One Way to Stay Relevant

Even if signature legislative achievements are not in the offing for Calderón, foreign policy could be one (unexpected) route to some second-half accomplishments. Here he is (in an article from last week) pressing his idea for a green fund to the G-5 and G-8.

Explosive Accusation

The Secretariat of Public Security says the half-brother of Michoacán governor Leonel Godoy is connected to La Familia. The brother, Julio César Godoy, was just elected to a deputy post in the state with the PRD.

El Universal on the Army

Here's El Universal's editorial on the uproar over army abuses:

When Felipe Calderón decided to use the army to confront drug trafficking groups head on, very few voices protested that determination. Two facts justified the strategy: local police lacked the capacity to confront the power of these organizations and the federal forces didn't have full confidence to perform the task. As a result, the political as well as civil society, explicitly or silently, signed a blank check for the president to act with all the weight of the state against this expression of illegality.

In December we'll be three years from that decision. Over that time span, networks, fiefdoms and agreements between officials and criminals have been taken down. Nevertheless, the intensive presence of military forces in the streets has also had harmful consequences. Despite demands that the soldiers respect human rights, the nature of their responsibilities tends to separate them from this objective.

Within that context, toward the second half of Calderón's term, political leaders are beginning to propose a revision of the army's role. The panista coordinator in the Senate, Gustavo Madero, yesterday recognized that the country is obligated to reflect so as to establish limits to the participation of the armed forces. Perredista Carlos Navarrete acknowledged that including the army in combating crime has brought with it violations of human rights.

On the other side of the spectrum, priísta deputy Francisco Rivera Bedoya, president of the Commission of Public Security, came out in favor of soldiers redoubling their efforts, while panista Jorge González Betancourt trusts that they are capable of respecting civil guarantees.

These declarations, for now, offer an indication of the fracture of consensus that existed among the political class on this topic. For now it seems prudent to document that fact.

The only thing that jumped out at me as questionable here was, "the nature of their responsibilities tends to separate them from this objective". That's surely true, but it implies that the army worked with a heavy hand that would not have been out of place on a battlefield. That's incorrect. Had they been committed in combat, the alleged abuses would be war crimes. Or in other words, the problems of the Mexican army go beyond the decision to use it for domestic security tasks.

Obama Coming Back

Obama will be back in Mexico in August, in a Guadalajara summit of North American leaders. It'll be interesting to see how much attention he pays to the military abuses that have earned a lot of press in recent weeks.

PAN Rumors

Bajo Reserva says that César Nava is Calderón's pick to be Germán Martínez's replacement. Santiago Creel, another possible pick, wants to delay elections beyond the 30 days stipulated when Martínez resigned. The big question mark is not if it's Nava or Creel specifically so much as if it's a Calderón guy (or gal) or an independent figure. Contrary to some panistas who've said that Martínez's closeness to Calderón was a problem, Gustavo Madero yesterday defended the right of the president to influence the selection.

Conditioning, Suspending Aid

Human Rights Watch is calling for a suspension of Mérida Initiative handouts until military abuses are subject to civilian trials rather than military discipline. HRW painstakingly detailed the reasons that civilian authorities should be handling such cases here, and it's hard to argue with their logic. As long as military judges who owe their jobs to the secretary of defense are overseeing cases of abuse, cover-ups will be hard to avoid. However, I think the tactic HRW suggests is a wrong-minded. The question is whether or not a suspension of aid will make Mexico more likely to address military abuses. I don't imagine it will; instead, it will spark an outbreak of the sort of self-righteous nationalism that has thankfully been rare in recent years, at least in the realm of security. An aid suspension stemming from a foreign uproar over military abuses would actually make life harder on the would be reformers among the Mexican military and political class. American concerns would be better addressed behind closed doors.

More Voter Characteristics

Mitofsky's voter profile polling is out!* Contrary to the polls cited by Kate D Artigues, 40 percent of PRI voters are not older than 60; indeed, barely a quarter are older than 50, and the PRI voters were only marginally older than those of the PAN. The major party with the youngest voters was the PRD, with roughly a third of its supporters under 29, almost five points more than the corresponding figure for the PAN. However, Green Party voters are by far the (forgive me) greenest, with 57 percent 29 years old or less. More Green Party oddities: almost two thirds of its supporters were women, and 47 percent of its voters graduated from high school or college. The PRD and PAN, by contrast, barely broke 40 percent in the latter measure, while the PRI clocked in at 35 percent.

What was motivating voters? For PAN voters, just under 60 percent said that the economy was the nation's most pressing problem, compared to 68 percent for the PAN and the PRD. Not surprisingly, almost 90 percent of PAN supporters expressed confidence in Calderón, but less perhaps less expected, almost 60 percent of PRI voters, 45 percent of PRD voters, 60 percent of Green Voters, and 53 percent of PT and Convergencia voters did as well.

