Two Years After The Return Of The PRI
Our southern neighbor of 120 million and 4th largest economy in the Americas has ended the second year of the return of its dominant political party of the 20th Century, the PRI. The PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) came out of the Mexican Revolution of the second decade of the 20th century and functioned much as similar authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union and China. There were elections but the Party chose the candidates and competing parties served as “stick figures” to promote the appearance of genuine elections and competing parties.
However by the 1970’s there began an awakening in Mexico to a world beyond its borders. This was especially true for Mexico City, geographically in the center of the country, and isolated from borders. The awakening came from travel and electronic media and especially was sparked by comparisons to Western Europe and the United States. The population was moving in Mexico from rural homesteads to the urban areas with Mexico City growing from a million in the 30’s to over 20 million by the 1970’s. Mexican leadership was recognizing that an urban Mexico would need factory jobs and eagerly responded to the overtures from George H.B. Bush and William Clinton to join the U.S. in a North American common market. Essentially the three countries watching Europe and Japan saw an opportunity to harness the raw materials of Canada, the educated labor of the United States and the young low wage labor of Mexico in an economic combine. Bush and Clinton promoted the idea of a “service economy” with the American workforce providing services and factory manufacturing being moved to Mexico. The wage differential was immense such as in electronics where hourly wages were 25 dollars to Mexico where daily wages were 3 dollars.
As Mexicans moved to the cities they spurred consumer markets for food, clothing, cars and apartments and homes. These consumer tastes were more accelerated in northern Mexican cities like Monterrey, Juarez, Reynosa, Veracruz where visits to the United States were common as were American media. The new consumer tastes included more equality for women, class mobility and competitive alternatives in politics. The politics were reflected in genuine electoral contests at the city and state levels and the more conservative National Action Party (PAN) won municipal elections in the north as more socialist parties won elections in rural farming communities of the south. These forces culminated in 2000 with the first Presidential election since the 1930’s of a President that was not a PRI candidate. The successful party was the PAN and one more closely allied with the North American Free Trade Agreement of Bush and Clinton. That President Vicente Fox was followed by a second successful PAN candidate, Felipe Calderon. Calderon implemented many of the NAFTA accords with Obama and Harper of Canada.
Calderon was more of a progressive activist than Fox and sought to respond to concerns in the north of Mexico for more honest and transparent governments. Ultimately this meant taking on municipal power structures in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros. But these cities, long part of the PRI structure, were also involved in issuing franchises to local crime organizations that would traffic in drugs and people across to the American side. These were valuable properties, plazas, that adjoined the border on the major streets and highways in these border cities. Local governments rather than let warring gangs fight for the plazas would award them to the high bidder. In some cases local municipal police were serve as the enforcer if another gang tried to muscle in.
Calderon seeing that the local PRI and the gangs—as they consolidated and grew in power and size were termed cartels—were in partnership brought in Federal police and both the Army and the Navy’s Marines to break the police-cartel alliances. This ushered in 6 years of open bloody conflict and in one major city-plaza- Juarez resulted in 2010 of about 100 murders daily!
With the election of Enrique Peña Nieto to the Presidency in July of 2012, the PRI returned to power. Pena promised honest government and less violence. Violence may or may not have declined but reporting did. Following the precedence of Mexico’s past, murders went unsolved but once again unreported. After two years international pressure created movement to remove Mexico’s most notorious Cartel boss Joaquin Guzman but in less than a year, he walked out of Mexico’s highest security prison even as the United States pressed to extradite him to face American charges. Now just two years after the inauguration of the PRI, cracks are appearing in the newly restored peaceful face of Mexico. Signs such as the torture and killing of members of the press even in what is thought to be a safe enclave of Mexico City and Cartel attacks becoming visible in the North as competition for the control of plazas along the American border heighten.
Mexico News Photographer Found Slain in Capital
MEXICO CITY — A photographer for the Mexican investigative magazine Proceso, who had fled his home state after being harassed, was among five people found slain early Saturday in an apartment in Mexico City, according to the magazine.
The body of Ruben Espinosa, who collaborated with Proceso and other media, was identified by a family member at the morgue Saturday afternoon, Proceso reported, adding that he had two gunshot wounds.
Espinosa had recently gone into self-exile from the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, where he felt under threat, according to Proceso.
Eight family members decapitated in north Mexico
Ciudad Juarez (Mexico) (AFP) – Eight people from the same family, including two minors, were kidnapped by masked gunmen and their decapitated bodies were found days later in northern Mexico, authorities said Wednesday.
The bodies were found after a ninth member of the Martinez family escaped Sunday’s abduction near Casa Quemada, in the state of Chihuahua, and alerted the authorities, prosecutors said.
The disappearance triggered a massive military operation in the region and the bodies were found this week.
