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"According to information supplied by members of the military high command in 1994, President Salinas already had given orders for a massive military move into Chiapas to root out and destroy the insurgents, but was dissuaded by the United States Embassy and some of his own governmental advisors because Subcomandante Marcos had become a charismatic figure worldwide and Mexico could not afford the negative publicity that crushing the movement would create. Therefore Salinas and the federal government determined to isolate and contain this ‘infectious disease’ and curtail popular protests and other indications of allegiance and support that might arise."
—Rodolfo Miguel The same sources asserted that the United States School of the Americas, which taught anti-insurgency tactics to the militaries of numerous Latin American countries, tutored Salinas’ forces in low intensity warfare to replace the all-out assault that Salinas had desired. They equipped paramilitary groups that harassed Zapatista communities, burned crops, and apprehended residents for supposed offenses such as theft, assault, and destruction of public property. Using the pretext of drug searches, military incursions evicted householders, destroyed food and water supplies, and manhandled and sometimes sequestered residents. The depredations have continued for over seventeen years. Despite Mexico’s severe economic problems, the takeover of much of northern Mexico by drug corporations, and rampant corruption, Mexico’s federal government has maintained an active duty force of several thousand armed troops and supplied well-equipped private "armies" like the Ejército de Dios, a militant arm of the Iglesias Cristianos Evangélicos, with weapons, training, and the impunity to harass, assault, and burn to prevent the infectious disease from spreading past the quarantine to which the government has subjected the Zapatistas. This model of repression isn’t confined to Chiapas. Military incursions also repress popular movements in the Estado de Mexico, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Soldiers, militarized federal police, and paramilitaries arrest, torture, steal, and rape with impunity. I have witnessed their criminality. I had just returned to my house on a hill perched above the city of Oaxaca’s central district on November 25, 2006 when I heard gunshots. Then shouts and sirens. The angry percussion of low flying helicopters. I threw a jacket over my shoulders and scrambled past shops and houses towards an intersection from which I could get a clearer look at what was happening. Except for distant outskirts, the city was totally dark. A sea of undulating black obscured stars and the moon. As I crossed the intersection, I saw flames flare upwards from burning buildings and heard what I thought were more gunshots. Phantoms that turned out to be people running towards me shouted warnings in Spanish that I couldn’t decipher until hands grabbed my shoulders, spinning me around, and a face close to mine bleated, "They’re kill-killing everyone! Everyone!" As it did I felt a sudden burning in my lungs: Teargas! Flashed remembrances of military experiences. Cautiously I edged along the sidewalk, keeping close to building fronts. I could hear the shouted pleas of women, incoherent screamed commands, glass shattering. My eyes and lungs burned; I tried to cover my mouth with a handkerchief but the teargas made it impossible to see anything clearly. Around me as I joined scores of people in retreat I heard questions, denouncements, curses. Soldiers…police…surrounded…beatings…snipers… No one seemed to know exactly what had happened. Just that after a protest march had ended, heavily armed and gas-masked soldiers and militarized federal police had swept through the center of the city beating and arresting everyone they could get their hands on. A lawyer whom I encountered the following week confided that an administration official had answered his complaint that virtually all of the 141 people who’d been arrested and sent to federal prisons for "sedition" and other offenses were innocent of any wrongdoing, even of participating in the protest march: "All the better. It will make the rest of the people more afraid." Less than a month after the assault, I participated in the first human rights delegation to interview members of the Popular Assembly that had initiated the protest march. Although various witnesses told us they’d seen persons who’d been hit by pistol or rifle fire, we could not verify any gunshot wounds or mortalities. Nevertheless, we corroborated twenty-three deaths at the hands of paramilitaries and non-uniformed police, including the slaying of American video cameraman Bradley Will, during the months preceding the armed assault. Will was filming an attack on a defensive barricade set up by Popular Assembly members and supporters in the Oaxaca suburb of Santa Lucía del Camino on October 30, less than four weeks before the November 25 purge. U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza tepidly admonished the Mexican government and asked that the crime be investigated; Will’s parents and a number of his friends and Indymedia associates formed an NGO to pressure U.S. governmental sources and media to insist that Mexican authorities resolve the assassination. It took over a year for the "exhaustive investigation" to discount Will’s videos of armed attackers charging towards him and incriminate Juan Manuel Martínez, one of his companions