*The explanation mark at the end of the sentence announcing new polls comes courtesy of Boz. It really adds spice.

Terrorism?

Twelve dead bodies were dumped along a highway in Michoacán, presumably more retaliation for the arrest of a capo from La Familia. No word on whether the people were killed merely to prove a point, or if they were connected to the source of information that led to Arnaldo Rueda's arrest.

Update: The bodies were those of Federal Police officers.

Admission of Failure

The Mexican army will be withdrawing from street patrols in Juárez, having concluded that despite some encouraging results early on, the operation was a failure. The army will remain in Juárez, but focused more on intelligence and police work than patrols.

Silly Argument

Trolling for Gold Cup commentary, I ran into this piece (via Beautiful Horizons) that attributes Rafa Márquez's dirty number on Tim Howard in the February qualifier to machismo. This is a parody of stereotype; I can't imagine anyone being offended by something so silly.

The author defines machismo as, "supreme valuation of characteristics culturally associated with the masculine, stressing attributes such as physical courage, virility, domination and aggressiveness", as well as the inability to weigh the future consequences of an action. Is there a non-artistic sport on the planet that doesn't value the bolded characteristics? Márquez's problem isn't machismo; it's letting competitiveness translate into dirty play, which is something that has always hounded athletes around the globe, from Zinedine Zidane to Bruce Bowen to Joel Casamayor to Rodney Harrison to Andrew Golota. Or put another way: if Márquez has a problem with machismo, every athlete who's taken a cheap shot a few times does as well.

AMLO in 2012?

David Agren, who knows a great deal about this sort of thing, commented that any hype surrounding an AMLO presidential run is probably a bit fantastical, and certainly premature. A couple of articles in today's papers concur: here's Ruth Zavaleta saying that neither Ortega nor AMLO offer a path into the future for the PRD, and here's El Universal with a post-op of the DF elections concluding that AMLO and Ortega were the two big losers, and that Ebrard came out stronger.

Popularity

Today's Excélsior offered another installment of its periodic popularity polling, squeezed as always into a graphic called the Populómetro. The top scorer this time was Enrique Peña Nieto, who was recognized by 86 percent of those polled, and viewed as having a good or very good reputation by 70 percent. Calderón followed, with 99 percent recognition and a 64 percent good/very good mark. Ebrard, Paredes, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, and Josefina Vázquez rounded out the top six. At the bottom of the list of thirteen were AMLO and Juanito, a.k.a. Rafael Acosta.

Two Arrests

During one of the many attacks in retaliation for the arrest of La Familia capo Arnaldo Rueda Medina, two gunmen were arrested for firing on Federal Police in Lázaro Cárdenas. And the other fifty or so who participated in the attacks?

Check out this graphic of La Familia's hierarchy, which shows Rueda as being just below the highest level of leadership in the group.

Questions from July 5th

I wrote a bunch of them down.

US Opposition

The US is opposed to José Miguel Insulza's reelection at the head of the OAS. The above article makes it sound as though the opposition stems from his perceived closeness with Chávez. I remember reading a criticism of Insulza that he was using the OAS to campaign for the presidency of Chile, which seems like a much more valid reason to dump him. The article also mentions his ineffectual response to the Zelaya coup, with Arias playing the role that should arguably be his. But the accusations from right-wing think tanks that he laid down before Chávez on Honduras are silly. Everyone was on the same side of this issue, from Chávez to Lula to Uribe to Calderón to Obama, with the exception of the coup authors, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and a handful of the think-tankers referenced above.

López Obrador in 2012

Thanks in large part to his success in Iztapalapa, speculation about López Obrador's presidential potential has surged in recent days. Here he is talking about a "date with history" in 2012, and he was on the cover of the most recent Newsweek en Español as well. The lengthy article and interview inside offer all the evidence of the futility of a López Obrador run. AMLO gave one rather smooth answer that called to mind his best moments on the campaign three years ago (he turned a Chávez-or-Lula question into a brief celebration of FDR, which he did a lot in '06), and spent more time talking about poverty than I remember him doing in a long time. But he spent a good portion of the interview railing against "the mafia", saying that Calderón was barely qualified to be a magistrate (no offense to magistrates), and talking about violence. From an electability standpoint, it doesn't really matter that he was talking about the absence of violence in his movement; the salient issue is that violence appears at all in his rhetoric. After all, no one would think to ask Peña Nieto, Paredes, Vázquez, or Ebrard about the potential of violence among their supporters. Taken as a whole, Mexicans who read this interview (which unfortunately is unavailable online) could be forgiven for wondering if a future with AMLO is one of bitterness and upheaval. And it wasn't the interviewers; they weren't exclusively soft-ballers, but they seemed to sympathize with AMLO and I only counted a single question that was combative.

