Weekly Report - 6 January 2011 (WR-11-01)

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.

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