Amid a challenging week for Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, as a salto of critical reports crowded media headlines here and internationally, there was a conversation between two Mexican newsmen that was refreshing. Veteran Mexican newsmen, they well knew what they were talking about. Meaning that they had face-to-face experience with the history of Peña Nieto’s political and personal life, and of the aromatic history of his political party, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). And because they are experienced political investigators, they clearly recognized the often veiled nuances of political malfeasance, no matter how distractingly adorned. Yet they had some rather differing opinions.
One of them, John M. Ackerman, is a professor at the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a visiting scholar at the American University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Mexican Law Review and a columnist for La Jornada newspaper and Proceso magazine. The other is Sergio Aguayo. Born in Jalisco, he a member of the National System of Mexican Researchers, a researcher at the Colegio de Mexico, a well-respected columnist for Mexico City daily Reforma, among other newspapers. He also is an analyst for a television program dissecting political matters on the Instituto Politecnico Nacional’s XEIPN, Channel ll.
This past week, and, especially May 1, Mexico’s labor day, media mavins were declaring the events of the last several days as Peña Nieto’s “biggest political crisis of his presidency.” Yet he’d only been in office five months. Allegations of vote buying by members of his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) possessed the potential to derail his “Pact of Mexico” – a plan to radically change the country’s economy. The Pact has 95 objectives, and the president began with the overhaul of education, the one reform he and many others believed would pass Congress easily by stirring little, if any, public ire – except among those teachers loyal to the teacher’s union extravagant and ruthlessly powerful jefa Esther Elba Gordillo. Shrewdly, Peña Nieto ordered her arrest right after the law was passed at the end of February.The trouble came from a group he hadn’t taken into account: the modest-sized anti-Gordillo, “democratic” or “radical” wing of the union, which is particularly strong in southern states such as Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas and Michoacan. The striking teachers are part of the civil society that the president forgot to consult. They now have been joined, surprisingly, by a number students and local cadres of vigilantes. These home-guard voluntary groups guard villages and patrol local roads and extensions of federal highways which bring, they say, catelistas, and other criminals who prey on the poor, small merchants and others left unprotected by government law enforcement agencies.
The demonstrators want a better educational system, said John Ackerman, admitting that he was looking at the optimistic side of the strike. Teachers want to participate in the reform. They want it to be a substantive teaching change, not just a government campaign against teachers. This strike may wake the president up to paying more attention to the street.
According to both men, it was what Aguayo called an obvious “conspiracy” to steal July’s election in Veracruz that could be the president’s biggest headache. The proof, Aguayo lamented, was “massive.” For it was compounded, he pointed out, when Peña Nieto did not dismiss the organizer of the plot, but told Rosario Robles, the minister for Social Welfare, that “everything would be all right,” that it “would blow over.” But Aguayo said, there was so much sad and irrefutable proof that it gave dramatic lie to Peña Nieto’s claim that he was bringing into power, not the old PRI – something most Mexicans feared, even as they voted for him – but a new version of the PRI. Peña Nieto’s honeymoon was over, he said.
John Ackerman said that whatever doubts people had about the PRI’s education reform, these were severely exacerbated by the release of recorded evidence that “operatives” of the PRI had plotted to use federal anti-poverty funds to support the party’s campaign in Veracruz’s July 7 elections. But, he said, this revelation of corruption was not a stunning surprise to many Mexicans. Peña Nieto comes from the State of Mexico, where his extended family has a history of dominating local politics. Before he launched his presidential campaign, Peña Nieto was governor of that state, which he described as “a bastion of PRI power.” Citing polls, Ackerman noted that only 21 percent of Mexicans had trust in the ”Pact for Mexico.” And Sergio Aguayo pointed out that only 17 percent of Mexicans take an active part in Mexico’s political life. “Eighty percent don’t really participate.”
Ackerman termed the president’s first months in power “a media theater” and noted that Peña Nieto never involved his constituents, Mexican voters, in the creation of the “Pact for Mexico.”
As protests are taking place in Mexico City as well as elsewhere in response to education reform – and now the Veracruz incident – the street is speaking. Peña Nieto pushed through the education changes quickly, believing that the street wouldn’t speak up. Well, now it is speaking – loudly. This past Monday, Labor Day, there were demonstrations in Guerrero, Jalisco and Mexico City voicing rejection of the entire “Pact for Mexico.”
Many protesters seemed most aggravated by the revelation of the evidence of “vote buying” in Veracruz. For that stirred memories of the spate of vote-buying by Peña Nieto’s own campaign for president, in which the PRI allegedly passed out “free” credit cards to be used in the Soriano supermarket chain in exchange for votes.
While Ackerman was slightly optimistic that the teacher’s union might push the government to heed their demands for participation in education reform – which Aguayo doubted – he said no one knew what Peña Nieto might do next. To suggestions that the one good thing that could come from the “Pact for Mexico” would be a reining in of telecommunication baron Carlos Slim, now the world’s richest man, Ackerman observed that Peña Nieto should be seen as the “son of Carlos Salinas Gortari” (1988-1994), modern Mexico’s most reviled president.
Aguayo said the future would depend on whether Peña Nieto could deal nimbly with the teacher’s strike in southern Mexico, and at the same time find a way out of the sticky scandal in Veracruz.