Columns

As the victory by Enrique Peña Nieto, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seemed a much surer thing that it turned out to be, many of Mexico’s political analysts, scholars, former office-holders and veteran news hawks began murmuring the name of former president (1988-1994) Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

“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.

Micaela (“Mica”) Garcia Martinez voted for a candidate whose party she loathed: Josefina Vazquez Mota. She was the first female to run as a presidential candidate for a major Mexican political party. Yet, Mica detests Vazquez Mota’s party, the presently ruling pro-church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN). That’s because she judged the last two local PAN presidentes de municipales to be worse than the normal run of thieves and liars, but, she said bitterly, because they were responsible for deaths of people she knew well. As for the party that “won” last Sunday, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), she lived too much of her life under its corrupt and brutal rule, she declared, and wanted nothing to do with that “vile armada”.

One solid, if awkwardly shaped, fact that stands out from the surging national certainty — and its backwash — that Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will win the presidency Sunday. That fact is that few of those citizens voting for Peña Nieto seem to have any clear, certain idea of what the new president will do with the party shaped by a dictator, General Plutarco Elias Calles, in 1929, as an autocratic instrument of a military/business elite.

“In this part of Jalisco” — meaning the ample area around Guadalajara/Lake Chapala — “las aguas begin on the day of San Antonio.” That what everyone said when my wife and I arrived in Ajijic in 1963. Though often it didn’t occur quite as promptly as that declaration claimed. But sure enough, the first full-fledged rain arrived this year – with truenos y relampagos (thunder and lightning) — the night of June 12-13, the 13th being the feast day of San Antonio de Padua. And folks out late marking that saint’s day got soaked, as they expected.

For history buffs, for the saint-struck, the fans of religious personages lost in historical mists, for aficionados of religious fecklessness, the ancient saint of rain Saint Primitivo can be enticing.