealer and the campaign coordinator of the PRI's Reynosa mayoral candidate, Oscar Luebbert, supposedly discussed why a raid was carried out on a drug stash house. 

Luebbert's public image has suffered other blows. An anti-Luebbert book some journalists suspect of being financed by the PAN has been circulating in Tamaulipas. Authored by Antonio Rosario, the book implicates Luebbert in shady insurance dealings during the 1990s.

After the Laguna Madre video was released, the PRI filed legal charges with the state attorney general's office and the PGR. The complaints accuse Saenz, as well as PAN federal congressmen Omehira Lopez Reyna and Raul Garcia Vivian and former Reynosa Mayor Francisco Javier Garcia Cabeza de Vaca, of engaging in political spying and  waging a "dirty war" against the PRI. "We have been the clear targets of telephone espionage and this is typified in the law as a crime," the local PRI leadership charged. 

Under a glare of negative publicity, Luebbert announced this past weekend that he had taken a drug test to prove he was as clean as a whistle. Adding that he couldn’t acknowledge if PAN members were working with organized crime,  Luebbert nevertheless contended that "suspicions accompany them."

Meanwhile, another important PRI candidate in Tamaulipas, Arturo Diez Gutierrez Navarro, who is running for the strategic mayoral position in the state capital of Ciudad Victoria, was recently forced to answer questions about suspicions of drug money in his campaign.

"We are good people, and we have nothing to do with (drug traffickers)," Melendez told reporters.  Diez's brother-in-law, Alfredo Melendez, was gunned down gangland-style in a restaurant in Mexico state at the end of 2006.

Until now, no one has been held accountable for the alleged threats and illegal activities which have tainted the 2007 Tamaulipas electoral process.

In another recent instance of the "n" word sending jolts through the Mexican political landscape, PRI Governor Humberto Moreira of Coahuila accused PAN members of involvement with the drug underworld. Delivering his annual state-of-the-state report on October 15,  Gov. Moreira turned heads when he accused Panistas of "being up to their knees in drug trafficking."

In an equally surprising move, Moreira quickly backtracked from his accusations. The governor then held a meeting with PAN Senator Guillermo Anaya Llamas, one of the politicians implicated by Moreira in his speech. When asked by a reporter about the sudden turn-around in his posture, Moreira replied that it was for the public good.

"We talked with Senator Anaya and we came to an agreement to work together for Coahuila," Moreira said. "In (Coahuila), we have a great deal of public works, of social development, and we have a work dynamic that begins early and ends very late, so that's why we come to a point of agreement that we must work together for the future."
 
German Martinez Cazares, Mexico’s former anti-corruption czar who is vying for the presidency of the PAN, called on Moreira as well as Fox to present concrete proof of their respective accusations.

Mexico's contemporary round of narco-polemics underscores the persistence of a politically explosive but little-resolved issue.  At a Ciudad Juarez forum this month, leaders of the powerful Coparmex employers' organization insisted that political parties as well as businesses had been infiltrated by narcos. Rogelio Serna Michelena, vice-president of the public safety commission of the Coparmex, said large sums of money of illegal origin were being spent on many elections. Although accusations and counter-accusations of narco activity are flying fast and loose on Mexico's political scene, rarely does such rhetoric ever get translated into actual criminal prosecutions or other actions like putting greater controls on the private financing of election campaigns. 

Sources: Univision, October 27, 2007. El Universal, October 11, 17, 26, 27, 2007. Articles by Lilia Saul, Fernando Pedrero, Jose Luis Ruiz, Ricardo Gomez, and the Notimex news agency. El Sur/Agencia Reforma, October 27, 2007. Milenio.com, October 27, 2007. Proceso/Apro, October 16, 17 and 23, 2007. Articles by Gabriela Hernandez,  Jose Gil Olmos and Arturo Rodriguez Garcia. Enlineadirecta.info, October 22 and 27, 2007. Articles by Anabel Rocha Garcia, Hugo Reyna and editorial staff. La Jornada, October 18 and 28, 2007. Articles by Georgina Saldierna. El Diario de Juarez, October 11 and 22, 2007. 

The Border’s Summer of Discontent

It's as if all the contradictions of the US War on Terror, immigration reform, US-Mexico relations, free trade, and sagging economies on both sides of the border have burst at the seams, and at the same time. As the record hot summer of 2007 crawls to a close, the political barometer on the US-Mexico border is tipping red. Barely a day goes by without hunger strikes, human chains, border crossing demonstrations, marches, and calls for economic boycotts.

In a press conference this week, Carlos Marentes, director of the El Paso-based Border Agricultural Workers Project, said "neo-liberal" economic policies exemplified by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) are sparking a growing crisis in the borderlands and beyond. He contended that US immigration laws and policies are shrouded in a veil of "hypocrisy" which views immigrant workers as an indispensable, cheap labor pool but then turns them into convenient political scapegoats. "We want to stop them, but we also need them," Marentes said. 

While border protests are hardly new, what's striking about the latest manifestations of discontent is how they are cutting across the political spectrum and even incorporating centrist and conservative forces that are increasingly frustrated by a status quo dictated in Washington and Mexico City.

In the wake of the US Congress' failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation this year, several developments are rekindling citizen activism. Among the most important are the construction of new border walls, long waits at border crossings, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown on undocumented workers, the deaths of detained immigrants while in US custody, Border Patrol shootings, and the August 19 deportation of activist Elvira Arellano.

The August 8 shooting of Jose Alejandro Ortiz by the US Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, unleashed a wave of indignation on the border and in Mexico. Ortiz, who reportedly had a criminal record in both the US and Mexico, was allegedly involved in an attempt to smuggle immigrants when he was fatally shot.  

According to the Border Patrol's account, Ortiz threatened to throw a rock at a still-unidentified agent, who was forced to fire in self-defense at the young man. At least one witness contradicted the official version, and the local US attorney's office is investigating the killing. Since Ortiz supposedly died south of the border, Mexico's Office of the Federal Attorney General has also opened an investigation. The Ortiz shooting was the fifth time El Paso Border Patrol agents have shot an undocumented person this year, but the first fatal incident of 2007.

Ortiz's killing was condemned in strong language by Ciudad Juarez Bishop Renato Ascensio Leon, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza, Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez and members of the federal Mexican Congress. On Saturday, August 25, several federal congressmen from President Calderon's center-right National Action Party leafleted motorists crossing the Bridge of Americas between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. Two days earlier, Ortiz family members and supporters burned a Border Patrol pinata at another bridge linking the two cities.

El Paso Democratic Congressman Silvestre Reyes, who headed the El Paso Border Patrol office during the 1990s, said an investigation of the Ortiz killing was necessary but challenged critics he said downplayed the seriousness of rock-throwing against agents. "Anybody who thinks you can't get killed by a rock is a fool," Congressman Reyes said at an El Paso border security conference.

The construction of new US border walls is another issue stoking anger in the region. While proponents of physical barriers insist the walls will guard against terrorists, deter illegal immigrants and curb drug traffickers, opponents, including most Texas border city mayors, contend the million-dollar structures will divide sister cities, intrude on private lands, create flood hazards, threaten ecosystems and wildlife like rare jaguars, and funnel undocumented immigrants to deadlier, isolated desert crossings. Isabel Garcia of the Tucson-based Human Rights Coalition, said more than 200 migrants have died trying to cross the border in the Arizona-Sonora corridor alone since October of last year. The Arizona-Sonora border is "the epicenter of the war on immigrants," Garcia charged.
 
In opposition to border walls, a Texas-based group called Border Ambassadors kicked off a 16-day campaign August 25 in El Paso. Led by Jay J. Johnson-Castro, the group organized a small human chain across the Santa Fe Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

The demonstration was supported by the League for United Latin American Citizens, Miss Latina Texas beauty contest queens and the mayors of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. El Paso Mayor Cook said that people outside the region don't understand the "symbiotic relationship" between border communities dependent on mutual economic, academic and social exchanges. Border Ambassadors plans human chains in the coming days in other Texas-Mexico border cities.

A separate anti-wall mobilization is planned for October 11-13. Endorsed by 37 Western Hemisphere non-governmental groups, the action grows out of last year's Border Social Forum held in Ciudad Juarez. Protest organizers   include San Antonio's Southwest Workers Union, the Border Agricultural Workers Union, Southwest Organizing Project, and many others.

Economic grievances remain are the core of many border-area protests. Former Bracero Program guestworkers, for instance, are renewing demands that the Mexican government compensate all the eligible braceros who had money deducted from their paychecks decades ago for savings accounts that never materialized.

On Monday, August 27, nine women initiated a week-long hunger strike in El Paso against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the conditions of women workers and treatment of immigrants in the US. Organized by La Mujer Obrera, a longtime group of former garment industry workers, the hunger strikers demand investment in women-centered economic development enterprises.

In Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, thousands of teachers are expected to hold a border demonstration August 31 to protest the Mexican government's passage of a new social security law that lengthens retirement age eligibility requirements and sets the stage for the privatization of pension accounts.

Building on a trend that's developed over the past few years, the latest round of border activism is connected to issues affecting communities across North America. In Prince William County, Virginia, the Sin Fronteras organization launched an economic boycott this week to protest a new county law that gives local police immigration law enforcement responsibilities.

In an August 27 telephone press conference, representatives of several US-based human rights and Latino and Asian community organizations criticized the expansion of law enforcement measures once confined to the border region to the interior of the United States. Activist leaders condemned house-to-house ICE raids, alleged detention center abuses, employer verification letters, the use of local police forces to enforce immigration laws, and the appearance of high-tech aircraft monitoring communities far from the border.  

Immigrant communities are in a "state of siege," charged Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee. Activists are "now calling for our communities to come together and say enough to these governmental initiatives," Ramirez added.

Veronica Carmona, an organizer for the New Mexico-based Colonias Development Council, told Frontera NorteSur that pro-immigrant groups are backing a national day of action for September 12. Carmona said the character of the protest is still being debated.

If cross-border activism needed a media face, Elvira Arellano certainly provided it. The undocumented Mexican worker's long fight to remain with her child, a US citizen, was abruptly interrupted when ICE agents arrested Arellano as she was leaving a Los Angeles press conference this month. Arellano's rapid deportation to Mexico drew the protest of the Mexican government.

Arellano's arrest injected new life into the immigrant rights movement, and thousands of people streamed into the streets of Los Angeles on August 25 chanting "We are all Elvira," a slogan evocative of the 1994 cry in Mexico, "We are all Marcos," in allusion to the Zapatista subcomandante. The Arellano case received ample coverage and touched off sharp commentary in the Mexican media, with some outlets proclaiming the young woman as the “symbol” of the Mexican immigrant in the US.   

Additional sources: Univison, August 18 and 27, 2008. El Universal, August 26, 2007. Article by Julieta Martinez.  El Sur, August 26, 2007. Norte, August 14, 16, 25 and 26, 2007. Articles by Ricardo Espinoza, Antonio Flores Schroeder, Pablo Hernandez Batista, Jorge Chairez Daniel and Carlos Huerta. La Jornada, August 11, 21 and 26, 2007. Articles by Ruben Villalpando, the Notimex news agency and editorial staff. El Paso Times, August 21, 24, 25 and 26, 2007. Articles by Daniel Borunda, Louie Gilot and Adriana M. Chavez.  Lapolaka.com, August 9, 14, 25, 26, 27, 2007. El Diario de Juarez, August 9, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 2007.

The PRI Dominates Mexico’s North

In a reversal of last year’s poor political performance, the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has emerged as the clear winner in local elections held in three north-central Mexican states last weekend.  

