Mexico news Jan.6

Posted by Diane on January 8, 2011, 11:56 am
187.146.111.136

Subject: Mexico News WEEKLY January 06 - 2010 Weekly Report - 6 January 2011 (WR-11-01) MEXICO: Encinas set for Estado Alejandro Encinas, a close ally of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a radical left-winger, is about to become the united Left’s candidate for the governorship of the Estado de México. Encinas’s candidacy will mean, almost certainly, that the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) will not run a joint candidate against the main traditional Partido Revolucionario Insititucional (PRI) in the Estado. The gubernatorial election in the Estado is the most important of this year’s elections in Mexico. It is crucial because the outgoing governor of the state, Enriqe Peña Nieto, is the front runner for the PRI’s nomination for the presidency in 2012. If Peña Nieto’s chosen (but as yet unnamed) candidate to succeed him were not to win the governorship on 3 July, Peña Nieto’s bid for the presidency would almost certainly end. According to the opinion polls, Peña Nieto will win in 2012. Peña Nieto and his supporters had been afraid of a “Stop the PRI” alliance between the PAN and the PRD in the Estado. Peña Nieto has used his majority in the state assembly to push through an electoral law which would have made it all but impossible for the PAN and the PRD to have clinched an alliance. There is, however, a constitutional question about whether Peña Nieto’s law change was legal and both the PAN and the PRD were challenging it. López Obrador, a former party president of the PRD, mayor of Mexico City and defeated presidential candidate in 2006, opposed any alliance with the PAN and had nominated Yeidckol Polevnsky Gurwitz, a PRD senator for the state, as the candidate for his El Movimiento por el Cambio Veradero. Her nomination was endorsed by two senators, Alberto Anaya and Luis Walton from, respectively, the Partido del Trabajo (PT), and Convergencia. These two parties have now said that they will back Encinas. What Encinas’s nomination means is that López Obrador’s view that the Left does not need the PAN to win in either the Estado or in the 2012 presidential elections, has prevailed over more cautious calculators. This is a damning view of the weakness of the current government of President Felipe Calderón. López Obrador’s supporters argue that the PAN has been haemorrhaging support since Calderón took office and that the victory of the “Stop the PRI” alliances in three state elections (Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa) in 2010 had almost nothing to do with the PAN. There is some truth in this: the three victorious candidates in 2010 were all ex-priístas, like most of the PRD bigwigs. On the other hand, the PAN beat the PRD into third place in the 2005 gubernatorial election in the Estado. It is worth noting, however, that its candidate then has since defected from the PAN and now runs a populist organisation in Tlalnepantla, one of the main urban areas in the Estado. The announcement by Encinas, on 5 January, that he will be the united Left candidate in the Estado, also has implications for the first election of 2011. This is in Guerrero on 30 January, where two cousins are the main candidates for the governorship. The cousins are Manuel Añorve Baños, who is running on a PRI-Partido Verde Ecologista de México and Partido Nueva Alianza ticket entitled the Alianza para Tiempos Mejores, and Ángel Aguirre Rivero, who is backed by the PRD, PT and Convergencia. Aguirre is a former priísta senator and he is backed by a significant number of local priístas. Technically, there is a PAN candidate, Marcos Efrén Parra, who was mayor of Taxco, but he is barely running a campaign. Indeed, there were strong rumours, before Encinas’s announcement, that he was about to pull out and endorse Aguirre. Now, if there is no possibility of a PAN-PRD alliance in the Estado, there is little point in Efrén Parra withdrawing. To do so would underline the uncomfortable fact that the PAN is not a national political party. Now that it has lost Yucatán, the PAN controls no states south of Mexico City apart from Morelos, which is embarrassingly gangster-ridden. To be fair, the PRD’s political support is just as weak north of Mexico City. It is worth noting, however, that Manuel Camacho Solís, another former (PRI) mayor of Mexico City, has not completely rejected the idea of a PAN-PRD alliance in the Estado. Camacho is another ally of López Obrador’s and is the coordinador of the Diálogo para la Reconstrucción de México (DIA). Camacho said that an alliance with the PAN could be considered once the Left was united. The most important aspect of Encinas’s nomination is that it was midwifed by Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City. Ebrard hosted the lunch at which Encinas announced his nomination. Ebrard, unlike his patron, López Obrador, had been a keen supporter of the “Stop the PRI” alliances in 2010. His change of policy is another indication of how weak the PAN is now perceived to be by ambitious politicians. Ebrard is a feasible left-wing candidate for the presidential elections in 2012. Unlike Peña Nieto, Ebrard has been working hard to polish his international image and on 7 December 7, 2010, was awarded the World Mayor prize for his environmental and civil-rights initiatives. Peña Nieto, by contrast, has a little experience of life beyond the Estado. On 22 December, after unprecedented joint complaints from the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala (which also subsequently sent Mexico a diplomatic protest note) the Mexican government announced that it would re-investigate the allegation that 50 Central Americans had been kidnapped on 16 December in Oaxaca. The day before, the government had dismissed claims by two eyewitnesses that a mass kidnapping had occurred. Now, almost two weeks after starting the investigation, the Mexican government has yet to announce, definitively, what happened. *********************************** Weekly Report - 6 January 2011 (WR-11-01) TRACKING TRENDS MEXICO | The PRI. On 3 January the governor of the northern state of Coahuila, Humberto Moreira Valdés, was granted a leave of absence. Moreira is the only candidate to succeed Beatriz Paredes as national president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The presidency of the PRI is a crucial job as politicians from all sides start to focus on the 2012 presidential and legislative elections. Moreira’s secondary goal is to ensure that his brother, Rubén, succeeds him as governor of Coahuila which holds elections on 3 July 2011. Moreira claims that he is an independent, unifying, force in the PRI. In fact he is backed by most of the PRI’s 20 state governors, most notably Enrique Peña Nieto, and he is close to Elba Esther Gordillo,the influential leader of the teachers’ union (the SNTE) and the Partido Nueva Alianza. Moreira’s ascension to the PRI presidency was decided in mid-December when his only real rival, Emilio Gamboa Patrón, the head of the PRI’s Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP), endorsed Moreira. Gamboa was a former private secretary to Mexico’s most controversial recent president, Carlos Salinas Gortari (1988-1994). One of the possible candidates to become the PRI’s secretary general is Paloma Guillén, a federal deputy. She is the sister of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, which led a brief military prising against the North American Free Trade Agreement in January 1994. MEXICO | Jobs. The economy created 732,000 new social-security paying jobs in 2010, President Calderón tweeted on 4 January. This was the most for 14 years but shows that 230,000 jobs were actually lost in December. In the whole of 2009 only 82,900 net new jobs were created. This was a result of the global economic crisis which led to the loss of 701,000 formal jobs between November 2008 and May 2009.

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