at the barricade. To eliminate testimony that could have vindicated Martínez, state prosecutors charged all of those who had been at the barricade with being accessories to the crime, thus nullifying any testimony they might have given. Efforts by Will’s supporters in the United States to reopen the investigations and drop the charges against Martínez muddied the waters. Their insistence that the crime was premeditated and the shooters singled Will out because he had actively supported the strikers and filmed incidents and interviews criticizing the repressive state government overlooked or ignored that Will was only one of three killed and that four Mexican journalists and more than a dozen other barricadistas were wounded by gunfire during paramilitary assaults that day. A few months after Will’s murder—and before Martínez was arrested—a Oaxacan who’d helped man the Santa Lucía barricade and I inspected the place Will had been shot. Photographs published the day following his death showed three armed attackers, all identified as current or former Santa Lucía police, charging along the rutted street, weapons raised. Obviously they had no concerns about return fire for they were fully exposed; it’s extremely unlikely that anyone at the barricade was armed. Witnesses confirmed at the time that the assailants had been drinking. Traversing the rough asphalt at a slow trot, hand upraised as though wielding a weapon, I tried to focus on my companion who was standing approximately where Will had stood. From my military experience I knew how difficult it was to hit anything with a .38 while one is running. (I found it difficult to hit anything, period!) The bullet ricocheted; others at the barricade were wounded; if Will’s murder was premeditated it was part of a general plan to assault and kill, not to target the American journalist. But all that was wafted aside in the drive to exonerate Martínez and indict the real killer(s). Mexico’s Supreme Court eventually ruled the charges against Martínez lacked sufficient evidence and he was released from prison. Six years later the crime remained unresolved. But Martinez’s conviction and the disputes it generated deflected attention from the overall repression that existed throughout Mexico. That the Zapatista movement has resisted being co-opted and continues to function as a viable entity reflects its tightly organized origins and singularity of purpose. The small coterie around which the movement formed began recruiting and training ten years before they had emerged as an anti-governmental force (unlike Mexico City student strikers in 1999 or the Popular Assembly in Oaxaca in 2006). Although those movements attracted enthusiastic support, they each lacked the core organizational structure that enabled the Zapatistas to stand up against governmental pressure. Tacitly, if not actively, the government of the United States has supported repressions of dissent. Zapatista spokespersons, principally Subcomandante Marcos, openly opposed capitalism, thus making them (by capitalistic definition) "subversive" and "leftist." The obsession with curtailing social protest, typical in totalitarian governments, might seem out of place in what ostensibly is a democratic country. But Mexico’s "democracy" retains many elements of its centuries-long authoritarian origins. The Spanish kings awarded hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of territory to relatives and supporters despite claims of ownership by indigena groups. Even after Mexico gained its independence in 1810, the hacendero system of royalty-like elite and dependent workers and campesinos continued. In 1910 nearly 90 percent of Mexico’s approximately 16 million inhabitants were illiterate and a few dozen families controlled over 90 percent of the country’s wealth. The Constitution of 1917 invested the bulk of power and authority in the executive (the president and in the states the governor), relegating elected assemblies and the judiciary to subservient roles. It included no provisions for citizen recall of governors or the president and granted the executive the power to appoint judges and to control finances. Once elected an executive does whatever he or she pleases, including fortifying his or her party’s hold on the government and repressing dissent. The police and the military have been the primary tools for exercising executive authority, backed by government-paid paramilitaries and/or porros (political gang members). Not only have these porrossubverted legitimate union activities but they have infiltrated student and popular movements and instigated participants to vandalism and criminal attacks that prompted armed police and the military to repress under the guise of restoring law and order. In Acteal: crimen de estado, journalist Hermann Bellinghausen asserts that Mexico’s federal government planned and carried out—through paid mercenaries—the murder of forty-five Zapatistas, almost all of whom were women and children, at Acteal, Chiapas in December 1997 as part of a deliberate repression of political dissent. "Here (in Mexico) there is no punishment…for crimes committed by the government…instead the guilty are rewarded," Bellinghausen insisted in a newspaper interview. Immediately after news of the Acteal massacre spread worldwide, Mexico’s federal government attributed the killings to "religious and tribal disagreements" just as it had attributed the slayings of community radio broadcasters in Oaxaca and dissident campesinos at Aguas Blancas in Guerrero