A survey of election results in Chihuahua, Durango and Zacatecas shows the PRI gaining control of municipal presidencies that govern 61 percent of the population in the three states. President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party came in second, winning mayoral offices that cover 27 percent of the population in the region. The center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was the big loser in the balloting, winning  municipal presidencies that are responsible for only 8 percent of the population.

“The PRI made an important advance, with its candidates predominating in the north of the country,” said the party leadership in a statement.

Chihuahua, Durango and Zacatecas  all rank high among migrant-expelling states in Mexico. The arid, northern states are also the scenes of  intense levels of illegal drug cultivation and trafficking.

To one degree or another, all three elections were characterized by negative campaigning,  nepotism, mutual accusations of election law violations and widespread voter apathy. In Chihuahua, for instance, more than 60 percent of the electorate reportedly stayed home, with absenteeism reaching record rates of more than 70 percent in Ciudad Juarez alone. In an election with extremely low voter turn-out in the border city,  the PRI’s Jose Reyes handily beat the PAN’s Sergio Holguin  in the mayor’s race.

A cliff-hanger mayoral contest  in the state capital of Chihuahua City almost turned into a drawn-out, post-electoral conflict when both the PAN and PRI candidates proclaimed victory. Reminiscent of former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the PRI’s Alejandro Cano Ricaud initially demanded a vote-by-vote recount but later accepted a ruling by the Chihuahua State Electoral Institute that rejected Cano’s request and handed the victory to the PAN’s Carlos Borruel Baquera by a margin of only 387 votes.

Local election results in Zacatecas  unleashed new political tremors within the faction-ridden PRD, which dominated the state prior to last Sunday’s election.
Besides losing the state capital of Zacatecas to the PAN, the PRD also lost the mining city of Fresnillo to the Labor Party, which participated with the PRD in last year’s coalition that ran Lopez Obrador for president.

The PRD’s Zacatecas debacle is widely viewed as the outcome of a conflict between former PRD Governor Ricardo Monreal and current PRD Governor Amalia Garcia. Holding presidential ambitions, Monreal heads up a family with widespread political influence in the state. He has been sometimes compared to a cacique, or old-time political strongman.

Monreal’s brother, David, earlier attempted to run on the PRD ticket in a bid to succeed another brother,  Rodolfo, as mayor of Fresnillo. When his aspirations were rejected, David Monreal hopped over to the welcoming Labor Party and won the election.  

The Zacatecas campaign was punctuated by bitter rhetoric, accusations of dirty campaign tactics and, on election day, a strange incident in which Rodolfo Monreal and a political colleague were supposedly kidnapped for 15 minutes by an armed commando that invaded a ranch belonging to businessman Guillermo Huizar.

Accused of mounting a “state election,” Governor Garcia shot back at critics. She contended that Ricardo Monreal had employed “crude” and “violent” language in the race, and denied charges that her government was using state resources to promote its candidates.

Gov. Garcia added that state subsidies to bean growers, who produce the majority of the national crop, were due to the lack of federal support for the agricultural sector as well as the looming crisis confronting  producers next year when the North American Free Agreement eliminates all tariffs on the product.

In the wake of the Zacatecas electoral defeats, a movement has gained momentum within the PRD to expel Ricardo Monreal from the party. Last year, Monreal played a prominent role in Lopez Obrador’s campaign.

Sources: Norte, July 6, 2007. Article by Ricardo Espinoza Rodriguez. Lapolaka.com, July 5, 2007. Proceso/Apro, July 5, 2007. El Sur/Agencia Reforma July 4, 2007.  La Jornada, June 30. 2007; July 1, 2 and 6, 2007. Articles by Gerardo Flores, Alonso Urrutia, Miroslava Breach and Ruben Villalpando.

The Ciudad Juarez Mayor's Race: Police, Pavement, Pop Music and the Poor

Although it received much less attention than Sunday's debate between the Democratic presidential hopefuls in the United States, a candidates' debate organized to discuss the future of a major Mexican border city was also staged over the past weekend in front of television cameras and radio microphones. Struggling with an inattentive public and a skeptical media, the five candidates for the mayoralty of Ciudad Juarez sat down at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez (UACJ) on the evening of June 2 to answer pre-written questions in a carefully-managed, two-hour format.

Competing for the top office in next month's municipal elections are Jose Reyes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and National Alliance Party coalition, Sergio Pedro Holguin of President Calderon’s  National Action Party (PAN),  Hector Sandoval of the Mexican Green Party, Sandra Rivera of the Alternative Social Democrat Party, Raul Reyes of the Labor Party, and Francisco Javier Franco of the Party of the Democratic Revolution and Convergence coalition.  Reyes served as an interim mayor of Ciudad Juarez several years ago.

All the candidates are associated with the dominant professional, business and political sectors of Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua.  Sandra Rivera, the only woman running for mayor, stresses her working-class, migrant background but is currently employed as customs specialist for a maquiladora. A doctor, Reyes is the owner of a private clinic that he says serves the poor. Exemplifying the chronic tribalism that afflicts Mexico's left, three parties which were united in Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's coalition last year are fielding two competing candidates, Franco for the PRD/Convergence slate and Reyes for the Labor Party. 

Addressing the issues of Mexican federalism, public insecurity, women's rights, police corruption, low-income health needs, and pollution, the candidates proposed very little in the way of novel ideas or solutions. The PAN's Holguin, who displayed a good on-camera presence and a clear if heavily criticized message, perhaps grabbed the most attention. In simple terms, Holguin's platform can be summarized as more police and more pavement.

Vowing to pave every street in dusty Ciudad Juarez within the next three years, Holguin said that much of the city's air pollution can be attributed to the rustic roads that predominate in Ciudad Juarez. In a post-debate press conference that was fed to journalists via closed circuit television, the PRI's Reyes slammed Holguin for making a financially unrealistic promise.

In the debate, Holguin pounded on an issue that resonates with Ciudad Juarez's electorate: public insecurity. With at least 127 slayings reported by the press from January 1 to May 31 of this year, Ciudad Juarez's 2007 murder rate could be the highest on record since 2003. At least 15 of this year’s murder victims have been women.

A 2005 UACJ poll curiously released the day before the mayoral debate, showed that 79 percent of 729 residents between the ages of 15 and 64 perceived their city was a violent one. Polled residents blamed the violence on police corruption, impunity and the disappearance of values. 

Claiming one in ten of the border city's estimated 1.5 million residents is a consumer of illegal drugs, Holguin called his city "Number one in the consumption of heroin" in Mexico. The conservative candidate promised to assign police in every single school in the city, a proposal that campaign rival Reyes also later attacked as financially problematic.

Ironically, Holguin's emphasis on public security hit close to home only hours after the debate.  Gathered in a city park, Holguin campaign supporters were witness to the nearby armed robbery of a couple and the theft of an automobile belonging to one of Holguin’s supporter.
 
A youthful Hector Sandoval, who's the standard bearer of former federal Congresswoman Maria Avila's Green Party, attempted to differentiate himself from the PRI and PAN parties, which have alternated the mayor's office in Ciudad Juarez since the mid-1980s. In a cross-border fusion of President Felipe Calderon's youth-oriented 2006 campaign and the late Yippie Jerry Rubin's slogan "Don't Trust Anyone over Thirty," Sandoval pledged that his collaborators in a future municipal administration would be young professionals below 40 years of age. In one of the livelier moments of the debate, Sandoval held up a black-and-white "certificate" that he said would be awarded to companies which maintain a violence-free workplace for women.    
 
In its sarcastic style, Ciudad Juarez's LaPolaka news outlet judged the June 2 debate as the "most boring in history." The Internet news service concluded that "the best thing that the Juarez public could have done is to not see it." In fact, many local residents were seemingly thinking along the lines of LaPolaka. A quick telephone poll done by the Diario de Juarez newspaper reported that only 33 of 126 respondents confirmed watching the debate. Of the 126 people questioned, 25 people rated the PAN's Holguin as the winner, while only 8 gave the victory to Jose Reyes.  Either Reyes or Holguin is likely to win the election.  

Besides indifference, Ciudad Juarez's mayoral candidates were up against another serious problem in attracting at least a sector of the public's attention on June 2. The debate was held on the same evening as a city concert by local boy-makes-good and music legend Juan Gabriel. The flamboyant crooner of  "El Noa Noa" and other classic hits was scheduled to perform at Ciudad Juarez's Carta Blanca venue for ticket prices ranging from about $45 to $95 per seat. 

Additional Sources: Lapolaka.com, June 3 and 4, 2007. El Diario de El Paso, June 1 and June 3, 2007. Articles by Mayra Salinas, Mauricio Rodriguez and Armando Rodriguez.  Frontenet.com, June 3, 2007. Article by Felix Gonzalez. El Diario de Juarez, June 3, 2007.

Mexico’s Hot Month of May

As the month of May opened with tornadoes striking the northern borderlands, Mexican unions and their allies stepped up an offensive against government economic
policies. From Chihuahua in the north to Chiapas in the south, tens of thousands of protestors staged rallies, occupied government buildings, seized highway toll booths,
and temporarily shut down some border crossings to the United States and Guatemala. In Baja California and Chihuahua, classes were cancelled by striking teachers.

Members of Mexico’s National Teachers Union (SNTE) played leading roles in the welling mass movement. A central issue was the passage of a new federal law that changes the troubled ISSSTE retirement system for teachers and other federal workers. Opponents object to the higher premiums and longer working years that are mandated in the new law.

Government spokespersons say that the reform is necessary to salvage a system on the verge of collapse and assure a decent retirement for ISSSTE members. But critics, fearing the privatization of the ISSSTE system, charge that they were not consulted about reforms that could leave them with less future money and healthcare.

“We’re teachers and they have to respect us,” said Tijuana strike leader Juan Ramirez Sanchez. “We’ll stop work until we are protected, because the law is unjust.”

In addition to the street struggle, ISSSTE law opponents took their fight to federal courts. By May 2, about 100,000 individual legal challenges to the law were piling up in federal offices in Mexico City.

The protest movement, which picked up steam on May Day when anti-ISSSTE law teachers upstaged official celebrations in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Aguascalientes and other places, varied in size and impact depending on the location. Downtown Chihuahua City was paralyzed May 2 by thousands of protestors, while Oaxaca City’s Zocalo was reoccupied by a reinvigorated popular movement. On the other hand, a mass movement failed to immediately materialize in Tamaulipas state.

Besides the ISSSTE law, protestors slammed Mexico’s growing security cooperation with the United States, criticized proposals to privatize energy resources and denounced the high cost of living. Other objections were raised to the North American Free Trade Agreement, and criticism was voiced about the recent release of alleged Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from a US immigration jail.

Although some immigrant advocacy groups in the United States like the March 25 Coalition had earlier declared that a broad coordination of US and Mexican organizations existed for this year’s May Day protest in both nations, little attention was focused in the Mexican actions on the situation of Mexican migrants in the United States. One notable exception was in Nuevo Laredo, where members of the border city’s Migrant House and the Mexico-USA United Front Association, marching in the annual May Day parade, protested the Bush Administration’s border wall and the overall treatment of migrants in the US.

More court battles, teacher strikes and other protests are expected in the days ahead. “We have to meet and establish our appropriate conditions of struggle, which aren’t the same conditions as in other states,” said Jose Francisco Ramirez, a protest leader in Aguascalientes. “Additionally, we don’t want to expose our protesting comrades to the repression of the armed forces or public order.”

