Mexico & Nafta - 12 October 2004
A sign of things to come?
The apparently arcane dispute over the reform of Article 122 of the constitution illustrates the grim political problems facing Mexico. Ostensibly the dispute, which has prompted members of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática to interrupt congress twice, on 5 and 7 October, is over whether the federal government should go on subsidising primary education in Mexico City. In fact, the dispute is really about how Mexico should be governed.
What is at issue is whether low politics should dominate the political process. The government, backed by the biggest party in congress, the Partido Revolcuionario Instituiconal (PRI), has seized on the chance to deliver a low blow to the government of Mexico City, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is the frontrunner for the presidential elections in 2006. Both his long-term rival from Tabasco, Roberto Madrazo, who now heads the PRI, and President Vicente Fox, would like to see López Obrador knocked out of the race for the presidency.
Their weapon is the arcane anomaly under which the federal government subsidises basic education in Mexico City. This anomaly is a legacy of the time when Mexico City was ruled directly by a presidential appointee. In 1992, the country's 32 states took responsibility for basic education, but Mexico City did not. Manuel Camacho Solis, the mayor at the time, said that this anomaly was because of problems he had with Ernesto Zedillo, then minister of education. Zedillo became President in 1994, after President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's first choice for the post, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated.
The government now wants to correct the anomaly, but in one go. This will blow a M$9bn (US$782m) hole in Mexico City's 2005 budget and probably force López Obrador to trim his spending. He has based his popularity on heavy public spending: he has built a lot of a new inner ring-roads and provided direct payments to pensioners and mothers with school-age children. The PRD feels that the change is aimed directly at undermining López Obrador's popularity. Even dissident Priístas feel that something rotten is going on. Amazingly Manuel Bartlett, who as interior minister presided over the computer failure during the election count which almost certainly allowed Salinas to `win' the 1988 presidential election, reckons that the reforms to Article 122 are being rushed. Along with the PRD he argues that any reform of Article 122 should form part of an overhaul of the whole of Mexico City's finances.
López Obrador is trying to portray himself as a political victim. He said that there is no chance of negotiating a solution to the Article 122 problem. He has probably calculated that the next move the PRI-PAN alliance (PRIAN, as López Obrador calls it) will make will be to strip him of his immunity so that he can be prosecuted for a (petty) contempt of court.