A Mexican judge March 6 ordered authorities to investigate the killings of hundreds of women in the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City, which took place during the former governorship of Enrique Peña Nieto (2005 to 2011), now the leading contender in the July 1 presidential election.
In the United States, the Republican party is losing women voters, according to both polls and widespread interviews. This abrupt and quickly growing trend among moderate Republican and independent female voters — a critical electoral swing sector — could hobble the already badly wounded GOP.
Peña Nieto was ahead even before he announced his presidential candidacy. His closest competitor is former education secretary, Josefina Vazquez Mota, Mexico’s first female presidential nominee for a major party, the ruling National Action Party (PAN). Peña Nieto averages about 47 percent to Vazquez Moto’s 27 percent. This is not surprising in light of the dismal record the administration of President Felipe Calderon and his pro-church, pro-business PAN has posted during the past five years.
The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 years, utilizing corruption, intimidation and assassination as its primary tools of governance. In those seven decades, most Mexicans agree, there was only one fair presidential election, that of Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Since their defeat in 2000 by Vicente Fox, who out-maneuvered his own PAN leadership to become the first successful opposition president in nearly a century, the seen and unseen rulers of the PRI have been preaching that their political organization has transformed itself. It’s true that, for a brief time, the facade of PRI’s political culture seemed to wrestle with change. But all that changed was getting rid of some of the most attention-getting manipulators. Mexico’s soiled political history was too long and too strong for such good intentions to last. Besides, it soon became clear that the PAN, while it had waited helplessly for years in the ante-room of Mexican political life, had carefully and unfortunately absorbed the nation’s legacy of political bad habits. Thus, by the time the second PAN president, Felipe Calderon, took office December 1, 2006, that political party, like regimes before it, was unable to take on the major challenge of Mexican society: “to construct its own limits,” as one Mexican analyst termed it.
Peña Nieto was reared in the environment of a priista dynasty. He’s benefited from politically powerful relatives on both sides of his family. Several male members were governors of Mexico State, and/or extremely wealthy and influential priistas. All of them at one time or another have been viewed by outspoken Mexican political assessors as arrogantly corrupt: two families enjoying immunity because of their political influence. And as his own marred term as the governor of the State of Mexico — seen by PRI kingmakers as a success — unfolded, it was clear that he knew how to behave as a respectful courtier in the company of powerful handlers. Simultaneously, Calderon’s naive 2006 declaration of war against drug lords and “organized crime,” for which neither he nor the PAN hierarchy did any analysis or preparation, spiraled into failure. Unfortunately for the PAN, and Mexican society, this has created something that seemed impossible a short time ago: nostalgia among voters for an authoritarian past — the PRI.
Troubling Peña Nieto at the moment is the February 27 order by Judge Jose Alvarado directing Mexican authorities to investigate the killings and disappearances of more than 1,000 women in the State of Mexico during Peña Nieto’s tenure. This recalled the campaign for justice waged by relatives of women killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of women were tortured, raped, killed and disappeared, igniting a women’s rights movement that attracted sympathetic international attention.
Another female problem he has is less publicly discussed and much doubted by many. Peña Nieto’s first marriage, to Monica Pretelini, reportedly was a troubled one, according to many in the State of Mexico, and in the capital, Mexico City. He had children with two different women while married to Pretelini, who died in January 2007. It was first widely reported that Pretelini killed herself following reports that she had “suffered a drug overdose.” This reported suicide was tied by some — sotto voce — who knew the family to Peña Nieto’s philandering. Others were not surprised by the declaration on the floor of Congress by Mexico State federal deputy Maria Elena Perez de Tejada that the then governor “is accused of having killed his wife.” The PRI quickly got that statement erased from the Congressional record. Immediately the usual PRI political faces appeared to insist that there was no medical proof to back up such a claim. The head of Department of the Neurophysiological Clinic of the ABC Hospital in Toluca said Pretelini suffered an epileptic crisis that caused heart arrhythmia leading to a stoppage of her lungs.But when Peña Nieto was interviewed for Univision by Jorge Ramos in March 2009, he couldn’t remember precisely what had led to his wife’s death: “She had been sick for two years of a malady similar to ... I can’t remember the name of the, of the... the name of the sickness...” he told Ramos. “It’s not epilepsy really, but something similar to epilepsy.”
But then a lack of attention afflicts both candidates thus far. Peña Nieto and Vazquez Mota have repeatedly avoided staking out firm positions on “security issues.” While nearly everyone seems to want a “change” in the war on drugs, a great many are vague on the specifics of what they want.
Yet in the United States, many evangelical and moderate female Republicans are becoming disenchanted by the remaining three GOP candidates’ focus on social issues. The emphasis on contraception and women’s place in society seems to be stripping many females from the party’s ranks. “My god,” said one woman, “with the economy in shambles, Santorum is criticizing women for working outside the home? That’s just crazy. It makes no sense.” She’s an evangelical, long-time Republican voter visiting the Lake Chapala area. “I thought calling women ‘radical feminists’ for suggesting women work outside the home had stopped 20, 30 years ago.” Journalists and pollsters are finding that opinion is becoming widespread, as female voters who were drifting away from Obama, are returning to the Democratic fold. Some were outraged by Rush Limbaugh’s foul attacks on Yale law student Sandra Fluke and the GOP candidate’s wimpish reaction to those remarks. Even Santorum’s wife has told him to ease up on his strident opposition on contraception.
Thursday, women in the U.S. Senate Thursday began demanding that the Violence Against Women Act, 1994 legislation, up for renewal — and expansion — be given quick passage. Though it once was a bipartisan bill, today’s Republicans unsurprisingly oppose it. That opposition, joined with recent “anti-women” stances, is gathering the GOP new enemies.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, warned her co-religionists that the party is risking being seen as radically anti-female, forecasting harsh consequences in November.
But Republicans see a trap where many women see a dangerously growing radical ideology. California Democrat Diane Feinstein, one of the two women on the Senate judiciary panel, labelled the opposition “no surprise.” It “is part of a larger effort ... to cut back on rights and services to women.” This is an all out campaign against women, she suggested, that encompasses the questioning of Roe V. Wade, partial birth abortion, contraception, preventive services for women and, now, the Violence Against Women Act.
Efforts by Virginia and Ohio to mandate ultrasounds before abortion or ban abortion once a heartbeat is detected have intensified this battle. On Wednesday Mitt Romney’s remark that he would eliminate federal financing for Planned Parenthood fueled general election opposition to his try for the presidency.
Rumors were flying here this week about the logistical bobbling of Josefina Vazquez Mota’s Sunday speech to voters in Mexico City’s soccer stadium. Supporters who had been waiting in sweltering heat for hours began leaving while Vazquez Mota was launching into the meat of her address. Rumors blamed it on both PAN’s internecine warfare and the internal opposition to a female presidential candidate.
Despite the bumpy road ahead in both the PRI and the Republican campaigns, political sages say both Peña Nieto and Mitt Romney will win their races — though canny oddsmakers are not yet persuaded by Romney’s chances in the U.S. general election.