Mexico

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• MEXICO: PRD struggles in the elections

  25 June 2009 Hits: 269

  The opinion polls are pointing to a thumping defeat for the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in the mid-term congressional elections on 5 July. Currently, the PRD is the second biggest party in the lower chamber of congress with 126 of the chamber's 500 seats. The party is badly split, most damagingly in its heartland of Mexico City.

  The splits are encapsulated by what is happening in the campaign to become jefe delegacional (ie borough president) in the Mexico City district of Iztapalapa. Here a candidate who supports Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leader of the radical wing of the PRD, has been thwarted from standing by a series of clever manoeuvres by the Nueva Izquierda wing of the PRD. These manoeuvres culminated in a ruling from the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF).

  Iztapalapa was the only district in Mexico City in which López Obrador failed to get his candidate nominated. The city government is run by the mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, who is loyal to López Obrador.

  The tangle at Iztapalapa is complicated and López Obrador's solution makes major demands of voters. Essentially, López Obrador's voters are now in a position in which if they vote for who appears to be the PRD candidate they will be in fact voting against López Obrador and Ebrard.

  The TEPJF, a federal body, eventually ruled on 11 June that the PRD's candidate in Iztapalapa should be Silvia Oliva rather than Clara Brugada. The TEPJF was ruling on the result of a disputed internal PRD primary, in March, which Brugada appeared to have won convincingly. The TEPJF decision has come so late that the ballot papers had already been printed with Brugada as the PRD candidate.

  López Obrador and his supporters (and even some fair-minded political commentators) objected furiously to the TEPJF decision. López Obrador saw the decision as a government attempt to foment divisions in the PRD. Fair minded commentators, such as Sergio Sarmiento, a columnist for Reforma and the presenter of an important political show on TV Azteca, argue that the TEPJF decision breaks a fundamental principle that the will of the voters should prevail over minor infringements of electoral laws. Sarmiento pointed out that the TEPJF had used this argument in rejecting López Obrador's allegations that the 2006 elections were marred by infringements and therefore the votes from some places should be annulled.

  The TEPJF ruling in Iztapalapa was based on the principle that Oliva's political rights had been compromised and it annulled votes from 81 of the 471 polling stations used by the PRD in the March primary. The TEPJF's reason for annulling the votes is feeble: it claims that some of the PRD supervisors whose scheduled replacements had not turned up were replaced by people who were standing about. As this was a party primary and all the replacements were party members, this seems a strange basis on which to abandon a principle. 

  What makes the TEPJF decision even more controversial is that Oliva has started to stake out some very un-PRD like positions, such as advocating the use of the army for social work in Iztapalapa. She also said that she would work with the federal government, which López Obrador calls illegitimate (largely because of the TEPJF's refusal to strike out dubious results). The PRD still has a strong anti-government stance, largely because of the weight López Obrador still wields in the party. 

  López Obrador has come up with a complicated scheme to get around the problem caused by the over-prompt printing of the ballot paper. This problem is, essentially that a vote for Brugada on the ballot paper (where her name appears) is in fact a vote against her and a vote for Oliva who is now the official PRD candidate.

  What López Obrador and his supporters have come up with is a campaign to get PRD voters to back Rafael Acosta, the Partido del Trabajo candidate. If Acosta, who is known as Juanito wins, he will resign and Ebrard will ask the new Mexico City assembly to choose Brugada to replace Acosta as Iztapalapa's jefe delegacional.

  The race in Iztapalapa is between Oliva and Brugada. Iztapalapa is a bastion of the PRD. In 2006 the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) won 18% of the vote in the borough and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) only 11%. Then the López Obrador-led coalition, Por el Bien de Todos, won 60% of the vote in the borough. In 2006 Por el Bien de Todos was composed of the PRD, Convergencia and the Partido del Trabajo.

  The feuds on the Left mean that López Obrador is campaigning everywhere in Mexico City (except Iztapalapa) for the PRD but everywhere else in Mexico for the more radical alliance of the PT and Convergencia. The result at Iztapalapa will show which wing of the PRD carries most sway with voters in Mexico City. The result will also have major implications for what happens on the Left in 2012.

  If Acosta/Brugada win, López Obrador will have confirmed that he is the dominant force on the Left and the Jesús Ortega-led Nueva Izquierda is heading nowhere. If, however, López Obrador loses in Iztapalapa, his grip on the Left will have been prised loose. This can only be good news for whoever is the PRI candidate for the presidency in 2012.

