Begun by Sergio Chamorro, a 35-year-old office worker, and a company of friends also disillusioned with the transparently false promises of human candidates, the ten-year-old, adopted “Morris the Cat” is running for mayor of Xapala, the capital of Veracruz state.
Morris’ campaign slogan: “Tired of voting for Rats? Vote for a Cat.”
Mexico’s governments, notorious among its citizens for decades of surreal antics, seems to have abruptly tweeked the mischievous (but deadly serious) side of the nation’s funny-bone. The result: A black-and-white, four-footed feline candidate that tens of thousands of voters have found the “ideal” political aspirant to rally around.
It’s a field of political fancy that’s becoming nearly as populous as it is popular. Numerous off-spring are appearing throughout the Republic, with more coming. Running for mayor in the frontier town of Ciudad Juarez is “Chon the Burro”; “Tintan the Dog” in the capital of Oaxaca state; “Tina the Chicken,” in Tepic, capital of neighboring Nayarit state; “Maya the Cat” in Puebla. But none of the campaigns for these nominees are as cleverly organized, or as popular as those of Morris the Cat. “He sleeps all day and does nothing, that fits the profile of a politician,” says Chamorro.
Numerous citizens have numerous theories for birth of this phenomenon. And somewhat ominously for Mexico‘ lawmakers and the bumblingly predatory army of presidential spear carriers, such theories point to a vigorously growing sense of anger-tinted exasperation with human politicians. Thus, the enthusiasm for pets and farm animals, which history proves are much more loyal than politicos. For years politicians here have ranked at the bottom of polls regarding citizens‘ trust in members of Mexico’s professions, and their abiding concept of governance. When Mexicans, after 71 years of brutally authoritative and corrupt rule by the oxymoronically titled Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) got a relatively honest vote with Vicente Fox – of the pro-business, pro-Church National Action Party (PAN) – they became quickly disillusioned by the discovery that a clean vote doesn’t guarantee a clean (or sane) government.Now that the Republic’s new president, 46-year-old Enrique Peña Nieto, has brought back what he terms a “reformed,” and “new” PRI, many feel they’ve been duped again. And they’ve reacted in ingenious ways proffered by the electronic age. Stories, which the mainstream media may hesitate to report under the reign of a touchy new chief executive, garner tens of thousands of followers due to YouTube, Twitter and other on-line carriers, plus think tank reports.
The hesitation by the mainstream media issues directly from Peña Nieto, flexing an ancient PRI habit that seems to be an institutionalized, but not very revolutionary reflex that simply won’t go away, despite all the campaign references to transparency. As recently as Monday a U.S. newspaper ran a story titled “Transparency Laws Give Mexican Citizens a Tool Against Mexican Corruption.” When translated, it prompted Mexican friends to blink and chortle. “Ay, los gringos,” they said. In speaking one-on-one with interviewers about the war on drugs, the president seems to reveal a combination of forceful shyness and a faintly appealing conviction that if you don’t talk about the drug war and its savage attacks on Mexican citizens, society will stop thinking about that problem, be less jittery, more optimistic. The fact that the Interior Ministry (flexing its newly restored power), the Defense Ministry and the federal attorney general also are shy about “the language of criminals” – no more menacing drug-lord nicknames – tells us that the concept of transparency is out the window, at least for now. No more levantones (kidnappings with intent to execute). No more bands of killers roving in pairs of SUVs. No more extortion by either bandits or law enforcement personnel. Peña Nieto has sent the army into Michoacan. But there are no reports of what it is really doing there. The president believes that what citizens want to hear is tightly-edited rosy news that Mexico is now a middle-class country.
And he got it almost immediately. Despite their public advocacy of always endangered transparency, both the domestic and foreign media filed a flood of stories declaring that Mexico is now a middle-class nation. There also were flocks of positive stories about investing in Mexico. When most investors are hesitant, prices will drop, counseled many financial advisers, and that’s the time to grab good deals south of the Rio Grande. Besides, the president, after being what many commentators and citizens felt was vague and\or ambiguous about Mexico’s most pressing problem, the drug war, declared he would do more than continue to reenforce the 35,000-member federal police force (which, one observer noted, is smaller than the New York City Police Department). He proudly announced he would be creating a new 50,000-person gendarmerie – ”a mobile constabulary,” someone called it – by the end of the year. No more military heavy hand to nourish “human rights violation” stories. No more poorly trained and often corrupt police who were in the pockets of drug traffickers.
But experts regarding Latin American military-police-drug war problems at Houston’s Rice University’s James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy pointed out it was going to be made up of personnel who had left the Army and Navy, and that “there is no clarity about how their training now would be different.” Meanwhile, it is not clear how urgently this new program is moving along, or whether “it is getting the resources or political backing it needs.”
Other Mexican and U.S. experts suggest it will take a great deal of time to thoroughly vet the 10,000 (now down from 50,000) inductees for the gendarmerie. “To thoroughly train and especially to vet that many people will take years,” said another veteran of such projects in Latin America. And at the James A. Baker Institute, Alfred C. Glassell, a fellow in Drug Policy, said, “the Peña Nieto administration may aggressively attempt to control information about the use of the military; it may de-emphasize the use of military in its public statements ... but such an organization (as a gendarmarie) cannot become an effective force against organized crime in a single presidential term.”
Meanwhile, the details of the inequality existing in Mexican society have been more carefully examined, and the flood of opinion that formerly supported the idea that Mexico is now a middle class nation has waned. One does not have to marshal a storm of statistics to understand this. Simply remember that eleven families in Mexico are billionaires – including one of the world’s richest men, Carlos Slim. This in a country where some 52 million of its 112 million inhabitants live in poverty.
Thus, the appearance of Morris the Cat & Co.
(Note: James A. Baker served as chief of staff and then as secretary of the treasury for President Ronald Reagan. He also served as chief of staff in the George H.W. Bush administration.)