Additional sources: Frontera, May 1, 2 and 3, 2007. Articles by Manuel Villegas and Kriztian Camarena. Lapolaka.com, May 1 and 2, 2007. Enlineadirecta.info, May 1 and 2, 2007. Articles by Hugo Reyna and Jesus Hernandez Garcia.

Mexico's 2007 Political Season Unfolds

Barely removed from the tumultuous 2006 presidential election, Mexico is embarking on a new round of elections this year. On different dates, voters in 14 states will elect 1,923 candidates to fill offices at both the state and municipal levels. Besides mayors, city council members and state legislative representatives, voters in three states- Baja California, Michoacan and Yucatan- will pick new governors.

For the 2007 season, 8 political parties will be bankrolled with at least $260 million dollars in public funding channeled by the Federal Electoral Institute. The funding formula, dividing 30 percent of the money equally among the 8 political organizations while distributing the remaining 70 percent according to the percentage of votes received by each party in the 2006 federal congressional election, reinforces the domination of the three big parties-President Calderon's conservative National Action Party (PAN), the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). 

The election outcomes will help determine the ability of new President Felipe Calderon to implement his agenda on the ground. In the last round of similar state congressional elections in 2004, the PRI won 10 of the races, while the PAN and the PRD took two each. In 2001, the last time governors' elections were held in the three states having such contests this year, the PAN claimed the governorships of Baja California and Yucatan, while the PRD conquered Michoacan.  For the first time, US-based migrants will be able to vote from abroad by mail in the 2007 Michoacan state election.

A big question is whether a public weary of politicians and expensive campaigns will turn out in big enough numbers to give any one force a legitimate mandate. Voter turnout in state and local elections is usually less than in presidential elections, and the percentage of registered voters who cast ballots in presidential elections has steadily fallen from about 77 percent of registered voters in 1988 to barely 58 percent in 2006. The 14 states where elections will take place this year account for roughly 40 percent of the Mexican population.

The Broader Political Context :

At this stage in the electoral process, intra-party conflicts have generally overshadowed any programmatic or ideological difference between the parties. Disputes over candidacies, leadership roles and political direction have erupted within the PAN in Aguascalientes, Yucatan and Chihuahua states, and have broken out inside the PRD in Baja California, Chihuahua and Zacatecas states, among other places. In Chihuahua state, an internal PRD conflict revolves around the candidacy of Ciudad Juarez business woman and former Lopez Obrador presidential campaign coordinator Edna Lorena Fuerte for a state legislator's seat.

Non-party political actors will directly or indirectly influence the elections in several states. In Michoacan, for instance, a shadowy crime syndicate called "The Family" that reportedly counts several thousand members and controls many drug trafficking routes, could be a force behind the scenes. In virtually all the states in which state and local elections will take place this year, recurrent bouts of narco-violence, political scandals and exposures of law enforcement corruption have characterized the landscape in recent months.

In the southern border state of Chiapas, reports of a resurgent anti-Zapatista paramilitary movement and harassment of non-governmental organizations could foreshadow a new outbreak of political violence. As is custom, the indigenous-based Zapatista movement is not likely to participate in this year's elections because of political principle.

In southern Oaxaca state, a renewed teacher's movement and a revived Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan Peoples (APPO) which was suppressed by federal and state security forces last fall amid hundreds of murders, disappearances and arrests, is back in the streets demanding a solution to educational problems and the resignation of PRI Governor Ulises Ruiz. In light of the simmering conflict, it's hard to imagine how authorities will stage their part of the Miss Universe Pageant at the Monte Alban ruins next May. Already, pro-APPO counter-protests are being organized for the internationally-famous Miss Universe event.  

Some warn of new episodes of Oaxaca-style repression in the southern state and elsewhere. Supporters of the Democratic Peasant Front (FDC) of Chihuahua state denounced the March 9 arrest of FDC leader Jesus Emiliano Garcia in Chihuahua City during a visit by President Felipe Calderon .  Garcia’s supporters reported that the campesino activist was arrested by the Federal Agency of Investigations on “sabotage” charges related to an earlier occupation of a federal building conducted to protest the corn crisis. Visiting the United States at the time of Garcia’s detention, Victor Quintana, another FDC leader and prominent PRD figure in Chihuahua state, expressed fears of being detained along with others if he returned to Mexico.

Finally, it remains to be seen whether Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, self-proclaimed as Mexico's "legitimate president" in a massive ceremony last November, will stage a comeback. Now largely operating outside his PRD party, Lopez Obrador is going ahead with plans to hold his National Democratic Convention in Mexico City on March 25.

The convention is likely to challenge President Calderon's economic program, and endorse a campaign to defend state ownership of energy resources. Conceivably, the national convention could add impetus to the gathering labor, campesino and popular protests that are spreading across Mexico against high prices and President Calderon's policies. If Lopez Obrador's partisans leave the meeting better organized than they have been until now, their influence will certainly be felt one way or another during this year's elections.     

Border Brouhaha :

Baja California and Chihuahua are two of the states where increasingly heated contests define the political scenes. Without a doubt, former PRI Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon's bid for the Baja California governorship has taken center stage in the northern border state.  The controversial politician, gaming industry magnate and private animal collector overcame a potential legal obstacle to his political ambitions when Mexico's Supreme Court ruled that an article in the Baja California constitution did not prevent Hank Rhon from resigning his mayoral post and running for the governor's office.

In Chihuahua, sparks are flying over a PAN-sponsored television spot that portrayed a den of con-men dressed as wolves learning how to deceive the public. Perceiving themselves as the target of the political ad, PRI leaders filed a complaint with the State Electoral Institute (IEE), which ordered the 30-second spot yanked from the airwaves.  Fernando Herrera Martinez, president of the Chihuahua IEE, justified the move as necessary to prevent a "dirty war.” The IEE's decision was welcomed by PRI and PRD leaders, but blasted by local PAN officials who demanded that the IEE reimburse the party for the $20,000 dollars spent on the ad. 

Chihuahua PAN leaders vow to take the matter to federal electoral court if necessary. But in comments that perhaps reflect divisions within the party, Manuel Espino, PAN national leader, distanced himself from the wolf ad. Espino considers Ciudad Juarez and 15 other cities as must wins for the PAN in 2007, and warns against engaging in campaign tactics that will alienate the electorate. According to the conservative political leader, local and state election victories this year will provide a base for the PAN to win a majority in the federal Chamber of Deputies in 2009, a triumph that would solidify President Calderon’s hold on power.

The Media is the Message :

Image is the strategic imperative in the Chihuahua election. Usually close to the PRI, Chihuahua's branch of the Mexican Green Party (PVEM), is undergoing a makeover in an effort to obtain a greater share of political power. Headed by Maria Serna Avila, a former federal deputy who once served on a congressional commission established to investigate the Juarez femicides, the party has contracted public relations specialists and professional trainers to hone the political skills of its cadres.

Several names of PVEM trainers have emerged in the press, including Jorge Acosta, an associate of Alterpraxis, which reportedly has performed public relations work for Microsoft, GEO and UPS, among others; Jogin Abre, a political consultant and pollster associated with the national Reforma newspaper; and Hernan Rivera, a Tec de Monterrery-schooled marketing specialist who reportedly has advised several political projects, including the campaigns of Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours, Nuevo Leon Governor Natividad Gonzalez and outgoing Ciudad Juarez Mayor Hector "Teto" Murguia, who has been in the limelight in recent days.   

Announced only months before the end of his administration, Mayor Murguia's cabinet reshuffle and the appointment of a former journalist and public relations official as the new police chief are attracting lots of press attention and even sarcastic commentaries. One of the first changes announced by new Chief Marco Anonio Torres Moreno, who counts some policing experience in Mexico state under his belt, was the creation of an intelligence department within the municipal police. Chief Torres confronted his first crisis barely five days into office when one of his sergeants was murdered in a crime that bore the hallmarks of a yet another gangland-style slaying.

Additional sources :  Norte, March 7 and 11, 2007. Articles by Ricardo Espinoza, Francisco Lujan, Salvador Castro, and Adrian Ventura Lares. Frontera, March 7, 2007. Article by Luis Adolfo San. El Diario de Juarez, February 24, 2007; March 7, 8, 9, 10, 2007. Articles by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, S. Macias, A. Salmon, J.M. Cruz, Blanca Carmona, and the Apro news service. El Universal, February 16 and 20, 2007; March 7 and 9, 2007. Articles by Jorge Octavio Ochoa, Julieta Martinez, Ella Grajeda, and the Notimex news service.

La Jornada, December 24, 2006; February 9, 10, 18, 27, 2007; March 8, 9 and 10, 2007. Articles by Antonio Heras, Ernesto Martinez Elorriaga, Guillermo Almeyra, Ruben Villalpando, Octavio Velez Ascencio, Alma E. Munoz, Gerardo Flores, Gloria Munoz Ramirez, and the Notimex news service. Proceso/Apro, March 8, 2007. Article by Pedro Matias. Narconews.com. Lapolaka.com, February 12, 2007;  March 9 and 11, 2007. Rebeldia, October 2006. Article by Sergio Rodriguez Lascano. What Country Did Fox Leave Us? Grupo Editorial Norma/IETD, September 2006.  Woldenberg, Jose, et.al,  Mexico in Numbers, Grijalbo, 2002. Aguayo, Sergio.

And the (Political) Beat Goes On....

In Mexico City , protests by supporters of presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are far from over. In southern Chiapas state, the PAN and PRI parties refuse to recognize the recent gubernatorial election victory of Lopez Obrador's endorsed candidate. On Mexico 's northern border, however, political parties and actors are already setting their sights on local and state elections in 2007. Indeed, entirely new political parties are emerging in some locales.

In Baja California , two new parties are marshaling their forces for 2007 races. The Social Encounter Party (PES) is the first new party that's requested registration from the Baja California State Electoral Council (CEE). Luis Moreno, an ex-deputy from Lopez Obrador's PRD party, is identified as one of the leaders of the new party. The Democratic Inclusive Front (Fidel) is the second new political force that's solicited state registration. Fidel's principal promoter is an unnamed leader of a non-governmental organization dedicated to the legalization of illegal vehicles in Baja California .

According to CEE official Raul Flores Adame, the two new parties will be granted the necessary status to receive public campaign financing and compete in elections if they meet the legal prerequisites of Baja California 's electoral law. Flores said two other new nationally-organized parties that won federal registration due to their showings in the July 2 elections, Roberto Campa's National Alliance Party and Patricia Mercado's Alternative Social Democrat and Campesino Party, are also seeking registration in Baja California . If approved for registration, the four parties will join 7 previously-registered parties in the border state. Existing, officially-recognized parties include the PAN, PRI, PRD, PT, PVEM, Convergencia, and Baja California Party organizations.

In Nuevo Laredo , Tamaulipas, Felipe Calderon's PAN party is preparing to choose its mayoral candidate for the 2007 city election. Jorge Ramirez Rubio, president of Nuevo Laredo 's PAN branch, said three possible candidates for mayor are under consideration. Besides Everardo Quiroz Torres, a Tamaulipas state legislator, the possible candidates include two customs agents: Francisco Gonzalez Quezada and Hugo Galindo Leal. According to Ramirez, the next mayor of Nuevo Laredo will administer a city that employs more than 2,500 municipal workers and boasts an annual budget of about $140 million dollars.

Sounding very optimistic about his party's 2007 prospects, Ramirez said he is "completely sure" the PAN will win Nuevo Laredo 's mayoral election. Ramirez said the main battle will be against the former ruling PRI party, adding that the current municipal administration of the border city of Reynosa is a "living example" of what the PAN can deliver at the local level. Ramirez contended that the deepening conflict over the results of the July 2 presidential election should not have big repercussions in next year's local election. "This is another movie..," Ramirez said. "There will be another movie next year that has nothing to do with the one that showed."

