Mexico & Nafta - December 2008 (ISSN 1741-444X)

President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa appointed Fernando Francisco Gómez-Mont Urueta on 10 November as the new interior minister to succeed Juan Camilo Mouriño, who was killed in a plane crash on 4 November. Gómez-Mont is a surprise choice for several reasons. Although he comes from the same traditionalist wing of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) as Calderón, he is not close to the president and thus breaks Calderón's habit of appointing his chums (cuates) to senior government posts.

Gómez-Mont is a longstanding member of the PAN, and his father was one of its founders, but he has been more active as a lawyer than a politician. Until his appointment he was the main partner in a leading law firm, Zinser, Esponda y Gómez-Mont. In this role he has defended a number of controversial people and made some enemies, notably Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the controlling shareholder in TV Azteca, the second most important broadcasting company in the country. TV Azteca was prominent in a government-inspired campaign that culminated in July 2008 with the ejection of Santiago Creel, Calderón's unsuccessful rival for the PAN's 2006 presidential nomination, from the leadership of the PAN in the senate.

A bigger handicap for Gómez-Mont is that he has served only one term in the lower house of congress and finished that term 15 years ago. This is a weakness because traditionally the interior minister negotiates with congress to get the government's bills into law. Gómez-Mont's main claim to fame is as the PAN's longstanding representative on the country's various election-monitoring bodies, culminating in a stint on the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE).

One of Gómez-Mont's chief tasks will be to pull the various factions of the PAN together for the mid-term elections in 2009. Delivering some victories in the war against organised crime (which the government appears to be losing) is essential if the PAN is to retain its position as the biggest party in congress. Since Calderón was elected in 2006, the powerful opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) has won virtually every important election: on 9 November the PRI continued its run by sweeping away the PAN and the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in municipal elections in the central state of Hidalgo.

Gómez-Mont had been out of favour with the dominant clique in the PAN for most of the past decade. This clique was neo-panista and dominated by rightwing businessmen rather than the Roman Catholic social conservatives who led the PAN before its election victories in states and municipalities were officially recognised in the 1990s. Gómez-Mont's father, Felipe, who served in congress three times for the PAN as well as setting up a prosperous law firm, was an archetype of the old style Panista: Fernando is the youngest of Felipe's 13 children.

The PAN's ruling clique in the late 1990s and early 2000s was unhappy at Gómez-Mont's constructive engagement with the last two PRI governments and with his legal work defending - mostly successfully - prominent politicians against corruption charges. His client list starts with a controversial former President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, moves on to his equally controversial brother, Raúl and includes bankers and also the trade union barons, such as Rogelio Montemayor, who ran the oil workers' union.  

Although Salinas probably did not win the 1988 presidential election fairly (no-one will ever know for sure because the ballots were deliberately burnt in 1991), he was the first Mexican president to allow the PAN to win executive power: previously the PAN had just been represented in federal and state congresses.  Carlos went into exile in Ireland during the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo, while Raúl was jailed on corruption and murder charges which were subsequently dropped.

In 1991, Gómez-Mont was elected to congress as a Panista and chaired the justice committee. He then went on to represent the PAN on the various election-monitoring agencies up to and including the current one, the IFE. Gómez-Mont's great achievement was to introduce voter cards with photographs: these cut down on fraud.

Politically, Gómez-Mont is close to Diego Fernández de Cevallos, the PAN's presidential candidate in 1994. Fernández is something of a maverick. In the 1994 election he was running strongly in the opinion polls but then all but stopped campaigning. He nevertheless finished a strong second. He then had a controversial career as a senator and a property developer in Acapulco.

In July 2008, Fernández criticised the Calderón government's failing policies, most notably its war on organised crime and attempts to reform the state oil monopoly, Petróleos Mexicanos. Fernández argued that the government's failures were undermining the PAN's electoral appeal. Calderón responded to this criticism by bringing Gómez-Mont and another Fernández supporter, Juan Miguel Alcántara Soria, onto the PAN's executive committee in mid-August. Alcántara also got a senior job in the Procuradurí­a General de la República when that was shaken up.

Some political commentators argue that the PAN, which has been performing dismally in elections, now appears to have three factions. The traditionalist wing has split into two factions: one is headed by Calderón and the other is headed by Fernández. The third faction, the neo-panista wing, is headed by former president Vicente Fox.

Fox, in a pointed insult to Calderón and Mouriño, went ahead with a conference of 100 prominent panistas at his ranch in Guanajuato on 6 November to discuss the future of the Right in Mexico. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the owner of TV Azteca, is close to Fox.

Gómez Mont's big problem is likely to be his lack of political experience. His predecessor, Juan Camilo Mouriño, was much more of a political animal and was being groomed by Calderón as his successor. The interior minister is traditionally the second most important job in the Mexican government.

The interior minister handles negotiations with congress, in which no party has had overall control since 1997, and has a major role in law and order policy, though this aspect of the interior minister's job has diminished with the rise in importance of the Procuradurí­a General de la República and the Secretarí­a de Seguridad Pública. The problem is that the heads of both these ministries have failed to lower the death toll from the government's war against organised crime.

Private secretary: On 25 November government officials announced that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa had a new private secretary, Luis Felipe Bravo Mena. The appointment is further evidence that Calderón is continuing to move away from his previous policy of surrounding himself with cuates (chums). His new private secretary was Mexico's ambassador to The Vatican. He has been president of Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional and served in congress. Bravo Mena is from the political generation above Calderón and should provide experience and political knowhow to complement the new interior minister, Fernando Gómez-Mont.

• Calderón shaken

Calderón has clearly been deeply upset by the death of Mouriño. Even Calderón supporters in the Mexican media thought that the president's eulogy of Mouriño, who after all had been interior minister for less than year, was over the top.

• Bravo Mena consulted?

The rumour in Mexico City is that Calderón's new private secretary, Luis Felipe Bravo Mena   was consulted by the President before Gómez Mont was appointed.