In other words, in 2006 AMLO's rhetoric was about one six-thousandth as heated as it is today, and Mexico had no idea that he was capable of camping out along Paseo de la Reforma for several weeks, and even then concern about his tropical messiah complex kept him from the presidency. It's hard to imagine that since then he has earned an army of new followers, and he almost certainly lost the lion's share of his moderate supporters. The only impact of an AMLO candidacy would seem to be as a spoiler.

Odd Historical Fact

According to a new article in Nexos, Adolfo López Mateos, Mexico's president from 1958 to 1964, was born in Guatemala. This would have made his candidacy unconstitutional, but I'm not sure what it means today, more than half a century after he was elected.

Gatti Gone

Arturo Gatti is dead at 37, presumably murdered. What a tragedy.

As to Gatti's boxing legacy, he was the most consistently exciting fighter I've ever seen. Unlike a lot of brawlers, Gatti had an aesthetically attractive style. He threw nice combinations, had a sweet left hook, and almost never clinched. Watch Ricky Hatton after a Gatti fight for an illustration of the latter's singularity. He probably could have won some of the fights that he lost had he adopted a more cautious style, but he correctly realized that more than any sport, boxing isn't just about winning, it's about entertaining. I write this with one eye on the rather boring opening rounds of the DeMarco-Adjaho fight, presently in the midst of an extended feeling-out process of the sort that never lasted more than ten seconds or so in a Gatti fight. I think that is the highest tribute a fight fan could pay him.

Let's have another look at the famous round 9 of Ward-Gatti I. The finale of Corrales-Castillo is the only comparable frame I've ever seen.

Attacks

A series of attacks on Federal Police outposts across Michoacán and Guerrero has left somewhere from five to eight people dead and several more injured. The possible reason: a high-ranking member of La Familia was arrested last night. 

Knocking Obama on Honduras

Jamie Kirchick has a video up on TNRtv knocking Obama for his reaction to the Honduras coup, calling for a more "moderate" stance based on the idea that in today's Latin America, authoritarians are more of a problem than coups. The theory that the best way to combat authoritarianism is to look the other way on coups is, to put it charitably, novel. The last century in Latin America has demonstrated a relationship between coups and authoritarians roughly analogous to boxing and black eyes. The fact that authoritarians are more of a problem today than coups is an unquestionable improvement over the dark past in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, et cetera, when coups and authoritarian regimes infinitely worse than today's were commonplace. The replacement of the sadism of the Argentine Junta and Pinochet with Chávez's soft authoritarianism as the region's biggest threat is progress, which comes in large part from the absense of anti-democratic coups. But if what you seek is a regression to the Latin America of the '60s and '70s, by all means support the Zelaya coup, and support any coup that claims to push back against authoritarians.

I also find his choice of the word "moderate" rather odd; Obama officials didn't immediate call it a coup, they didn't let their rhetoric get ahead of the facts, they didn't respond in kind to the provocation of one of the coup leaders referring to Obama as a "negrito", and they have been squarely within the mainstream of world response. Via Boz, whose coverage of Honduras has been great, here's a recent comment from the president himself on Honduras:

America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front. Even as we meet here today, America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies. We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not.

That all seems to be pretty moderate to me. Of course, Kirchick doesn't define what a moderate reaction would be. Indeed, he even says that the US shouldn't support the interim government, which has me scratching my head as to what he would actually want done differently. Perhaps he wants the media to recognize that Zelaya was a bad leader? I'd say they have done so from the very beginning, but that on balance, most analysts say that a coup is the worst of the two evils.

You get the feeling his complaint is motivated by a general desire to be more hawkish than the American left, as well as to oppose Chávez at every turn. But how would American interests be advanced by equivocating in our treatment of a government recognized as illegitimate by everyone on the planet? Clearly we would sacrifice our prestige with such a policy, a la Venezuela 2002, which in certain circumstances could perhaps be justified, but what would we get in exchange? And what would Kirchick say if a couple of weeks before the vote for a third Álvaro Uribe term, the Colombian leader was hustled off to Miami at gunpoint by military leaders protesting authoritarianism?

Explanations

Macario Schettino offered a few points in his explanation of the PAN's loss: First, the party's tent has three powerful groups who interests don't always align: economic and political liberals (in the Latin American rather than the US sense of the word), Catholic conservatives, and business groups, which previously supported the PRI but began to switch in the 1980s. Second, needing to a create a government that satisfied two of these groups and in search of legislative agreements, Calderón (a liberal) compromised on his convictions and undermined any attempt for his PAN to formulate a coherent vision for Mexico. That, in turn, made the PAN largely indistinguishable from the PRI, and more susceptible to a negative vote with circumstances aligned against it. (I'd also add that it had the unfortunate impact of allowing religious conservatives to think that Calderón's flaw was in giving them the cold shoulder, and that all of Mexico is eagerly awaiting for "Guanajuatization".)

