Mexico & Nafta - October 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The only gubernatorial election remaining this year is for the western state of Michoacán on 13 November. The election is interesting and important for two reasons. The first is that it is one of the rare threeway  races in the country. Although the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) has held the state since 1998, currently the experienced candidate from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is leading in the opinion polls. The second reason why the election is important is that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s elder sister, Luisa María ‘Cocoa’ Calderón Hinojosa is running for the third party in contention, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) who is running with the endorsement of the Partido Nueva Alianza, which is controlled by the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo.

The latest opinion poll published on 19 September, for Reforma, a Mexico City daily newspaper had Fausto Vallejo, a four time former PRI mayor of the state capital Morelia on 37%, just ahead of Silvano Aureoles, the PRD candidate (who is also backed by the Partido del Trabajo and Convergencia) on 34%. Cocoa is on 29%.

Vallejo is doing well in urban areas, which is not good news for ‘Cocoa’. The PAN is known throughout Mexico as the “streetlight party” because of its strength in urban areas. Aureoles is well ahead of the other two candidates in rural areas. There is still a huge amount to play for, however, as 20% of the voters either won’t say, don’t know, or say that they will vote blank. It is also worth noting only just over a quarter of those polled, knew when the election was and almost half of those polled had no idea that an election was imminent.

Voters were also asked in the poll which candidate they thought would win. The result was fascinating: 28% said Aureoles; 26% said Vallejo and 21% said ‘Cocoa.’ More encouraging for ‘Cocoa’ is the fact that voters had grasped her two main policy pitches: reducing insecurity and improving education. She is well ahead of her rivals on these two issues. Aureoles and Vallejo’s main policies are creating jobs and reducing poverty and they are running neck-and- neck on both.

‘Cocoa’ is running a strong, if bizarre campaign. At one point she claimed that because she knew Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the founder of the PRD and the son of Mexico’s greatest 20th Century president (and native of Michoacán) Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 to 1940), Cárdenas wanted her to win. This seems most unlikely.

Luisa María Calderón Hinojosa is 55. She has been in politics longer than her brother and appears to know her stuff. She points out that 92% of what the state government in Michoacán spends is the result of transfers from the federal government. She argues that the current state government’s failure to sign up for the Acuerdo por la Calidad Educativa, has cost the state M$3bn (US$230m) and prevented every school having lavatories, a games area, and being able to offer music tuition. She claimed that any child learning a musical instrument would not pick up a gun. In Michoacán, 241 people have been killed by gangsters so far this year (from 1 January to 16 September, according to Reforma’s Ejecutómetro). In the whole of 2010, 259 people were killed by gangsters but this was a major improvement on the 543 killed in 2006, before Felipe Calderón took office.

The cost of the 2012 elections: The Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (Trife), which will run the 2012 elections, reckons that they will cost M$18.45bn (US$1.4bn). This is 42% up on what was spent in 2006, the last presidential year.
The Instituto Federal Electoral, which hands public money over to political parties, has seen its budget jump from M$10.5bn to M$15.95bn. The Fiscalía Especializada en Delitos Electorales (Fepade, which investigates electoral crimes), has a budget of M$129m up from M$106m in 2011.

The elite’s origins: Immediately after the Mexican Revolution all Mexican presidents were revolutionary generals. That changed in 1946 when Miguel Alemán Valdés, the son of a general, became modern Mexico’s first civilian president. From him until President Carlos Salinas (who took office in 1988), all Mexican presidents were law graduates from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Unam). Salinas was an Unam economics graduate.  Salinas’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo (1994 to 2000), was a graduate from the Politécnico, while the first Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) president, Vicente Fox (2000 to 2006) was a mature graduate in marketing from the Universidad Iberoamericana. The current president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, is a graduate from the Escuela Libre de Derecho. The two PAN presidents illustrate that party’s non-metropolitan base. Fox was governor of Guanajuato before becoming president (after the constitution was changed to allow him to run because his mother was Spanish). Calderón’s base is in Michoacán.
What is interesting is that Calderón has made a habit of appointing economics graduates from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (Itam), most of whom also have second degrees from US universities, to his cabinet. Both of his new cabinet appointees, Meade and Chertorivski, are Itam economics graduates. So is the governor of the Banco de México, Agustín Carstens. The Itam has long specialised in public policy. Rival economics schools such as the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey which focuses on training businessmen, and the Unam, which is still more than slightly Marxist, are now less influential politically.

• The PAN has held the presidency since 2000 but is currently floundering in the opinion polls. According to Mitofsky’s most recent poll (at the end of August) the PAN’s national support is down to 19%, only just ahead of the Broad Left’s 17%.
• ‘Cocoa’s’ promise to improve education comes despite the fact that she is backed by Elba Esther Gordillo, the powerful leader of the teachers’ union, who has blocked any radical reform of education for the past 20 years.
• The supreme court is studying whether it should rule on two PAN states (Baja California Norte and San Luis Potosí’s) changes to their state constitutions (in 2008 and 2009 respectively) which now state that life begins at conception. Pro-choice activists argue that the changes to the states’ constitutions infringe the federal constitution. Currently abortion laws are settled at the state level. Mexico City, a state-in-all-but name, currently has the most liberal abortion laws in the country.