  • Gang killings

  In 2008, 1,600 of the 5,630 gang killings in Mexico took place in Ciudad Juárez. To date this year, 829 people have been killed by gangs in the state of Chihuahua, virtually all of them in Ciudad Juárez.

• MEXICO: More grim forecasts

  25 June 2009 Hits: 261

  On 24 June the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forecast that Mexico's economy would contract by 8% in 2009. This is by far the gloomiest forecast by any major international organisation for the economy. The OECD is headed by Angel Gurrí­a, a former Mexican foreign minister and finance minister, who will know the effect of the forecast on the mid-term congressional elections, due on 5 July.

  The World Bank, which produced its forecasts the day before the OECD, has Mexico down for a 5.8% contraction in 2009. This looks optimistic. The general assumption in Mexico is that the economy will decline by about 9% in the current (second) quarter. This will mean that for the first half of 2009, the economy will have contracted by 8.6%. To achieve a 5.8% contraction for the year as a whole means that the second half must see some sort of recovery. There is little sign of this.

  The only encouraging point from the OECD forecast is that the organisation sees a sharpish recovery in 2010 when it expects 2.8% growth in Mexico. The World Bank is forecasting that growth in Mexico will still be negative (in per capita terms at least) in 2010 when it will be around 1.7%. In 2011 growth will only be back to 3%.

  The World Bank forecast is also potentially damaging politically to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. The World Bank is forecasting per capital GDP in Mexico at the end of 2011 will be 1.2% down on per capita GDP when Calderón took office.

  It is also significant that the OECD is critical of Mexican policymakers' response to the global economic crisis. The OECD said that the fiscal response to the crisis could have been better targeted and pointed out that the government could have done more to ease inflationary pressures by reducing “administered" (i.e. government-controlled) prices. It also called on the Mexican government to set out a clear medium-term fiscal strategy.

  The OECD's criticisms of Mexico are all the more pointed when contrasted with its praise for Brazil and Chile's policy response to the crisis. Chile is due to join the OECD in December as a full member. Brazil is in talks with the organisation but no accession date has been set. Mexico joined the OECD in 1994. 

  • Unemployment

  In May the official unemployment rate hit 5.3%. In May 2008 the rate was 3.24%.

• TRACKING TRENDS

  25 June 2009 Hits: 251

  MEXICO | Missing island. On 23 June a scientific expedition officially informed the lower chamber that it could not find Bermeja Island. Bermeja Island was crucial to Mexico's ownership claim to potentially oil-rich parts of the Gulf of Mexico. The island would have expanded its maritime boundary by 55km and thus given it rights over deep waters (Hoyo de la Dona Oeste) which may hold an estimated US$300bn worth of oil. Rights to this area are now likely to go to the US.
  Bermeja Island originally appeared on charts dating from 16th and 17th centuries and was supposed to lie approximately at latitude 22 º North and longitude 91 º West. In November 2008, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Unam) was commissioned by the marine committee of the chamber of deputies to find the island. Unam searched historical records and sent a research ship to the presumed location but found nothing, even using ultrasound techniques which could have detected an island which existed 300 years ago but had since been submerged. In 1820 two expeditions to the presumed location also failed to find the island.

  MEXICO | Nursery tragedy. The federal government issued nine arrest warrants on 22 June for officials who, allegedly, were to blame for the fire at a nursery that killed 47 children. The warrants seek officials loyal to Eduardo Bours, the governor of Sonora, who is a close ally of Elba Esther Gordillo.
  Gordillo regards herself as the person who won the 2006 presidential election for Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, so the warrants suggest that Calderón has decided that he has to break with Gordillo.
  Bours did nothing to bring the operators of the nursery or the building to justice. He argues that the tragedy was the fault of the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS), which licensed the nursery. The nursery caught fire on 5 June. Gordillo has her own political party, Partido Nueva Alianza, which has nine seats in the current congress. She also controls the teachers' union, which is the biggest trade union in Latin America. The mid-term congressional elections are on 5 July.

  MEXICO | Ciudad Juárez. On 21 June, the government announced that it was relieving 2,500 soldiers from Ciudad Juárez. The government is rotating the soldiers, which it sent into Ciudad Juárez in March, in order to avoid them becoming corrupted by local drug gangs. There is also some evidence that the soldiers' impact has been diminishing, because the daily murder rate in the city, which was running well into double figures prior to their arrival in March, is now back up to eight or nine a day. According to Enrique Torres Valadez, the spokesman for military operations in Chihuahua, there are now 5,500 soldiers on patrol in Ciudad Juárez, with another 1,300 patrolling its hinterland.