to land disputes between rival communities. By officially attributing politically involved slayings to socio-religious confrontations or regional land disputes, the federal government is able to dismiss them as "local concerns" which have nothing to do with government repression. Even when state authorities confirm assaults or intimidations they find ways to derail accusations, as they did when the public prosecutor in Teopisca, Chiapas refused to process charges against three Ejército de Dios members who waylaid and beat a teenaged Zapatista. Despite acknowledging that the assault had occurred, the prosecutor claimed that the teenager lacked proper identification and consequently was not authorized to file charges under Mexican law. Soldiers and armed police, spurred on by porros, overreacted to National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) student strikers in 1968 and attacked and killed a still unconfirmed number of protesters at Tlalcoloco in Mexico City on October 2 of that year. An eyewitness fleeing from the assault told me he saw pistol-wielding police fire tiros de gracia (coups de grace) at protesters who had fallen or were curled in doorways trying to protect themselves. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and his successor, Luis Echeverría, who was Díaz Ordaz’s Government Secretary, were absolved of criminal charges but the protests and their violent aftermath stimulated anti-dissent and anti-public education feelings among the country’s political leadership. The assault by heavily armed military and militarized police in Oaxaca in 2006 broke the back of the People’s Popular Assembly that had emerged after government repression of a teachers’ union strike in June of that same year. A year and a half earlier, in January 2005, armed Oaxacan state police swept into the town of Santiago Xánica and opened fire on a group of more than eighty indigena men, women, and children engaged in a community work project. Members of the Santiago Xánica community had clashed with clear cutters illegally harvesting forest land that the community claimed fell within their jurisdiction. During the skirmish a policeman was killed and over twenty-five indigenas badly wounded and placed under arrest. Mexican law makes no provision for jury trials; a judge determines whether or not the accusations are valid and levies sentences accordingly. The presiding judge sentenced Santiago Xánica community members Abraham Ramírez and two others to prison for homicide, attempted homicide, personal injury, and kidnapping. The judge disregarded evidence that would have vindicated them but did note that all three men were members of the Defensa de los Derechos Indígenas de Santiago Xánica, an organization affiliated with the Magonista Zapatista Alliance, the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca and the "Other Campaign," the Zapatista’s national organization. "That was the real crime," a Santiago Xánica resident told me, "that’s why the police came." In September 2009 federal agents arrested Ramsés Villarreal for participating in bank bombings in Mexico City, claiming they had identified him from photographs taken at the scene of the crime. It later was proved that the photos weren’t of him, but the federal accusations detailed his role on the student strike council during the 1999-2000 UNAM closure, his participating in FARC solidarity against the military incursions by the army in Colombia and in the Zapatista The Other Campaign. The Mexico City newspaper La Cronica de Hoy quoted a federal dossier that linked Villarreal and other former UNAM strikers with discussions about Marxism, opposition to the privatization of the energy industry and the higher educational system, exalting Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and protesting neoliberalism. "The government has made it clear that it plans to take advantage of the bombing investigation in order to spy on and hunt down student and social organizations…(that) are allegedly linked to terrorists," journalist Kristin Bricker insisted in her blog. When citizen protests reach dimensions that the outcry in Ciudad Juárez over drug-related assassinations have done, or that the thousand-mile march from Cuernavaca to the city organized by Javier Sicilia after his son was killed achieved, and the government cannot respond by using repressive force against "lawbreakers," it sponsors "dialogue and negotiation" and assures support, investigations, and legal actions. Publicity photos extol this cooperation, the abrazos and attention to widows and orphans and welcomes citizen participation in the war against crime. Occasionally, as happened after the Tlalcoloco massacre in 1968, it grants concessions to those affronted or victimized. But overall politics don’t change. Seldom are restrictions actually lifted. Seldom are those responsible for the violence sanctioned. Seldom do those protesting achieve any of their goals. Seldom do any concessions lessen the stranglehold on power that those in governing elite cling to. "Social protest," a former federal government official who refused to have his name published for fear of reprisals told me, "is more threatening than the drug corporations to those in power. Those in power can work out deals with the drug corporations. They’re after the same things: money, more money, and much more money. It becomes a contest to see who can corrupt each other the most. "They can´t deal with protesters who want change. Change could destroy what has been built up for over eighty, ninety years. That’s why protests have to be repressed." "So the only way for a protest movement to succeed would be to corrupt those in power?" I asked. He gave me a knowing wink. First published in New Politics, Summer, 2012lic aquí para modificar. |