Nuevo Laredo 's next mayor will take the reigns of power an from a city administration that's presided over unprecedented bouts of narco-violence, generalized public insecurity and declining cross-border tourism. Everardo Quiroz, one of the possible PAN mayoral candidates mentioned by Ramirez, said public insecurity and economic development should be the top priorities of the next PAN candidate.

" Nuevo Laredo should be a pole of development that generates thousands of jobs for all, and it should be a national example as well," Quiroz said. "I believe that the priority is to improve the quality of life through education, sports, culture, jobs, and public security."

Sources: Frontera, August 29, 2006 . Enlineadirecta.info, August 28, 2006 . Articles by Angel A. Guerra Salazar and Blanca Leticia Guerra Guerrero.

Border Governors and NGOs Gear Up for Austin Meets

Governors of the 10 Mexican and US border states will begin their annual meeting in Austin , Texas on Wednesday, August 23. And for the second year in a row, civil society groups organized by the Albuquerque-based Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice will stage an "alternative" conference during the official three-day gathering. The 2006 events will take place against a backdrop of stalled US immigration reform legislation, renewed opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, deployments of US National Guard troops near the Mexican border, protests over the July 2 Mexican presidential election results, and the upcoming US mid-term elections that increasingly feature immigration and border security as hot-button issues.

As in previous years, the governors are expected to pass resolutions on matters that affect border communities and states. Working groups have traditionally focused on the issues of agriculture, border crossings, economic development, education, energy, environment, health, security, tourism, water, and wildlife. Held with support from Cemex, AT&T, Western Union , the Texas Border Coalition and other sponsors, most of the conference's Austin sessions will be closed to the press.

Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores said he plans to propose strengthening and expanding the North American Development Bank (Nadbank), which was established under a side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement to fund environmental and infrastructure projects on both sides of the border.

Pointing to studies that predict the emergence of the US-Mexico border region as the most dynamic economic zone in the world within the next 50 years, Gov. Hernandez said the Nadbank needs to broaden its mandate. "We need projects to come that fortify development, an ordered development that doesn't translate into the loss of the quality of life," Gov. Hernandez said.

Dissolving the Nadbank was a topic of conversation between Mexico 's Ministry of Finance and Public Credit and the US Department of Treasury earlier this year. Since its inception, the San Antonio-based bank has distributed nearly $400 million dollars in grants and loans to border communities.

While the border governors and their representatives debate and shape public policy in their sessions, members and supporters of the SNEEJ will also gather in Austin August 23-25 to draft an alternative agenda opposed to border militarization and walls, National Guard deployments and the NAFTA.

"We feel that the policies, resolutions and strategies that the governors have been discussing a these border conferences for the last 14 years have been very negative for the border communities," contended Tomas Garduno, SNEEJ border campaign organizer. "We've got the solutions. They need to listen to us," Garduno said.

According to the SNEEJ activist, civil society groups meeting in Austin will demand that the governors urge their respective national governments to renegotiate the NAFTA to include worker, community and environmental protections. Regarding the Nadbank, Garduno said the SNEEJ has many concerns about the financial institution's role in the direction of the border economy. "We're against any entity that is not accountable to the people having more power," Garduno said.

Garduno told Frontera NorteSur that the Austin event will include a vigil in memory of dead migrants, panel discussions and a public protest. For the second time, Garduno said the NGO conference will draft a letter to the governors containing demands and recommendations. Mexican and US state leaders did not respond to a similar letter delivered last year, Garduno added. "We plan on having as many (alternative conferences) as possible until they do," he said.

Additional Sources: Enlineadirecta.info, August 21, 2006 . Article by Roberto Aguilar Grimaldo. Irc-online.org, June 9, 2006 .: "North American Development Bank: An Institution Worth Saving." Article by Andrea Abel and Marico Sayoc. Bordergovernorsconference.com

Post-Election Conflict Continues; Border States Face Renewed Scrutiny

Repudiating the Federal Electoral Tribunal's August 5 decision not to order a complete recount of the July 2 presidential results, candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the For the Good of All Coalition vowed to step up the mass protest movement he heads. In a speech before supporters in Mexico City 's Zocalo, Lopez Obrador blasted the TEPJ's decision limiting the vote recount to only 9.07 percent of Mexico 's more than 130,000 precincts

The former Mexico City mayor contended that 72,000 precincts exhibited the same sort of irregularities as the 11,839 precincts selected by the TEPJ for a recount. He also charged that 900,000 presidential election ballots were missing. Predicting greater emigration and the intensification of other social problems if conservative candidate Felipe Calderon assumes the presidency, Lopez Obrador warned that the future of Mexico was at stake.

"This is a democratic movement, but at the same time we contend that democracy is a path, the most important one to make social justice a reality," Lopez Obrador said. "If we let them impose the project of the right, it means not only the trampling of the popular will, but more poverty and margination as well."

In contrast to Lopez Obrador's sharp rejection of the TEPJ's decision, other political actors praised the action of Mexico 's top elections' court. Both the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the newly-formed Alternative Social Democrat and Campesino organization, which fielded feminist Patricia Mercado as its presidential candidate, backed the TEPJ's ruling. Calderon's National Action Party (PAN) quickly applauded the move.

German Martinez Cazares, the PAN's representative to the Federal Electoral Institute, expressed confidence that the recount will "clarify the victory" of Felipe Calderon. Sounding the trumpet of victory, Martinez added that Calderon was willing to engage in serious talks with his opponents about Mexico 's most severe political crisis in years. "We once again extend the hand of dialogue," Martinez said.

In its ruling on the so-called "mother" legal complaint presented by the Lopez Obrador camp, the 7-member TEPJ also rejected charges that President Fox had unduly intervened in the electoral process; that unfair media treatment prevailed; that campaign expenditures surpassed legal limits; that foreigners illegally participated in the campaign, and that the Office of the Federal Attorney General's election crimes division was negligent in investigating complaints.

In reaching its decision on how many ballots should be recounted because of presumed irregularities, the TEPJ employed a strict legal interpretation based on existing election law and the documentation presented by Lopez Obrador and his supporters. According to the election judges, Lopez Obrador did not specifically challenge the results in all of the nation's 300 electoral districts, a condition required under Mexican law to conduct a full recount.

The precincts the TEPJ agreed should be recounted paint an interesting political and geographic picture. In Jalisco state, where PAN Governor Francisco Ramirez Acuna openly backed Calderon as a presidential candidate in May 2004, the TEPJ ordered the votes recounted in 2,705 precincts. Neighboring Aguascalientes , also governed by the PAN, emerged as the state facing the greatest percentage of precinct recounts- 35 percent- under the TEPJ's ruling.

Standing out in the TEPJ's order were the 6 northern border states of Baja California , Sonora , Chihuahua , Nuevo Leon , Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. Despite constituting a distinct minority of the total nationwide pool of potential votes, border state ballots now represent a disproportionately high percentage of votes subject to the recount. The TEPJ found that the votes cast in 4,470 precincts scattered throughout the 6 states should be recounted. The number make ups nearly 40 percent of the 11,839 precincts nationwide pinpointed by the TEPJ for a recount.

Downplaying the local implications of the TEPJ's decision, the Ciudad Juarez-based Internet news service LaPolaka.com claimed that the vote recount in Chihuahua state will be "minimal." However, the TEPJ actually ordered that the votes be recounted in slightly more than 18 percent of the precincts in Mexico geographically biggest state.

Election results in the northern border region raised interesting questions, especially in Sonora, where a PRI governor, Eduardo Bours, was known to be on the outs with his party's presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, and in Tamaulipas, where another PRI governor, Eugenio Hernandez, was allegedly a player in a complicated scheme involving ousted leading PRI member Elba Esther Gordillo, the longtime leader of the National Teachers Union who's immersed in a political blood feud with Madrazo. The Lopez Obrador campaign charges that Gordillo organized anti-Madrazo PRI factions to funnel votes to Felipe Calderon.

Both Sonora and Tampaulipas, as well as the remaining northern border states , favored Calderon, according to the Federal Electoral Institute's official vote tallies. While flirting with the PAN, Gordillo is credited with helping form the New Alliance Party (PANAL), which ran Roberto Campa for president. As part of its legal complaint, the Lopez Obrador campaign contended that the PANAL actually transferred votes to Felipe Calderon, another contention the TEPJ rejected. Lending some credence to Lopez Obrador's claims were the preliminary election figures that showed a three-fold difference between votes cast for Campa and the PANAL's congressional candidates, with the latter curiously racking up a far greater total than their presidential standard-bearer.

Meanwhile, in Tamaulipas, pro-Lopez Obrador protests spread to the Texas border on Friday, August 4. Demonstrations or partial bridge closings by scores of Lopez Obrador supporters were reported at international crossings at Nuevo Laredo , Reynosa and Matamoros . The participants in the protests, which drew the ire of some motorists trying to drive over to the US, included members of the National Movement for Democracy, For the Good of All Coalition and Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). No major incidents ensued, but a tense stand-off between demonstrators and heavily armed elements of the Federal Preventive Police temporarily chilled the Reynosa action.

Miguel Angel Almaraz, Tamaulipas PRD leader, said he expected more protests in the border state in support of a national vote-by-vote recount, but was awaiting further instructions from the party leadership in Mexico City .

Sources: Enlineadirecta.info, August 5 and August 6, 2006 . Articles by Gaston Monge, Hugo Reyna, Rodolfo Sanchez Barron, and Federico Zuniga Garcia. La Jornada, August 6, 2006 . Articles by Alonso Urrutia and Fabiola Martinez. El Universal, August 5, 2006 . Articles by Jorge Herrera, Arturo Zarate, editorial staff, and the EFE and Notimex news agencies. Laredo Morning Times/Tiempo de Laredo, August 5, 2006 . Article by Vicente Rangel. Lapolaka.com, August 5, 2006 . Univision, August 5 and August 6, 2006 .

Pre-Election Tempers Sizzling

Like the blazing desert temperatures this time of year, political tempers are sizzling in the northern border state of Sonora . Denied the registration of candidate slates in 10 Sonoran municipalities and 21 local legislative districts, members of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's For the Good of All Coalition occupied the offices of the Sonora State Electoral Council (CEE) in the state capital of Hermosillo on Sunday, May 21. The protestors, who included members of Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the allied Labor Party (PT), charged that Sonoran election officials used "biased" reasons for denying the coalition the right to run its chosen candidates in the upcoming state election. In addition to a national president and congress, Sonoran voters will elect new municipal governments and state legislators on July 2.

Hildelisa Gonzalez Morales, leader of the Sonora PRD, declared that her party will "go all out" to defend the rejected candidacies. The protest followed a CEE decision that was taken in an extraordinary session held late on Saturday, May 20. In a press statement, the CEE justified its ruling on several grounds based in Sonora 's state election law. According to the CEE, some pro-Lopez Obrador slates in question did meet state requirements for gender balance; failed to present candidate identification documents and, in other instances, did not provide signed, sworn documents attesting to the nationality of two candidates for city council positions.

The CEE's ruling affected For the Good of All Coalition slates in the municipalities of Empalme, La Colorada, Bacerac, Rayon, Atil, Banamichi, Divisaderos, San Javier, San Pedro de la Cueva, and San Felipe de Jesus. Empalme has been governed by the PRD for the last three municipal administrations. The PRD-PT coalition can appeal the CEE'S decision and, in the event of a lost appeal, take the matter to state and federal election courts.

