“Tu me conoces” – “You know me” – was what Enrique Peña Nieto kept saying to voters throughout his campaign as presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But despite the thousands of times he said that, out of the thousands of speeches he’s given, Mexicans don’t know him. They became so familiar with the opaque script his handlers and PRI’s dinosauric elders put together for him, that they could repeat it before he did. Even when he changed the simple sequence of the same words.
For some unknown reason, even intelligent, serious interrogators (apparently not in fulsome supply) sit still for this reiteration of platitudes and dodge’em cliches. This is particularly true of North American interviewers. Over the weekend a new set of television “presenters” gave it a shot. Margaret Warner of the PBS and Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s GPS tried to find out with some specificity what kind of human being Peña Nieto is, and a hint of what he had in his head. But they, too, ended up settling for merely another recitation of his resumé and a re-run of generic campaign promises. And it was obvious that a good part of this collection of emptiness, delivered with Peña Nieto’s usual wide-eyed grin-and-grimace intensity, continued to be merely make-believe. But his interlocutors are not all to blame; their interviews were truncated because they’d been warned by Peña Nieto’s handlers of the PRI’s list of “out-of-bounds” questions. Oddly, now that he’s won the election, “the list” seems to have grown.
But the list of prohibitions does not veil Mexico’s of vast problems. Mexico’s governing “original sin” — corruption — still cripples it. It was institutionalized by New Spain’s viceregal government. When a law or an edict issued by the king in metropolitan Spain was deemed “inappropriate” or “burdensome” by the assembled viceregal court in New Spain, a member would raise a placard saying: “Obedezco pero no cumplo” — ”I obey but do not comply.”
All the while that Peña Nieto was declaring that he was the face of a new kind PRI politics, that his government would be transparent, the PRI was clumsily buying votes — and practicing other familiar undemocratic habits particularly identified with PRI’s 71 years (1929-2000) of brutal autocratic rule. Someone promptly remarked, “Denials trashed transparency before he even got into office.”
{/access}Even the vote buying was a scam within a scam, say hoodwinked voters. For instance, in the State of Mexico, which cups around Mexico City, a vote that usually goes for 1,500 pesos — a bit more than 110 dollars — was going for 1,000 pesos (75 dollars). Elsewhere, they were going for 500 pesos. The Associated Press picked an unhappy voter out of a mass of angry people in front of a supermarket. It interviewed a 20-year-old university student and her grandfather, who had just cashed in their PRI-issued gift cards. “They gave us three (supermarket gift) cards in the name of the PRI, and told us they were worth 500 pesos (37.50 dollars), but when we got to the check-out counter, they were only worth 100 pesos (7.50 dollars).”
The Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), Friday, July 6, two days before the vote, released a statement, illustrated by photographs of dozens of gift cards from the Soriana supermarket chain, asserting they had been distributed by a PRI-affiliated union. The present ruling party, the National Action Party (PAN), said that Peña Nieto’s campaign had “acquired” around 9,500 prepaid gift cards worth nearly 5.2 million dollars, or 70 million pesos.
Mexico’s voting oversight agency, the Federal Electoral Institute, basically said it would do nothing about the voting violations, because they wouldn’t change the results of the election. Said Jesus Zambrano, leader of the PRD “Yes, someone could say, ‘Sure, I spent ten times more than the (legal) campaign limit, fine me whatever you want want.’”
The problems facing Mexico, traced back to their roots, issue in great part from the Republic’s original sin. Corruption, in some ways, isn’t as brazen as it used to be. But it has become more sophisticated in action and clandestine manipulation. Much of this sophistication comes from the increasingly deft operational strategies concocted by drug cartel jefes.
But possibly the largest nest of corruption is one that every president must court and no president dares to oppose, and it demonstrates to Mexico’s children the culture-wide power of endemic corruption. This is the 1.4 million-member National Education Workers Union (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion), headed by “president-for-life,“ Elba Ester Gordillo. Mexican President Felipe Calderon, of the PAN, and his Minister of Education, Josefina Vazquez Mota, recently tried to make a few basic changes to improve Mexico’s surreal and lagging educational system. They were blocked by Gordillo and Vazquez was fired. She became the first viable female candidate for president in Mexico’s history. Calderon gave her only tepid support. She came in third in the voting.
For some time, Mexico’s slowly growing middle class has been abandoning public schools, sending children to pricey private “academies.” Reason: Though test scores crept up a few points in the past decade, Mexico still loiters at the bottom among member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of industrial nations to which Mexico belongs. In the most recent exams, more than half of Mexican 15-year-olds scored at the lower levels in math and did only a bit better in reading and reasoning. This is not for a lack of funding. A bulky 20 percent of the national budget goes into education — a lavish 30 billion dollars a year. And of this, some 90 percent goes to salaries — negotiated by Gordillo’s teachers union, which also dictates policy. That dictate includes the practice of teachers buying and selling their jobs. A life-time tenured elementary teaching post in one of Mexico’s popular cities goes for 20,000 bucks. In the countryside, it’s around 2,000 dollars.
Yet Wisconsin’s anti-labor Governor Scott Walker would love Mexico’s anti-union maquiladora policies designed to keep workers in poverty. “Mexico does all it can to ensure that workers don’t unionize, or if they do that they join a so-called “protection union” designed to assure the interests of plant owners and keep wages low,” the Miami Herald noted last month. For such workers, Mexico’s rise in inflation last month was a harsh blow. Millions of workers can barely put enough food on the table to keep their families healthy. Millions of others live in more extreme poverty. Their lives contradict recent good-cheer government reports of Mexico’s “growing middle-class.”
Such workers don crisp-looking uniforms during their working hours, but return home to shanties without legal electrical of water service. These have to be bootlegged in from the homes of better-off friends. Such workers usually labor for around 7.50 dollars a day, with no raises in the offing. The government will subsidize credit for buying appliances and sometimes a small house. But this “credit” plunges them into a hole of debt, from which few will ever escape. Teen-age children of these families quickly drop out of school to join factory work forces, like their parents, or they join organized criminal gangs.
Corruption fuels this national calamity, ensuring that unions became a tool to be used for political control. Peña Nieto’s vagueness regarding an effective path to dealing with the drug cartels, and the PRI’s political strategy to winning the presidency are worrying more than a few Mexican analysts. They speak openly now of what is becoming known as “Mexico’s social/cultural abyss.” In a report covering such matters, one researcher said, “Here, it’s so often impossible to know who’s really behind a massacre or a candidacy, an assassination or a ‘discovery’ of arms, a cache of drugs or high-level corruption.”
True, many such people hold out hope that the PRI’s lack of a majority in the legislature will rein in the party’s possible inclination to fall back on old, dangerously well-honed — and discredited — habits. Yet studying Peña Nieto’s declarations can be disconcerting. “Have to hope and wait and see.” Words that now seem to be on the lips of a lot of people.{/access}