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

The interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora, and seven other people were killed on 11 November when the helicopter in which they were travelling crashed en route from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos. The cause of the crash is still unclear, but it seems unlikely that sabotage or terrorism brought the helicopter down. Blake Mora is the second of President Felipe Calderón’s interior ministers to die in an air crash. The first was Juan Camilo Mouriño, a great chum of Calderón’s, who was killed on 4 November 2008 when his executive jet crashed near the centre of Mexico City.

On 17 November President Calderón appointed Alejandro Poiré Romero as his new interior minister. Poiré is Calderón’s fifth interior minister. Traditionally, the ministry (Gobernación) is the most powerful in the cabinet and the minister handles the federal government’s negotiations with congress and state governors.

Gobernación’s hard power, such as its control of internal security, has been whittled away however; first by the creation of the ministry of public security, which is effectively in charge of reforming the police (and is run by Genaro García Luna) and then by the deployment of the army and the marines from December 2006 in the war against Drug Trafficking Organisations (DTOs).

As President Calderón is almost into his final year ahead of presidential and congressional elections on 1 July 2012 (the new president is inaugurated on 1 December 2012), Poiré’s acceptance of the post signals that he will not seek election in 2012.

Poiré’s rise up the ranks in the government has been sensational. He is only 40 and moves to the interior ministry from the top of the national intelligence agency (Cisen), a post to which he was only appointed in September 2011. Calderón is keen on appointing Cisen graduates to his cabinet. Besides García Luna and Poiré, at least one of Calderón’s federal prosecutors has also headed the Cisen.

Poiré is a political science graduate from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), the alma mater for most senior Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) officials, and has a doctorate in political science from Harvard, where he has also worked as a researcher and teacher.

In public life in Mexico, he has worked for the Instituto Federal Electoral, (which runs elections) and was director of political analysis for both the presidency and also the interior ministry. He knows the interior ministry well, having served as a chief adviser and then as a deputy minister responsible for population, immigration and religious issues.

Calderón’s interior ministers have been a mixed bunch. The first, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, a former governor of Jalisco, left under a cloud of corruption allegations after just a year. He was succeeded by Juan Camilo Mouriño, whom Calderón appeared to be grooming to succeed him as president (even though there were considerable doubts as to whether Mouriño was Mexican by birth).

Mouriño was succeeded by Fernando Gómez Mont, a well-connected lawyer and PAN stalwart. He resigned on principle, in 2009, over the political alliance deals the government was cutting with the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) for the 2010 gubernatorial elections. These deals won three key elections, albeit with the help of dissidents from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and temporarily halted the PRI’s electoral steamroller.

Then came Blake Mora, whose big success was establishing a cordial relationship with Javier Sicilia, a campaigner for the withdrawal of the army from the war against the drug gangs.

Calderón said that Poiré was the obvious choice because of his experience of security and political issues. Prior to taking over the intelligence agency in September, Poiré was technical secretary and spokesman for the National Security Council (CSN). The CSN is tasked with harmonising federal and state security policies.

Poiré’s main task will be ensure that next year’s elections pass off peacefully. This is a big ask: gang violence has erupted this year in Veracruz, the third biggest electoral district in the country after the Estado de México and the Distrito Federal (both of which have been comparatively free of gang killings).

To date this year (to 18 November), 11,274 people have been killed by gangs across Mexico, according to Reforma’s Ejecutómetro. As the weekly death toll is running at between 150 and 200, the total for 2011 will be around 12,000, slightly above 11,583 officially registered in 2011. In Veracruz, the death toll has jumped from 52 in the whole of 2010 to 298 so far this year.

The crash itself

What is alarming is about the crash which killed Blake Mora is that according to the manufacturers Eurocopter, its helicopters in Mexico crash on average five times per 100,000 flying hours, which is well above its global average of 3.2 times per 100,000 flying hours. The Mexican authorities dispute these figures and claim that Mexico’s incidence of helicopter crashes is 0.15 per 100,000 “operations”.

Following the precedent set by the near public investigation into the causes of Mouriño’s crash, the government is deliberately publicising initial findings from the crash investigation in an effort to puncture conspiracy theories. The government’s view is that the most likely underlying reason for the crash was poor visibility.

Besides Blake Mora, the other victims included: the deputy minister responsible for legal affairs and human rights, Felipe Zamora; the ministry’s spokesman, José Alfredo García; the technical secretary, Diana Miriam Hayton Sánchez; a military adjutant, Major René de León Sapién; and three crew members.

Conspiracy theorists cite sources ranging from the pilot’s brother – who, apparently, said that the pilot had told him that there was something wrong with the helicopter before taking off - to commentators, who say that it is more than a coincidence that the helicopter came down just a day after the government arrested Ovidio Limón Sánchez, an important member of the Sinaloa drug-trafficking organisation (DTO). These conspiracy theorists claim that Mouriño was also killed by the Sinaloa DTO.

UNAM : The Rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Unam) José Narro Robles, a  medical doctor and researcher, has accepted a second four year term, which began on 16 November. The Unam holds an emblematic place in Mexico’s academic landscape and educated many of the technocrats who transformed Mexico. More recently it has been eclipsed, politically at least, by the Instituto Tecnológico Autónoma de México, though under Naro Robles the Unam has started to recover its leading position. The Unam is one of the top, if not the top, university in Latin America.