Jesus Humberto Valencia Valencia, CEE president, later said the PRD and PT were warned May 15 they had three days to remedy their slates' deficiencies. But PRD leaders questioned the motives of CEE President Valencia. Last November, Jesus Bustamante Machado, the coordinator of the PRD fraction in the Sonora state congress, denounced that Valencia omitted from a personal declaration to a state legislative committee that he had been fired as a federal judge in 1997 for freeing alleged drug traffickers in Hermosillo during the 1990s.

Confronted with a sudden political crisis, Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours, a member of the Institutional Party of the Revolution (PRI) quickly disassociated himself from the CEE's decision, adding that the state election authority is an autonomous institution that makes its own decisions.

In other action, the CEE approved PRD-PT slates for 18 municipalities, but rejected a PRD-PT challenge to 6 PRI-PANAL slates for the municipalities of Nogales , Guaymas, Cajeme, San Luis Rio Colorado , Navojoa, and Hermosillo . The CEE also approved Mexican Green Party (PVEM) candidacies for state legislative decisions, as well as for municipal positions in the historic mining municipality of Cananea .

The pre-election conflict in Sonora erupted amid an increasingly charged national political atmosphere. Accusations of character assassination, dirty campaigning and undue interference by the Fox Administration are flying all over the airwaves and in the press. Largely lost in the sharpening acrimony is any serious debate about the issues facing Mexico . Speaking out in Sonora , Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, secretary general of the PRD, charged President Fox's office with spending about $90 million dollars to promote National Action Party (PAN) presidential candidate Felipe Calderon during the month of April alone. Acosta contended that the government publicity subliminally included phrases and slogans used by the Calderon campaign.

Like Acosta, the PRI is making similar accusations about unfair publicity. Felipe Solis Acero, the PRI's representative to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) , claimed that a media monitoring study contracted by his party revealed that the federal government ran 456,375 television and radio spots promoting its programs during the months of April and May at an estimated cost of $160 million dollars. On Tuesday, May 23, an IFE-negotiated “neutrality agreement” went effect that bars federal, state and local government agencies from publicizing their public works for the remainder of the election campaign.

In the manner of old PRI governments, Calderon's opponents charge the Fox Administration with preparing a "state election" to thrust their man into office. On Monday, May 22, PRD national President Leonel Cota filed criminal charges with the Federal Office of the Attorney General ( PGR ) against President Fox. The complaint accuses the president with illegally interfering in the political campaign . Earlier, PRI President Mariano Palacios Alcocer announced that his party too would file charges with the PGR and the IFE on similar grounds.

Vowing to take the election intervention issue to the international stage, Cota based the PRD's complaint, in part, on statements by PVEM President Jorge Emilio Gonzalez Martinez. The so-called "Green Boy," of Mexican politics, Gonzalez created a recent scandal when he said President Fox personally tried to convince the PVEM leader, on three separate occasions, to ally with the PAN. The PAN and PVEM formed the coalition that elected Vicente Fox president in 2000, but the Greens broke with Fox shortly after he assumed office and are supporting the campaign of the PRI s Roberto Madrazo this year. According to Gonzalez, President Fox told him that Madrazo isn't "trustworthy," while Lopez Obrador represents a "danger for the country."

President Fox's critics charge the Mexican leader will use his planned tour of the United States this week to campaign on behalf of Felipe Calderon. Only slightly more than 30,000 Mexicans residing in this country will be eligible to cast absentee votes, but their preferences could prove crucial in the event of a tight Calderon-Lopez Obrador race, which some polls indicate. Campaigning for candidates abroad, nonetheless, is illegal under Mexican election rules, save for the 5-minute messages from each candidate that are recorded on a DVD included in the election packages containing the absentee ballots mailed to Mexican expatriates. Rejecting his critics' charges, President Fox responded this week that he is not interfering in the election. In a broadcast statement, he assured viewers that Mexico "will have the cleanest elections" in its history.

Sources: La Jornada, May 22 and 23, 2006. Articles by Cristobal Garcia Bernal, Alfonso Urrutia and editorial staff. El Imparcial ( Hermosillo ), Article by Luis Alberto Medina. Cambio Sonora , May 22, 2006 . El Universal/Notimex, May 22, 2006 . Univision, May 22, 2006 . Proceso/Apro, May 18, 2006 . www.ceesonora.org.mx, press statement.

Migration, Narco-Violence Shape Political Landscape

With less than 7 weeks to go before Mexico 's July 2 election, political and other red flags are fluttering in Nuevo Leon , a northern state that shares a border with Texas . Blaming migration to the United States , the president of the Nuevo Leon State Electoral Commission (CEE), Eduardo Guerra Sepulveda, has announced that not enough people will be available to supervise polling stations for the July 2 state congressional and municipal elections. Legally charged with organizing state elections, the CEE is a separate entity than the Federal Electoral Institute, which will oversee the federal congressional and presidential elections also scheduled for July 2.

In some cases, Guerra said intense out-migration has prevented state election officials from locating up to 80 percent of previously selected and trained polling booth officials. In one place, Los Aldama, a municipality located southwest of the border city of Reynosa , Tamaulipas, Guerra contended that the CEE could not locate a single pre-approved election worker because every last individual was in the United States , legally or illegally.

Statistics from Mexico 's National Population Council report that 500,000 residents of Nuevo Leon , or more than 10 percent of the total state population of 4 million people, currently reside in the United States . Reportedly, the majority of the population of the northern municipalities of Hualahuises, Mier, Noriega, Los Ramones, Agualeguas, and General Bravo has relocated to the United States .

Guerra said the population deficit made it impossible for election authorities to find replacements for the leadership posts of polling stations before a May 15 deadline. "(The people) that remain are minors or old people who don't have an education and can't be trained to count votes," Guerra said. Due to the election official shortage, Guerra said some polling stations will have to be closed and fused with others. The CEE's president did not disclose how and when eligible voters will be informed about the ballot box changes.

Meanwhile, escalating narco-violence is increasingly tainting the pre-election landscape in Nuevo Leon . A grenade and AK-47 attack on the Punto Vivo night-club in San Nicolas de los Garza early Monday morning on May 15 that killed four persons and wounded 25 others was blamed by authorities and business leaders on organized crime.

Owned by Salvador Corona Duenas, the Monterrey metro-area club hosted dozens of youthful clients at the time of the bloody assault. Local police pursued suspects and recovered a vehicle with Tamaulipas license plates linked to the attack, but as in countless similar incidents, the gunmen escaped. One press story suggested that the attack was directed against an individual known as "Danny Boy," but ended up killing and injuring innocent people instead. Two of the slain victims, Rene Espinosa Sanchez and Oscar Villareal, were employed as Punto Vivo security guards.

Jesus Marcos Giacoman, the president of the Monterrery Chamber of Commerce," called the attack "an act of war." Saying he will demand serious federal action , Nuevo Leon Governor Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras (a member of the opposition PRI party) charged that the Federal Office of the Attorney General is "not responding to the narco-war" and losing the national battle against drug trafficking.

At least 30 people have been reported murdered in Nuevo Leon in cases to narco-violence since the beginning of the year, though Gov. Gonzalez has said that 10 murders were committed in neighboring Tamaulipas state and the victims' bodies later dumped in Nuevo Leon . Along with the PRI governors of Tamulipas and Coahuila, Gov. Gonzalez said that he will present a new series of anti-organized crime proposals to Mexico's National Governor's Conference.

Sources: Proceso/Apro, May 16, 2006 . Article by Arturo Rodriguez Garcia. El Universal, May 14 and 16, 2006. Articles by Juan Cedillo. Milenio ( Monterrey ), May 16, 2006 .

Voters Tune Out Presidential Debate

Anecdotal reports hint that many Mexicans decided they had better things to do the evening of April 25 than watch the televised debate between four of the five presidential candidates. In the first of two debates, candidates Roberto Madrazo, Felipe Calderon, Patricia Mercado, and Roberto Campa faced a broadcast audience which might have been much smaller than they had desired. Candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador did not participate in the event, but is expected to join his political rivals in a second debate scheduled for June 6.

An unscientific poll conducted by the Diario de Juarez newspaper, which is historically close to Roberto Madrazo's Institutional Revolutionary Party, reported that 118 out of 150 people interviewed said they did not see the debate. According to El Diario, the non-viewers said they did watch the debate because of they did not know about it; had conflicting work schedules, or were not interested.

Of the 32 people interviewed by El Diario in Ciudad Juarez who said they watched the debate, 75 percent judged the National Action Party's Felipe Calderon the winner, a result that was similar to two other unscientific post-debate polls carried out by Mexico City's Reforma daily- a newspaper partisans of presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador accuse of favoring Calderon. The post-debate polls led Maria Elena Salinas, Univision's star news anchor, to declare that Calderon was now clearly the front-running presidential candidate.

Interestingly, one of the Reforma polls indicated that Patricia Mercado of the Alternative Social Democrat and Campesino party could have been the second real beneficiary from the debate, especially considering that her new political organization is short on money, publicity and infrastructure and is in desperate need of a shot-in-the-arm just to keep its electoral registration. According to Reforma, 14 per cent of the respondents to one poll gave Mercado the debate victory.

But in Acapulco , Guerrero, a city which is governed by Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution and under siege from violence attributed to border drug cartels, journalist Ricardo Castillo Diaz declared that indifference was the genuine winter of the debate. In an excursion with friends through popular cafes and restaurants in the City that Never Sleeps, Castillo encountered turned off television sets, empty seats or groups of people busily watching soap operas, soccer matches and waitresses during the two hours of the political debate.

In one case, clients of a Sanborn's Cafe became upset and yelled after Castillo and company asked the waiter to turn up the volume on the televised political debate. Castillo's experience led him to suggest that many voters might just simply stay away from the polls on July 2. If Castillo's observations are accurate, then it is increasingly likely the party/coalition that mobilizes its hard-core base of support will take the election.

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, April 26, 2006 . Frontera/EFE, April 26, 2006 . El Sur, April 26, 2006 . Article by Ricardo Castillo Diaz. Univision, April 26, 2006 , 2006.

Amid Media Blackout, Congressional Campaigns Unfold

Virtually overlooked by the US and international press, Mexico 's congressional campaigns are getting underway in the border and other states. Much of the media's attention is focused on the 2006 race for the Mexican presidency, but scant international press coverage is being devoted to the battle for the federal Mexican congress. Given the historic weakening of the authoritarian Mexican presidency, the media blackout of the congressional election is especially glaring in light of the potential power of Mexican senators and deputies. Pre-election polls suggest Mexico 's next president could confront a similar political equation faced by outgoing President Vicente Fox: a divided congress capable of blocking or drastically compromising the executive branch's political agenda.

In the Baja California border city of Tijuana , the competing political parties recently unveiled some of the strategies they will employ to get their candidates elected to the federal Chamber of Deputies on July 2, 2006 . Currently running Tijuana 's municipal administration, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) and its Alliance for Mexico will rely on direct, door-to-door contact with the city's population, according to Carlos Barboza Castillo, the party's Tijuana leader. As in other Mexican cities, the PRI can rely on a hard-core network in Tijuana of supporters mobilized by colonia leaders, merchant association heads and other political operatives.

For President Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN), the record of current Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon's government will be put to the scrutiny of the voters. Salvador Morales Riubi, the state leader of the PAN in Baja California , said the conservative party will ask voters to compare previous PAN administrations with PRI ones.