That all makes sense, but I'm also not sure Calderón standing on principle would have made him more successful this past Sunday. If he'd been less accommodating and had pushed just one reform package through congress, Calderón would have been subject the charge of, The economy is sinking and your president can't do anything about it. Really, (and Schettino has made this point before, I believe) as long as there are three parties and none of them are aligned under a coherent majority-held agenda, the president is going to have his hands tied. It's a tricky pickle.

José Luis Calva laid into Calderón for his government's response to the crisis. In response to the claim that the crisis came from abroad, Calva points out that exports add up to only 13 percent of the GDP. Calva also says that the US has spent 5.6 percent of its GDP in its response to the crisis and will shrink about 2.7 percent this year, while Mexico has only invested 0.8 percent of its GDP in crisis response, and is expected to shrink by about 8 percent. I think this at least partially disingenuous. Dealing with his second point first, the US spent hundreds of billions to prop up banks, but in Mexico the banks are in good shape, so there was no need to spend that cash on a Mexican TARP. I've read nothing about why Mexico is contracting so much relative to the US, but I find it virtually impossible to believe that it can be laid entirely at the feet of the governmental response. Calva doesn't give us any explanation beyond the statistic itself, which is telling. Hey, look, unemployment in the US is almost twice as high as it is in Mexico; should we conclude that the US would have been better off with a stimulus closer in size to that of Mexico?

As far as his first point, 13 percent is actually a pretty big chunk of the economy. If 13 percent of your economy declines by half, you're looking at a huge recession. And that's before you get into the further impact on internal consumption of export industries, i.e. the Mexican trucks that deliver stuff to maquiladoras, the extra money that factory operators spend on shoes for their family, et cetera, et cetera. Additionally, to dumb the impact of a worldwide crisis down to exports alone, and to conclude that any further impact must have an internal cause, is willfully misleading. Mexico faces a fiscal disaster because the crisis undercut oil prices. Remittances are plummeting and rural Mexican towns dependent on them are in danger of collapsing because of the weak American job market. The economy has made life tough on Mexico and Calderón in ways that go well beyond exports.

Nothing Interesting to Say

As the post's title might indicate, I don't have anything interesting to say about the anti-kidnapping crusader from Chihuahua who was murdered earlier this week, other than the obvious: sad story from a place overflowing with them. But in the interest of keeping you updated, according to the PGR the murder was committed by a paramilitary group, while state officials say it was committed by the street gang La Linea, which is affiliated with Vicente Carrillo's organization. Richard's got another theory.

Update: Richard elaborates:

The killers probably were from this gang (though, as in Michoacan, the first suspects are usually just whomever the coppers picked up first) but my speculations on the LeBaron community were more that -- as very odd outsiders, and a very closed-in community -- they've probably made more than their share of enemies for any number of reasons.

Full Slate

We have lots of decent scraps on tap this weekend, starting with Vic Darchinyan versus Joseph Agbeko for a bantamweight title. I've never been enamored with Darchinyan as a fighter (though he's an all-time great as a trash-talker), and awkward bludgeoners always seem to have a hard time being effective when they move up in weight (think Ricardo Mayorga). I remain convinced that a smooth boxer with fast hands and pop will be more than Darchinyan, iced by just such a boxer in Nonito Donaire at 112, can handle at 118 pounds. However, I'm not sure Agbeko is that guy. I've only seen him once, but in that fight he went life or death against William González, who isn't in Darchinyan's league. I don't know, I'm flipping a coin. It's up... and it's tails! So which fighter is tails then? Screw it, I'm going with Agbeko by late knockout.

On the undercard, I like Antonio Demarco (a fighter to keep an eye on) by late knockout over Anges Adjaho, and Steve Cunningham over Wayne Brathwaite by knockout in a battle of former cruiserweight champs looking to get another crack at a belt.

The cruiserweight champ against whom they both want that crack is also in action: I like Tomasz Adamek by knockout over Bobby Gunn. In a featherweight title fight from Chiapas, I'll take Jorge Solís over Cristóbal Cruz by decision. In tonight's semi-main event (which should be the main event) on ESPN, I like Chris Henry by decision over Shaun George in a history-making battle of guys with first names for last names. And that's not the only trail-blazing matchup of surnames this weekend: in the first installement of N'Dou versus NDou, I'll take Lovemore over Phillip by decision.