Mexico & Nafta - November 2006 ( ISSN 1741-444X)

President-elect Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has had a good couple of months since he was confirmed as the winner of the 2006 presidential election at the beginning of September. The best news probably came on 29 October when the weak government of President Vicente Fox finally stirred itself to end the anarchy in the southern state of Oaxaca, rather than leaving that problem to fester for Calderón.

Even the bad news in the past month, the decision by the US President, George W Bush to build walls along the border with Mexico, is not necessarily bad news for Calderón. The US decision is a clear failure for President Vicente Fox's policy towards the US. As the US decision came in the last six weeks of his term, President Calderón can take the credit for any improvement. Weary realists doubt that there will be any improvement for at least a couple of years until a new US president takes office. Optimists hope that a setback for the Republicans in the mid-term elections may lead to more constructive, if less construction-heavy, US policies towards Mexico.

Besides Oaxaca (see p5 and following) Calderón has also benefited from the progressive marginalisation of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftwinger who still cannot believe that he lost the presidential election in July. López Obrador's candidate lost heavily in the gubernatorial elections in López Obrador's home state of Tabasco. López Obrador has seen middle of the roaders, such as Juan Sabines, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) governor-elect of Chiapas spurn him and accept Calderón as the legitimate president-elect. 

Gallingly for López Obrador, even his allies in the PRD accept that they cannot prevent established perredista figures from establishing working relationships with Calderón. The most interesting rapprochement is between Calderón and Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, the governor of Calderón's home state of Michoacán. The PRD president, Leonel Cota, a long time supporter of Cárdenas's father, Cuauhtémoc, the man who was almost certainly cheated of the presidency in 1998 by rampant electoral fraud, said that PRD governors could not be disciplined by the party for recognising Calderón. Cota said that the governors' roles as representatives of their states had to take precedence over their party affiliation. Besides Cárdenas, Zeferino Torreblanca, the new governor of Guerrero, and Amalia Garcia of Zacatecas have accepted Calderón. 

Calderón problems are obvious and unavoidable: the state of the US economy and the Mexican government's over-dependence on oil revenues. Calderón's only (virtual) cabinet appointment so far, Agustí­n Carstens, has already identified these two issues as the biggest economic issues facing the new government. Calderón and Carstens both seem confident about finding a way through these difficulties. Fox failed in an identical situation.