Members of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's For the Good of All Coalition said they will ask voters to give thumbs down to the performance of both the PRI and PAN parties, or the so-called "Prian," as the two organizations are sometimes derisively called. Lopez Obrador's partisans will emphasize the candidacy of their standard-bearer to benefit the campaigns of their other candidates. Besides the big three, two smaller parties also will field congressional candidates.

Martha Patricia Avalos Valenzuela, the state coordinator of prominent feminist Patricia Mercado's Social Democrat and Campesino Alternative party, said a lack of resources will demand creative and intense contact with the electorate. As of late last week, Roberto Campa's Social Alliance Party, which was formed from a split in the PRI, had not publicly announced their Tijuana and Baja California strategies.

In multi-party alliances that include smaller parties, the electoral coalitions are an unparalleled opportunity for the smaller organizations to inflate their influence by means of congressional candidacy concessions negotiated with the larger parties. Political scrambling in Mexico during the past weeks and months demonstrates that the high-stakes nature of the congressional races has not been lost on the various political actors. Power plays, positional bargaining, party switching, and top-down candidate impositions all have been features of behind-the-scenes dramas that could strengthen as well as weaken the prospects of the different parties/political coalitions and their respective presidential candidates.

As in Lopez Obrador's coalition, sometimes polemical candidate selection processes can provoke internal political discord, Dissension over the Chihuahua senatorial candidacy of longtime Priista and sudden Lopez Obrador convert Victor Anchondo, who served as government secretary during the controversial 1998-2004 administration of Chihuahua Governor Patricio Martinez, has threatened splits in Lopez Obrador's own center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution at a time when the party enjoys its best prospect ever of winning the presidency of the republic.

Sources: lapolaka.com, April 21, 2006 . Frontera, April 20, 2006 . Article by Luis Adolfo San and Fausto Ovalle.

Election Judges Order Migrant Voter Guide Revision

Responding to a challenge from a supporter of Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a federal electoral tribunal has ordered the revamping of a guide that will be sent to absentee voters living abroad. Horacio Duarte, a representative of Lopez Obrador's For the Good of All coalition on the Federal Electoral Commission (IFE), filed a complaint with the tribunal over allegedly negative publicity about Lopez Obrador that was included in an initial IFE voter guide prepared for absentee voters residing in the United States and other countries. Duarte 's complaint arose from a statement in the guide that accused Lopez Obrador of eliminating the jobs of 47,000 people when the candidate served as mayor of Mexico City .

After reviewing the complaint last week, the legal panel determined that the source of the statement was President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN). The judges said the accusation was “black propaganda” that violated principles of equity in the presidential campaign. Consequently, the IFE was ordered to strike the controversial statement from voters' guides that soon will be sent with mail-in ballots to absentee voters.

Although seemingly a minor bump in the electoral road, the controversy over the absentee voter guide is another example of how the Mexican presidential campaign is becoming more acrimonious. Launching their campaigns last January with a focus on their declared positive qualities and personal proposals, the major candidates lately have been lsucked into a whirlpool of negative campaigning, personal attack and scandal. Lopez Obrador's supporters, for instance, vigorously protested a PAN-sponsored television spot that compared the presidential hopeful with Venezuela 's President Hugo Chavez. The PAN ran the ad after Lopez Obrador publicly urged President Vicente Fox to “shut up” and refrain from allegedly campaigning on behalf of PAN candidate Felipe Calderon.

La Opinion ( Los Angeles ), April 13, 2006 . Article by Francisco Robles Nava.

Richardson Speaks Out on Immigration, NAFTA

As a high-profile border state governor with long-standing ties south of the border, New Mexico Democrat Bill Richardson carries weight in Washington D.C. , Mexico City and in state capitals on both sides of the border. Gov. Richardson's declaration of a state emergency along the New Mexico-Mexico border last year influenced similar measures in Arizona and elsewhere, helping fuel the immigration and border security debates taking center stage in recent weeks. Although he won't say yes or no, the talk of the town in Santa Fe and beyond is that Gov. Richardson will seek the 2008 presidential nomination for the Democratic Party.

In an April 3 interview with liberal Air America Radio host Al Franken, Gov. Richardson expanded on his views concerning immigration, guest workers, the Minutemen, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Queried by Franken about his stance on the immigration issue, Gov. Richardson said he favored a multi-pronged approach that legalizes the status of undocumented workers, with a formula involving penalties, payment of back taxes and English-language instruction, while instituting a guest worker program.

The Democratic governor defined undocumented immigrants as generally "patriotic" people who root for the Dallas Cowboys (The governor said NFL team-deprived New Mexicans usually go with the Cowboys or Denver Broncos), work hard and send their children to school. On the Minutemen, Gov. Richardson called border watchers "dedicated individuals" who are frustrated at federal shortcomings in border security. However, he said the Minutemen create potential problems for professional law enforcement personnel because the civilians are untrained elements who could confront dangerous situations. "It's better that they don't do (border watches)," Gov. Richardson said.

New Mexico 's chief executive said he is receiving good cooperation from the Chihuahua state government on border security matters. He pointed to the Chihuahua government's willingness to undertake some actions in the town of Las Chepas , a place reputed to be a staging ground for migrant traffickers known as coyotes. "You know, the state of Chihuahua , the governor (Jose Reyes Baeza) and I get along very well," Gov. Richardson said. Minutemen deployments only complicate the relationship, he said, adding the Minutemen crop up in discussions with Chihuahua officials. Drug-smuggling, human trafficking, property destruction, and cattle-rustling are common complaints he hears from New Mexico border-area residents, Gov. Richardson said.

A long-time proponent of free trade, Richardson , as a Democratic congressman from New Mexico in 1991, campaigned for fast-track approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the administration of Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush. But in comments on the Al Franken show, Gov. Richardson was critical of aspects of the trade pact he earlier pushed.

Contending that the NAFTA was supposed to take care of the immigration-jobs issue, Gov. Richardson remarked that central Mexico has been the main beneficiary of the trade agreement. Emigration, he maintained, serves as a "safety valve" for Mexico , which should do more to create jobs internally with US assistance. The Mexicans, continued Gov. Richardson, are losing "a strong labor force" of young workers to the migrant stream. New Mexico 's governor said one of the problems with the NAFTA was that it didn't address the "worker parity" issue of vastly unequal wages between Mexico and the US .

In wrapping up the Air America interview, comedian and radio personality Franken thanked Gov. Richardson for spending extra time on the show. Franken said he knew the governor was busy with his 2006 gubernatorial re-election campaign, not 2008, when in Franken's estimation, Richardson is “going to run for president." "Thank you, Al," Gov. Richardson chuckled. "See, he confirmed it," Franken quipped, before moving on to the next commercial break.

Source: Air America Radio, April 3, 2006.

Border Cities to Get New Mayors

Residents of the twin border cities of San Luis , Arizona , and San Luis Rio Colorado , Sonora , will have new mayors and city councilors soon. In a primary election, voters on the US side went to the polls on Tuesday, March 14, to select one of four candidates who are vying for the seat of incumbent Mayor Nieves Garcia Riedel. Garcia's rivals include Delio Castillo, Juan Carlos Escamilla and David Lara. Ten candidates are also competing for 3 seats on the city council. Any candidate who gets more than 50 percent of the vote will be automatically seated on the city council. The others will compete in the general election scheduled for next May.

San Luis' primary election is the first time voters in Yuma County will be required to present photo or other proof of identification, because of the new law stemming from state Proposition 200 that is designed to prevent allegedly undocumented people from voting. Voters who show up at the polls without identification will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, but then will be required to present proof of identification within three days. Official results of the March 14 election should be announced by Saturday, March 18.

Meanwhile, residents of neighboring San Luis Rio Colorado also will be getting a new mayor. Mayor Jose Ines Palafox Nunez is expected to request permission from the Sonora state Congress this week to leave office so he can run for the federal Congress on the ticket of the conservative PAN party of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. A replacement for Palafox will be named by the city council, but it is unclear at the moment who will fill the post. Members of Palafox's party are divided between three possible replacements, leading PRI Councilman David Topete Hernandez to speculate that “we could have a mayor from the PRI or PRD” if the PAN doesn't agree on a new city leader.

Once the city council agrees on a new mayor, the state Congress is expected to give its stamp of official approval. Whoever is chosen as San Luis Rio Colorado 's new mayor could only have five months in office. In addition to the federal election, San Luis Rio Colorado and the state of Sonora will elect new city governments and a state Congress on July 2, 2006.

Sources: Yumasun.com, March 13, 2006. Article by Blake Schmidt. KSWT.com, March 14, 2006. Information from Laura Rillos. La Cronica (San Luis Rio Colorado ), March 14, 2006. Article by Juan Jose Razzo.

Candidates Retake the Northern Road

Big in territory but still relatively small in population, Mexico 's northern and border regions have become a strategic battleground in the 2006 elections. In a geographic zone where the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) can still count on a hard-core vote of about 25 percent of the electorate, a possible close race between presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the center-left For the Good of All Coalition and the second leading candidate in the polls, Felipe Calderon of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), is giving the north extra importance.

For Lopez Obrador's supporters, the goal is to puncture the traditional bipartisan lock on politics the PRI and PAN have maintained for decades in northern Mexico . Founded in 1989, Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution has typically polled only about 5 or 6 percent of the votes in the states of Chihuahua , Nuevo Leon , Coahuila and Sinaloa. In 2006, the Lopez Obrador campaign is ambitiously shooting for 25 percent of the northern vote. Given the former Mexico City 's base of support in population-dense central and southern Mexico , a strong northern showing could push Lopez Obrador over the top on July 2.

"We haven't been in a situation like the one we are in right now," said Rafael Espino de la Pena, a representative of Lopez Obrador campaign in 8 northern and central states. "We have seen a lot of sympathy for the Alternative Project of the Nation, especially for the candidacy of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador... we have to translate this historical preference in votes for the left,"

In February, Lopez Obrador held large public rallies in Chihuahua City and Monterrey , Nuevo Leon , attracting thousands of supporters to each event. In the industrial city of Monterrey , the ability of the former Mexico City mayor to make some inroads among sectors usually not identified from the left was evident when he stood on the stage with Nora Garza Calderon, the sister of Javier Garza Calderon, one of Monterrey 's most prominent businessmen.

Despite Lopez Obrador's northern surge, representatives of the PAN view their real competition in the region as still coming from the PRI. In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Jesus Avila and Francisco Ortiz, the press coordinators for the PAN and the Calderon campaign in Ciudad Juarez, said PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo, who's been struggling at the national level, remains strong in Chihuahua state due to support from Governor Jose Reyes Baeza and Ciudad Juarez Mayor Hector Murguia Lardizabal. Ortiz said the PAN in Ciudad Juarez is banking on a combination of public discontent over Murguia's handling of controversies like the planned binational border city of San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa and Calderon's own message.

"(Murguia's administration) hasn't been the best and it could help Felipe Calderon," Ortiz said. " Ciudad Juarez traditionally has been an important PAN bastion, and Felipe has revived the traditional doctrine of the PAN."

In his campaign strategy, Calderon projects himself as the candidate of a new Mexico while he links Lopez Obrador with the old, "populist" policies of the Luis Echeverria era. Promising to continue President Fox's social programs and implement universal health insurance, Calderon vows to get tough on crime, "militarize" the police and make Mexico a top-notch world power. "His project is the project of the future," Ortiz said. "It puts Mexico at the forefront of world competition."

