Enrique Peña Nieto has tidily completed his first semester of government without the battering that many predicted for his first hurdle. He has imposed a reform agenda that had its first test when he imprisoned a union leader whose claws ended up being of paper. He followed with a new design for sharing the telecommunications 'pie', and he is ready to try his luck with riskier endeavors, those related to taxation and, above all, with energy.
The master key has been the Pact for Mexico, a mechanism of agreement between leaders of the three main political parties of the country through which Peña Nieto himself has been able to launch his projects of the second Salinismo [President Carlos Salinas, widely vilified for signing NAFTA and opening Mexico to neoliberal development] without the abrasions ... ; a pact used to deepen internal divisions within the PAN [National Action Party] and the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution], to replace the haggling in the chambers [of Congress] by arrangements with the party leadership and corporately to reduce the margins of political opposition (by giving it viability only for that which is expressed in the palace backrooms, condemning all non-Pact dissent to the margins).
However, the gimmicky political success of Peña Nieto and his group does not correspond to that of the country. In the first six months, the PRI administration has done absolutely nothing that means substantial changes in the pattern of injustice, poverty, impunity, human rights violations and corruption that characterized the first PRI reign, the septuagenarian [PRI governed without a break from 1929-1989], and the PAN's tragic dozen years of the partisan alternation. There has not been the expected economic growth. The big capital speculative feints still generate anxiety. The Crusade Against Hunger is only a variant of electoral clientelism. The level of public violence remains the same or is worse than during the Calderón administration. The strategy against organized crime seems erratic and is not yielding positive results.
Resistance to labor reform in education has been higher than expected by the federal government, and the PRI's repressive intent has had to backtrack more than once. Civil self-defense groups have multiplied and not even the Army has been able to disarm some communities (especially in Michoacán). The political ground does not feel firm, despite the reinstatement of classic mechanisms of media control, despite the "new narrative" on the subject of organized crime and despite the "function" of some museum dinosaurs advising the team in power, mostly composed of natives of the state of Mexico and from the state of Hidalgo.
The triumphant appearances of the Peña Nieto administration are proportional to their opponents' lack of energy. Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO] continues giving [Peña Nieto] precious time, focused as AMLO is on assembling a party apparatus itself that will aspire to be effective in 2015, but willing to make an early attempt to reconstitute as a social leader under the banner of the defense of oil. Felipe Calderón and his band are dedicated to trying to regain the presidency, but the PAN, and Josefina Vázquez Mota is a ghost in search of somewhere to put herself with her fixed smile.
In this scheme of abating the opposition, the government of Mexico City stands out as perhaps the last bastion of power with the capacity to resist the Peñismo [political power of the Peña Nieto organization]. Miguel Ángel Mancera was designated the candidate by an agreement between two people, Marcelo Ebrard and AMLO, leaving to the first [Ebrard] the political control of the nation's capital in exchange for ceding the presidential candidacy to the second [AMLO].
A few days before completing his first six months as Mayor of Mexico City, the balance to Mancera is negative .... A socially satisfactory explanation still hasn't been offered on what happened on December 1 of last year when Marcelo Ebrard was still Mexico City Mayor, and police abuses occurred against young people and citizens who were then released without any charge. That repressive tactic returned last Saturday when groups of young people who wanted to travel by Metro to Los Pinos [Mexico's White House, The Pines] to protest against the occupant of the residence, in the context of actions convened by Internet and called #OpDesobediencia [#OperationDisobedience], were infiltrated by provocateurs and then attacked.
Another example of such political slaking, which dismays the left and opens the way to the PRI, has been seen in the treatment of the case of the disappearance of at least eleven young Tepiteños. Tangles, zigzags and incredible inefficiency [have been the norm] for more than a week of events. Yes, Mancera was getting ready to go on Saturday to Baja California to support candidates of the PAN-PRD alliance for various elected positions (a trip that he wisely chose to cancel) and to be in San Diego on Monday at a conference on the environment.
Speaking of infiltrators, the magazine Contralínea published the organization chart of the CISEN [National Center of Investigation and Security; Mexico's Intelligence Agency] in which Manuel Cossío Ramos appears as director of open source information (area dedicated to espionage and provocation within social movements), with a salary of 171,000 pesos [$13,370 USD] (notes Jorge Torres, http://bit.ly/14mjb69). The official approached the movement #YoSoy132 in the early days, it appropriated for that e-mail address (which is now for sale on http://bit.ly/17OUarv) and from a recorded conversation with Saul Alvídrez organized a "complaint" that AMLO and other characters from the left financed and used that movement.
So we proceed from job insecurity at Aeromexico, forcing workers to accept prejudicial contract negotiations under the threat of closing the company, and allowing new hires to have lower benefits, until tomorrow, when Nuevo León inaugurates penal sanctions against anyone who "by any electronic means" might cause "dishonor, discredit, damage or (...) scorn anyone"! Spanish original