The Telenovela Called Politics
Despite gruesome massacres, massive poverty that thrusts thousands of jobseekers northward and military confrontations that have made no man’s lands of huge swaths of Mexico’s territory, the country’s outmoded political system creaks along unabated and unchanged, a cumbersome dinosaur oblivious of its twenty-first century surroundings. Mexican journalist Jenaro Villamil accuses political opportunists of presenting a “reality show” that bears no resemblance to reality; factory worker José Renato Barbosa derides the government for staging a puppet show with tangled strings and plots less entertaining than drunken bar talk. By 2009 nearly half of Mexico’s federal budget was devoted to paying salaries and benefits to the country’s bulging bureaucracy. Competition for elective and appointed positions superseded how those holding the offices performed. (Mexican law does not permit reelection; as a consequence both elected and appointed officials begin campaigning for future positions as soon as they are sworn in.) “They [politicians] think to govern is synonymous with to entertain…it’s not important to them that they spend public money to cosmeticize their photo-shop appearance and their political activities with informercials,” Villamil described what he called “the new generation of politicians” in a syndicated article. Until 1988 Mexico’s single-party system remained under the autocratic control of the Partido Revolucionario Instituciónal (PRI). Although founded as a worker-identified and nationalistic political entity after the Mexican Revolution, by 1946 the PRI had become an oligarchy combining business and political interests under a head of state who theoretically was elected but who actually was appointed by his predecessor. The PRI manipulated federal and state elections to give the voters the opportunity to go to the polls but opposition to PRI candidates was slight. Now and then PRI presidents and governors ceded a few benefits to opposition parties from the left and the National Action Party (PAN), which was strongly pro-Catholic, on the right but until 1988 it never encountered serious opposition to its one-party dominance. In 1988 an anti-PRI coalition headed by Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, the son of the country’s most revered post-revolution chief executive, Lázaro Cárdenas, almost toppled the PRI regime in an election that was awarded to the PRI thanks to computer tampering. Plus the PRI-dominated legislature and hundreds of thousands of destroyed ballots. The PAN’s candidate, Manuel Clothier, reacted publicly to the results before Cárdenas did. Four days after the election Clothier called for a national civil disobedience movement that included blocking the international bridges between Mexico and the United States as well as many of the principal highways and boycotting Televisa, the major television outlet whose Jacobo Zabludovsky had broadcast PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s victory before it became official. Six days after Clothier called for a national protest Cárdenas led a Mexico City demonstration. PAN and Cárdenas’ National Democratic Front (FND for its initials in Spanish) tried to force a recount but the Mexican army, apparently under orders from lame duck President Miguel de la Madrid, restricted access to the millions of marked ballots. The PRI dominated House of Deputies ordered to have them burned, thus eliminating any chance for verification of the results. Cardenas refused to challenge the PRI dominated election institute’s decision and the newly elected Salinas de Gortari named several prominent members of PAN to cabinet and administrative posts in exchange for the conservative party’s cooperation with his plans to push the North American Free Trade Agreement and other pet projects through the country’s Senate and House of Deputies. An incumbent party in Mexico has a great advantage over its opposition because it can use government employees, including the police, to coax, bribe and strong arm its quest to stay in power. PRI functionaries routinely hustle bags of cement, edibles and other “inducements” to rural communities to assure that they vote correctly. If they don’t they received nothing from government programs during the years that follow. Theoretically such inducements are illegal and trigger confrontations between the PRI and opposition parties but as Guadalupe Loaeza points out in La Comedia Electoral all of Mexico’s political parties engage in similar practices. One of the first things Loaeza was asked as she was putting together her Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) campaign to run for the House of Deputies from the Federal District was “how much can you spend for each vote?” Although PRI candidates Francisco Labastida in 2000 and Roberto Madrazo in 2006 lost presidential elections to PAN opponents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, PRI governor candidates won elections in the majority of Mexico’s thirty-two states and a plurality of seats in the national Senate and House of Deputies. The party also controlled most state legislatures, enabling them to authorize expenditures for a variety of programs (agriculture, school and highway construction, health