The youthful-looking Calderon is making a special pitch to Mexico 's young people, the potentially decisive voting bloc in this year's election. According to figures from the Federal Electoral Institute cited by Mario Sanchez Silva, the director of a research institute at Mexico City's National Polytechnic Institute, people aged 20-39 constitute 52.4 percent of the nominal voter list this year.

As February drew to a close, Calderon mounted a 3-day campaign swing through the Chihuahua cities of Parral, Delicias , Chihuahua City, and Ciudad Juarez . He drew thousands of supporters to rallies, spoke in a closed session with Ciudad Juarez businessmen and signed an alliance with civil society organizations. Speaking in Ciudad Juarez , Calderon vowed to arrest the killers of women in the border city, a remark that drew skepticism from Irma Monreal, the mother of 15-year-old Brenda Esmeralda Herrera, one of 8 victims found raped and murdered in a Ciudad Juarez cotton field in 2001. Many politicians have made the same statement but the killers of the women remain loose, Monreal noted.

Later, Calderon offered a moment of silence for the 65 miners recently killed in Coahila state.

Not lost on Roberto Madrazo either is the importance of the northern vote. In a bid to eliminate one of his numerous problems, Madrazo held a private meeting on February 26 with Sonora PRI Governor Eduardo Bours, who has been a high-profile opponent of Madrazo. In separate statements to the press after the meeting, both Bours and Madrazo indicated they would work together for the benefit of Madrazo's candidacy and the PRI. Bours urged Madrazo to move beyond the PRI's base and appeal to "those who are outside our party."

Following the meeting, Madrazo traveled to Sonora 's Yaqui Valley for a meeting with thousands of indigenous farmers. Evoking the memory of Sonora 's famous son and the PRI's assassinated 1994 presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, Madrazo addressed the issues of poverty, migration and Coahuila's miners. The PRI's standard bearer promised to increase the number of beneficiaries of the Liconsa milk program to two million people. Striking a note from Bours, Madrazo recognized the PRI must transcend its own base in 2006.

"We have a hardcore vote that the other parties don't have, but that isn't sufficient," Madrazo said. "We also have to go after the undecided vote, which can be obtained by means of proposals and not confrontations."

While Mexico 's presidential race will likely be won by one of the three major candidates, the two other smaller parties running candidates are also paying attention to the north and issues that affect the region. Appearing on February 25 in the northern Gulf Coast city of Tampico , Patricia Mercado of the Social Democratic and Farmers Alternative Party proposed that Mexico , Canada and the United States join together to promote economic development with migrant remittance funds. Mexico 's only female presidential candidate said a state program in Zacatecas that invests remittances in productive projects is an example of an economic development strategy that should be expanded.

Additional sources: La Jornada, February 19 and 27, 2006. Articles by Georgina Saldierna and editorial staff. Norte de Ciudad Juarez , February 25, 26 and 27, 2006. Articles by Margarita Hernandez, Ignacio Alvarado Alvarez, Angel Zubia Garcia, Bernardo Garcia Medina, and the Sun news agency. El Universal, February 27, 2006.

Group Demands Migrant Political Stands

A binational US-Mexico organization of migrants is calling on Mexico 's three principal presidential candidates to take strong stands on issues that affect expatriates. In a statement, the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans in the Exterior (CDPME) contended that migrant support will be crucial in this year's election scheduled for July 2.

"The candidate that makes the best political proposal about migration, and who makes it in a serious way with knowledge about what he says, will be the one who becomes president of the republic," predicted the group. The pro-migrant organization appealed to the candidates to not discount the small number of Mexicans eligible to cast absentee ballots in the upcoming election. According to Mexico 's Federal Electoral Institute, about 56,000 Mexicans who live abroad, mostly in the United States , registered to vote before the deadline expired last month.

In an earlier count that was widely criticized for its miniscule figure, the IFE reported about 25,000 absentee voters were registered, but the federal agency revised the number upward this month based on what it said was a more complete tally . The absentee voter list represents about 1 percent of the 4.2 million Mexican nationals originally deemed as eligible absentee voters.

Noting that Mexicans who live in the US tend to have extensive social and family networks back home, the CDPME contends that each migrant could potentially influence between 50 and 250 votes in Mexico . Expatriates' political influence will be especially important in migrant-expelling states including Guanajuato, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacan and others, according to the group. Criticizing the "hypocrisy" of Mexico 's official migrant policy, the CDPME said it seeks a "coherent policy of the Mexican government and the next president."

Sources: La Jornada, February 18 and 19, 2006. Articles by Gabriel Leon Zaragoza and Tania Molina Ramirez.

Expatriate Voter Registration Falling Flat

Early this year, Mexican congressmen approved legislation that charged the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) with implementing a system to permit the casting of absentee votes by Mexicans residing in the United States and other countries. With more than 4 million Mexicans deemed eligible to participate as absentee voters, optimistic predictions held that immigrants could become a crucial swing vote in the 2006 race. Now, with less than two months to go before absentee voter registration closes, early projections of the size of the Mexican expatriate vote are falling far short of expectations.

By the first half of November, only 1,073 registration application forms from the United States and other countries had trickled into the IFE . About 20 percent of the early registration forms were returned back to the senders because the applications weren't sent by certified mail as required by Mexican law. Pilar Alvarez, an IFE official who recently toured the United States promoting the migrant vote, said about 2.5 million registration forms have been prepared for expatriate Mexicans. Declining to comment on the potential degree of absentee participation, Alvarez said it all depended on "the will of the voters."

Rodolfo Rubio, a researcher with the College of the Northern Border in Ciudad Juarez , predicted that if current trends continue less than 10 percent of eligible expatriate voters will be registered to cast their ballots for the July 2006 election. Analysts attribute a number of different factors to the disappointing number of registrations returned so far.

Cost, lack of information, distrust of government, and political burn-out with the standing parties are all variously cited as reasons for the low registration roll until now. In what constitutes a sort of poll tax on migrants, absentee voters are being asked to use certified mail to send in their registration applications so they can receive a mailed ballot during the April 15 to May 20 time frame. After voting, the ballot will have to be sent back to Mexico by July 1, again by certified mail. Potential voters can also register via computer, a gadget sill not owned by many on the other side of the digital divide. Absentee voters must also provide a copy of their Mexican voter identification card, a document not all people have.

"Before, you could say that they paid us to vote. Now, everyone that wants to register to vote has to pay between $8 and $10 dollars for each certified package sent to Mexico ," said Jorge Arturo Garcia, the president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in California . "Besides that, they are asking people to vote blind, because the candidates are unknown and nobody knows their platform."

In a move that has upset political partisans, the IFE has prohibited Mexican candidates from direct campaigning abroad, and barred political parties from spending campaign funds in foreign countries. An IFE-promised media blitz in the United States and other countries urging Mexican residents to participate in the election back home has not taken off as widely as expected. Ads are spotty, and some immigrant advocacy organizations in the US still have not received promotional literature or procedural information.

Further complicating matters, the federal Chamber of Deputies just slashed the IFE's 2006 budget, even though IFE officials previously said they needed an extra $8 million dollars on top of the approximately $118 million dollars already budgeted for the absentee voting process. Most of the budget will pay for the costly mail-in, mail-out process. In all fairness to the IFE , it should be mentioned that this year's registration is the first time the Mexican government has administered a vote from abroad. Nonetheless, the clock is ticking.

Although the current regulations stipulate that absentee voters have until January 15 to register, the looming holiday season in both the United States and Mexico will almost certainly cut a large chunk of the real time left to register. Traditionally, official business in Mexico comes to a crawl between about December 15 and January 7, the day after the Three King's Holiday , as family activities, travel and celebration take precedence over everything else. As the holiday season dawned near, the IFE announced it would promote voter registration in the heavily-crossed border corridors of Tijuana , Nuevo Laredo , Reynosa and Matamoros . However, it's unclear how many people will take off time in the middle of their busy travel and shopping activities to register to vote.

Overall, there's currently a mixed feeling among Mexican immigrants in the US about participating in the 2006 election, according to leaders of immigrant advocacy organizations in New Mexico and Texas contacted by Frontera NorteSur.

Mary Luchini, the director of rural development for the Las Cruces, NM-based Advocates for Children and Families, said some immigrants have expressed more of an interest than others in voting. "They really feel like they want a voice," Luchini said. "Even though they're here, they feel like they're still part of Mexico . They're happy about."

Carlos Coral, the director of the Office of Catholic Social Ministry for the Diocese of Las Cruces, sounded a similar note. Coral said some people he's talked to recently have brought up the elections, but other topics like the pay-out of monies from the old Bracero Program are hotter issues at the moment. "That's the one people are asking about right now," Coral said.

Some immigrant advocates blame popular indignation at Mexico 's political status quo for the lack of enthusiasm shown so far in the electoral process. Daniel Solis, the director of the Alliance for Community Development, a group which works in the low-income colonias of El Paso County 's Lower Valley , said he strongly supported the right of all Mexicans to vote but criticized what he said were a lack of real alternatives available to voters.

Criticizing Mexico 's three major political parties, Solis contended that NAFTA-fanned changes from Chiapas to Ciudad Juarez are worsening living conditions for the indigenous, campesino and worker sectors. Many people, Solis added, are instead losing hope of better prospects at home and putting stock in their future as new immigrants.

"With the whole democratization process in Mexico , there has to be some results if they want folks to participate," Solis said. "I see it as a stagnant process. Everyone calls it a new democracy, but the poor are still being left behind." Nonetheless, Solis said he still favored involvement in the election. "It's a priority and people have to get involved, but there are no options with the political parties right now," he said. "But you can't give up and throw up your hands. What is the other option?"

Ultimately, Mexican immigrants who live close to border cities and want to vote in next year's election might wind up playing a bigger role than their compatriots residing in the US interior, who have to dig into their pockets to vote and make sure forms and ballots are sent in by deadlines way before election day. As in previous elections, the IFE will install special polling stations on election day in Ciudad Juarez and other border cities for people away from home.

Additional sources: El Universal, November 1, 9 and 15, 2005. Articles by Jorge Octavo Ochoa, Fidel Samaniego and Arturo Zarate. El Diario de Juarez/El Diario de El Paso , November 6, 9, 10, 15, 2005. Articles by Lorena Figueroa, Patricia Giovine and press agencies. KLUZ (Albuquerque) November El Paso Times, November 9 and 14, 2005. Articles by Louie Gilot. Univision, November 11, 2005. Proceso/Apro, October 19 and November 4, 2005. Articles by Jenaro Villamil and Pedro Matias.

Protests, Polemics and Proposals at Border Governors' Meet

 Gathered in the old northern Mexican cotton-growing capital of Torreon, Coahuila, governors and their representatives from the 10 U.S.-Mexico border states concluded their annual conference this past weekend. Meeting during an increasingly charged atmosphere along their common frontier,  the states' chief executives issued  proposals for border security, law enforcement, environmental regulation, and education. While not endorsing any specific reform, the governors called for the promotion of legal immigration and respect for the law in both Mexico and the United States.

 In an apparent allusion to the Minuteman Project and similar groups,  Mexican President Vicente Fox, in a videotaped message transmitted to the meet, expressed concern about the actions of "certain civilian groups against migrants, respectable persons, with dignified aspirations," A brief appearance at the conference by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sparked a media frenzy and triggered protests by non-governmental groups affiliated with the New Mexico-based Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ).

 The network represents more than 50 Latino and other people-of-color organizations from northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.  In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Richard Moore, SNEEJ's executive director, explained that the network's presence was part of a long-term movement to promote human rights, economic sustainability and environmental protection along the 2.000 mile long Mexico-U.S. border. Moore said that while the campaign is ultimately aimed at the federal governments of Mexico and the United States, the network is currently taking its issues to the governors. "The touchable, reachable ones for us were the border governors," he said. "We think that at least in New Mexico and Arizona we can get some fairly progressive legislation." 