services, etc.) that they often failed to fully fund. The money that wasn’t spent wound up in a caja chica (“little cash box”) to be used for keeping their party’s candidates in office. Governors like Ulisés Ruiz in Oaxaca (2004-2010) controlled rubber stamp legislatures, the judiciary and state finances. Mexican law makes no provisions for recall; once an individual is elected he or she has free rein to award (or sell) construction contracts, appoint administrators and judges and divert funds intended for social services into personal bank accounts. A governor’s access to wealth virtually is unlimited and the wealth is shared with the political organization that ushers him or her into office. Elections in Mexico, like in the United States and most other countries, cost money. Lots of money. By law contributions to Mexican political campaigns from non-governmental sources are strictly limited; the federal government allots funds to individual political parties for campaign purposes. Like many well-intentioned laws this one doesn’t work in practice the way it was designed to function in theory. Half a dozen smaller political parties scramble to achieve the 2 percent of the popular vote necessary to qualify for federal funding while the major parties—PRI, PAN and the fragmented remains of the PRD—invest heavily in propaganda, salaries and suborning regional caciques. Once funding is approved by the federal legislature these parties—major and minor—spend the money as they choose with minimal restrictions and only rudimentary accounting of expenditures. “Un político pobre es un pobre político” (“a financially poor politician is a poor practitioner of politics”), a phrase attributed both to ex-president José López Portillo and long-time political operative Carlos Hank-González, is the guiding principle in Mexican politics. Although both appointees and regularly elected federal lawmakers show up now and then in the areas they represent the majority of them live in the Federal District when they’re not vacationing in Cancun, Miami or Europe. Openly disputed primary elections often are shunted aside and national and state party bosses “dedazo” (“finger”) candidates of their choosing. As a consequence, an officeholder-candidate needs to ingratiate himself or herself to those making the dedazos. Politicians holding elective or appointed offices continue to be mapaches for other offices and only peripherally have time for committee meetings or other legislative activities. (Mapaches—“raccoons”—are political operatives who hustle votes for upcoming elections using whatever means they find effective. Those able to bring in winners are rewarded by being named to high-paying government positions.) Some mapaches, like Ulisés Ruiz in Oaxaca, rise through successive offices and become governors. (And become extremely wealthy along the way.) In the 1970s, in the name of “democracy,” the PRI responded to outside criticism and amended Mexico’s constitution to include supplemental delegates and senators in the federal and state congresses based on the percentage of vote that each party received. These appointees became safe seats since those filling them did not have to run for election but were selected by the party hierarchy. This enabled party leaders to reward loyal operatives (often ex-governors, party officials and relatives of one or the other) by naming them to legislative positions. Virtually all committee heads in both the federal Senate and House of Deputies are appointees, not representatives who were chosen in popular elections. The constant turnover and non-stop electioneering creates an intense, almost hermetic competition—like that of a fantasy sports league where participants close out the real world to concentrate on the details of fantasy team competition. Public reaction to this hermeticism varies from accepting and ignoring the self-serving coterie to demonstrating against it by blocking highways, calling for work stoppages and taking over government buildings. Non-traditional political movements, among them defeated presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s peregrinations to “every city and town in Mexico” to stimulate a grassroots movement, wedge their way into voter consciousness but lack the publicity, the “punch,” that candidate competition gives newspaper headlines and television talk shows. During the 2009 mid-term elections for Senators and Congressmen a number of Mexican academics and intellectuals, among them award-winning authors Lorenzo Meyer and Sergio Aguayo-Quezada, advocated a “voto nulo”—the casting of blank or mutilated ballots—theorizing that the casting of a million or more of them would force politicians to respond more closely to their constituencies. Unfortunately Mexican academics and intellectuals (like their counterparts in many other countries, including the United States) base their theories on ideals and logic, not mapache reality. PRI mapaches encouraged voto nulo balloting in areas that previously had supported opposition parties. The more than a million voto nulos, most of which would have gone to non-PRI candidates, increased the PRI’s winning margins in a low participation election. Party leaders celebrated by pushing increased disbursements to PRI governors through the federal Congress—funds that the governors used to support PRI candidates in 2012. Since the executive controlled the budgetary process he or she could aware no-bid contracts or designate excessive amounts, part of which the supposed recipient