 Making sure that officials heard their grievances, the network sponsored a demonstration outside the hotel where the governors stayed. The protestors raised crosses in memory of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez and migrants killed while trying to cross the border. Another demonstration involving as many as 1,000 people was held by the SNEEJ in Torreon the last day of the conference, Moore added. 

 After convening an "alternative people's forum" attended by farmers, youth, women and others, the SNEEJ issued a document that demanded guaranteeing environmental and economic justice, curbing the Minutemen, upholding the right of education,  legalizing immigrants in the U.S, respecting  labor rights, and tearing down  border walls. The network also reiterated its demands to halt violence against women, especially those residing in Ciudad Juarez. A meeting between the SNEEJ leadership on one side and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Coahuila Governor Enrique Martinez on the other was held to discuss the network's immigration positions.

 "We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish," said Moore. "It was pretty obvious to those governors that the Southwest Network has a lot of recognition. Very clearly we were making our presence known by the bodies of hundreds and hundreds of people who demonstrated." 

 On the official agenda, joint border security and law enforcement were among the hot items. The governors approved a declaration calling on their respective national governments to define the border region as a strategic security zone, step up joint police training programs, increase cooperation against organized crime, and speed up intelligence exchanges. Pledging to budget $5 million extra dollars for security, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced during the conference that additional state troopers will be deployed in the border region of his state. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and his colleagues urged the federal governments Mexico and the U.S. to pay greater attention to border security by allocating more resources and appointing liaisons to the governors' group.

 Although the macabre phenomenon of femicide is an ugly reality in a number of different border cities, no specific plan to counter the murders of women and girls was part of the official agenda. In response to questions from reporters, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza appealed to the public not to single out his state and Ciudad Juarez. He contended that femicide is actually worse in other entities. Gov. Reyes said his administration is taking steps to contain the murders, pointing to recent actions like the arrests of suspects in last May's murder of 7-year-old Airis Estrella Enriquez Pando in Ciudad Juarez. Gov. Reyes added he will not "magnify or downplay" the women's murders, but will instead emphasize his administration's actions. 

 On the environmental front, the governors requested that the federal governments of Mexico and the United States finish appointing the board of directors for the Border Environment Cooperation Commission and the North American Development Bank (Nadbank). They called for greater flexibility in Nadbank's credit rules, extending the area of eligibility for Nadbank funding from a limit of about 60 to 175 miles away from the border, and continued funding of border infrastructure projects by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. With the water dilemma in mind, the governors called for a new working group to look at resources in hydrological zones shared by the 10 states.

 Finally, the baton of conference leadership was passed on at the just concluded session from the outgoing president, Coahuila Gov. Enrique Martinez, to the new one, Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours Castelo will serve as the new vice-president. Martinez, who presided over the organization for the past year, is one of the candidates for the nomination to represent the Institutional Revolutionary Party in next year’s Mexican presidential election. Now almost three decades old, the annual border governors’ conference seeks to coordinate policies and advocate common concerns before the federal governments of Mexico and the United States. Leadership of the conference is rotated on a yearly basis between the 10 member governors.

Additional sources: Norte (Agencia Reforma), July 16, 2005. Norte, July 16, 2005. Article by Angel Zubia Garcia. El Diario, July 16, 2005. Article by Silvia Macias Medina. El Siglo de Torreon, July 16, 2005. Articles by Fabiola Perez-Canedo Herrera. Norte (SUN), July 15, 2005. KFOX News (El Paso),  July 15, 2005. 

Political Party Targets Gas Terminals

 With Mexico's 2006 presidential campaign now underway, unofficially at least, signs are appearing that the planned liquified natural gas terminals for Baja California will grow as a hot-button political issue. Hector Diaz Cervantes, the Tijuana director of the Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) has called for a public consultation over whether the natural gas terminals should be built or not. Diaz said a recent internal meeting of the PVEM agreed to propose that the natural gas terminal issue be subjected to a public poll. Contending that the terminals would benefit foreign investors more than national ones, Diaz also questioned the possible ecological and public safety hazards of the energy project.

 "We shouldn't allow Tijuana to be converted into an easy place for a disaster like the one that happened in Sri Lanka in Asia, because of the installation of a re-gasification plant," said Diaz. "We can't allow Tijuana to be a possible target of terrorists due to the installation of these plants, because that would mean an even greater loss of security for us and future generations." Diaz added that his party is not against industry and technology, but viewed  eco-tourism and mass recreation as more appropriate forms of economic development.

 "We think our municipality and the state would benefit more if the government, politicial institutions, civil organizations and society in general encourage economic development in the entity by creating places of tourist and family recreation, such as ecological parks," said Diaz.

 Above all, the PVEM leader said that public opinion about the natural gas terminals should be gathered in conformance with polling standards. Forming an alliance with the center-right National Action Party in 2000, the PVEM increased its strength nationally by riding on the coattails of Vicente Fox's conquest of the presidency. However, the party soon broke with Fox and has been since generally aligned with the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in many local and state elections.

 Source:  Frontera, June 21 , 2005. Article by Fausto Ovalle.

 Border Businesses Named in Spreading Gaming Scandal

 Two Matamoros gaming parlors have been mentioned as beneficiaries  in a controversial series of concessions that could jeopardize the presidential aspirations of former Interior Minister Santiago Creel. A mounting scandal began earlier this month when it was revealed that Creel granted 130 gaming permits to a business affiliated with television giant Televisa shortly before leaving office to campaign for the presidency.

 As a pre-candidate for the presidential nomination of his center-right National Action Party (PAN), Creel promotional spots have been appearing frequently on the Televisa network. The new permits would allow the Televisa affiilate, Apuestas Internacionales, to broadcast bingo and other games over television in order to entice viewers to call from telephones and place bets. Besides the millions of dollars in gambling income expected to be made, Televisa stands to net more than two dollars for each phone call dialed.

 Critics have blasted the deal for side-stepping Mexico's 1947 gaming law, which authorizes some forms of gaming but does not permit casinos. Proposals and measures to legalize casinos have languished for 10 years in the Mexican Congress, and opposition to expanded gaming has remained stiff even among sectors of Creel's own PAN party.  Opponents say casinos will be a haven for money launderers and attract organized crime.

 PAN President Manuel Espino has called for an investigation of the gaming concessions, and new Interior Minister Carlos Abascal, another prominent Panista, has ordered a review of the deals. Federal deputies from the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), meanwhile, warn that Creel could face jail for granting the gaming permits. The pre-presidential candidate recently defended the concession, saying he was only trying to "democratize" a gaming market that was dominated for a handful of individuals mostly tied to the PRI. Although the 1947 law doesn't provide for permanent casinos, temporary licenses are routinely issued for casinos to operate at places like the annual Aguascalientes fair. 

 "They should investigate the PRI, investigate why they've given these permits to so few people and in conditions of discretion, creating a monopoly," said Creel.

 Creel tried to distance himself from the new permits, attributing the decision to an Interior Ministry council. Nonetheless, Interior Undersecretary Felipe Gonzalez later took credit for the permit approvals. In addition to awarding the 130 permits to Apuesta Internacionales, the Interior Ministry granted hundreds of other permits in April and May. to 6 other firms for sports books, numbers and bingo operations, as well as for a new race track and a dog track. If the concession to the Televisa affiliate stands, Apuestas Internacionales will surpass in size the previous biggest gaming concesssionaire,  Operadora de Apuestas Caliente, a sports books chain owned by Tijuana PRI Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon.   In Matamoros,  permits were granted to two Reflejos gaming parlors, a business which reportedly has ties to the Canada-based International Thunderbird Gaming Corporation, an outfit with gaming palaces in Central America and other nations. The company earlier filed an investor complaint under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement against the Mexican government for the alleged, improper closure of gaming parlours.

 Sources: El Bravo, June 21, 2005. Article by  Oscar Trevino Jr. El Sur, June 20, 2005. Articles by Jorge Zepeda Patterson and Agencia Reforma. Proceso, June 19, 2005. Article by Jenaro Villamil.

Ex- Tamaulipas Governor Flirts with Presidency

Former Tamaulipas Governor Tomas Yarrington Ruvalcaba (1998-2004) is getting his name out as a possible pre-presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Recently, brigades of green-shirted youths handed out pro-Yarrington plastic bracelets at major intersections in the Tamaulipas state capital of Ciudad Victoria. The bracelets were engraved with the initials TYR and carried the slogan broadcast in Yarrington television spots: “Mexico: I Want a New History for You.” Neither the bracelets nor spots directly promote a Yarrington candidacy, but they are viewed nevertheless as pre-campaign publicity. Youths involved in distributing the bracelets said that a plan exists to distribute one million of the objects nationwide. Yarrington is an adherent of the All United Against Madrazo (TUCAM) faction of the PRI. The group was formed to counter current PRI president and former Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo, who is considered the frontrunner for the PRI candidacy in the 2006 elections.  Another leading TUCAM figure, former Coahuila Governor Enrique Martinez Martinez, was recently in the Tampaulipas border city of Reynosa to promote his own pre-presidential run.

Yarrington governed Tamaulipas during a period when cross-border commerce jumped and the maquiladora industry weathered its ups and downs. He promoted a high -profile  road-building program, leaving behind a controversy over potential debts incurred. His governorship will be remembered as the years when a simmering conflict erupted with Texas farmers over Mexico’s water debt with the United States, and when narco-violence spiraled in border areas. Statistics maintained by Reynosa’s non-governmental Border Studies and Human Rights Promotion Center show that while overall homicides in Tamaulipas’ 10 border municipalities actually dipped during Yarrington’s administration,  narco-related murders leaped from 302 slayings tallied between 1993-1998 to 393 killings counted from 1999 to 2004. Kidnappings in the same border municipalities registered a notable increase during the last two years of the Yarrington administration, increasing from at least 93 reported incidents in 2002 to 363 cases in total for both 2003 and 2004.

Sources: Proceso/Apro, May 31, 2005. Article by Gabriela Hernandez.  www. derechoshumanosenmexico.org

Transportation Law only Partially Successful in Modernizing Nuevo Laredo Bus Fleet
  
Elva Aguirre, a regular user of the Nuevo Laredo public transportation system, says that the service some busses offer is awful because of their deplorable conditions.  Indeed last Wednesday, December 8, passengers panicked when the bus they were riding on in Nuevo Laredo nearly rolled over when part of the suspension fell off of the vehicle. 

Things are no longer supposed to be this way. Three years ago the state of Tamaulipas passed a new transportation law which sought in part to upgrade the state's bus fleets.  According to the law, busses can not be more than five years old.  

However, according to government reports, approximately 100 of Nuevo Laredo's 320 busses do meet current age regulations.  Some of the busses are from the 1980s and show the wear. 

An article in the Nuevo Laredo newspaper El Mañana says that the majority of the over-used busses in that city circulate with broken windows, seats and head lights.  Additionally, the busses are in need of a paint job and are in horrible mechanical condition.  They are also problematic in the quantity of pollution they unleash, the newspaper noted. 

The private companies that have concessions for city bus routes had until August 2004 to modernize their fleets.  

El Mañana did not mention whether the city and/or state might take measures against bus lines that flout current regulations. 

Source: El Mañana (Nuevo Laredo), December 13, 2004.  Article by Marco Martínez and Javier Terrazas.