never received. Instead it went into the executive´s caja chica. This set up a domino effect where the contractor’s accounts would show excessive payments to suppliers and/or subcontractors whose books would show similar overages paid for raw materials, labor or expenses with each participating business or agency skimming the differences between what the books showed and what actually was paid out. For a price—often a very high price—a governor can grant land and business concessions, manage a state’s finances without being audited, appoint judges and department heads and construct a network of acolytes to funnel everything from parking meter collections to drug cartel quotas through his hands. Corruption, whether benevolent or cruel, becomes the order of the day. Where mapache and “karaoke politics” fails to entice voters, PRI operatives co-opt opposition challenges by infiltrating their membership and forging secret agreements. (“Karaoke politics” is a description that Villamil gives to party functionaries who sing the “canto de jefe”—chieftain’s song—during public appearances but who do most of their politicking debajo del agua “under the water,” i.e. surreptitiously.) Although the PRI bears the term “revolutionary” in its official party name it is rigidly authoritarian, conservative and elitist. Once “the party for everybody” that incorporated both conservative and liberal aspects it became increasingly dinosaurian as liberal adherents defected. After the 1988 election scare President Carlos Salinas de Gortari replaced the newly elected PRI governor of Guanajuato with PAN’s Carlos Medina-Plascencia in a maneuver designed to bring the PRI and PAN closer together and thwart challenges from the newly formed PRD, the former FND which Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had represented during the 1988 election campaign. Assertions that Salinas and the PRI orchestrated PAN’s rise to the presidency in 2000 lack documentary proof but many political scientists and journalists in the country assert that the two parties collaborated to push the country further to the right in order to prevent the more liberal PRD from gaining power. Adhering to the age-old doctrine of “divide and conquer” the PRI helped finance newly forming liberal parties to qualify for federal funding, knowing that the support they garnered would take votes away from the PRD and increase the PRI-PAN majorities. After the 2006 national presidential elections, apparently won by the PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador but rewarded to PAN’s Felipe Calderón despite assertions of fraud reminiscent of Salinas de Gortari’s 1988 “victory” in 1988, PRI and PAN operatives convinced a number of PRD leaders to form a dissident movement to diminish López Obrador’s popularity. In 2007 the federal election board, controlled by PRI and PAN appointees, threw out the results of a tumultuous PRD election marred by multiple irregularities and ordered it to establish a second—and more disciplined—process to choose their party president. Dissident Jesús Ortega won and thousands of PRD stalwarts bolted to other minority parties, effectively shattering liberal opposition to PRI-PAN control of federal policymaking. Although voto nulo voting did not promulgate political reforms or prompt those in power to be more responsive to public sentiment the million-plus mutilated and blank ballots cast during the 2009 midterm elections (and the high percentage of those eligible to vote who did not) revealed how negatively the voting public regarded the nation’s politicians. “I won’t vote for any professional politician,” asserted Proceso magazine columnist Sabina Berman when she was approached by an election official. “The professional politicians ought to find out that we’re not cabbage heads, Teflon skillets, amnesiacs.” Berman rejected the frequently cited PRI mantra Shoes are for shoemakers, politics for professionals by insisting that politics belonged to the people, not to professional politicians. In Juan Carlos Rulfo’s documentary Los que se quedan a returned indocumentado accuses the president of Mexico of lying 80 percent of the time, then shrugs, “But I don’t blame him. That’s his job…” as though lying 80 percent of the time is a preexistent state of affairs. The PRI’s 2009 mid-term congressional and gubernatorial elections catapulted the dinosaur back into control of Mexican politics. With López Obrador shunted aside as an opposition leader and the voting public dismayed at President Felipe Calderón’s inability to regulate business, improve the economy and control crime the PRI steamrollered its way into control of Congress, a majority of governorships and public acknowledgment that its candidate, governor Enrique Peña Nieto of the Estado de Mexico, would become the country’s president in 2012. Mapache and karaoke “have converted politics into a bad reality show, Villamil complains, “and threaten to transform elections into a badly produced performance by telegenic figureheads.” The end justifies the means even though, in the words of former PAN Congressman Jesús González-Schmal “on the road there principles, independence, dignity and the nation itself are scattered to the four winds.” What will mapache politics bring to the reestablished PRI sexenio? The same bright smiles, pretty wives and complete disregard of everything except the quest for power? Or an even worse telenovela reality show? First published in Southern Pacific Review.
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