Mexico's Identity Crisis

...She is simply paying for the errors of others...

...To underline his role as an "Old Fighter" who was in the trenches when PAN was fashioning its electoral miracle—and Durazo wasn't even a PAN member—Livas trumpeted, "I voted for Fox, not for Durazo...

...How have the up-andcoming PRD and the PRI been exploiting PAN'S woes...

...Its thrust, though, is a variation on the theme, "That and a token will get you a ride on the subway...

...Widespread approval often evaded Lazaro Cârdenas during his lifetime, even though he was undoubtedly the most popular president in his country's history...

...A former cosmetics executive, she returned to the private sector ostensibly for "reasons of health...

...Leading the opposition to Durazo is Javier Livas Canni, a prominent political activist in Nuevo Leon...

...For freedom and the Reform Laws, Mexico paid a heavy price—an empty treasury and a countryside controlled by bandits...

...After his election Canavati said, "We have once more learned to ring doorbells...

...The people they have injail are innocent...

...In hushed tones that evoke shades of Colonel House and Cardinal Richelieu, Durazo's friends and foes call him "the Supersecretary...

...Their optimism was premature...

...The present drive toward unity is designed to soften the impact of Robles' bitter August 9 resignation as PRD president...

...His official title now is Secretary of Social Communications, but he also serves as Fox' private secretary and spokesman...

...Longtime Mexico resident, editor and political commentator Allyn Hunt has pointed out that the INEGI's figures are based on the concept of "open unemployment...

...Well, no...

...An influential recruit to the "Aztec Gold" Party, as the PRD is now popularly known, is Princeton-educated Manuel Camacho Solis, who earlier distinguished himself as the chief government negotiator in Chiapas...

...In their view, Fox has fallen down on his commitment to maintain a clean human rights slate...

...In large part this is attributable to Fox' declining image...

...As if all that were not enough for PAN, it lost four of the six gubernatorial contests to the PRI, including one in the prosperous northern Nuevo Leon State, previously a Fox stronghold, and another in Jalisco State, home of the megaresort area called Puerto Vallarta...

...But these are not tangible benefits that translate into electoral victories...

...Among current aspirants the front runner is Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who remains popular despite the troubles that have beset the unruly metropolis...

...She claimed the true figure was around $24 million...

...According to an Amnesty International (AI) report issued in August, over the past decade 370 women have been murdered...

...Instead of a conscientious inquiry, she said, frequently "the police arrest people, torture them, get confessions, and then build a case around that...

...As PAN has drifted toward becoming a closed corporation, the PRI has moved in the opposite direction and has shown far more openness than its rival in selecting candidates for office...

...Today...

...Though the term "structural reform" has become a shibboleth here, it does not impress Camacho...

...More embarrassing for the party that pledged to stop rampant human rights abuses has been the Fox administration's role in solving—or, more accurately, the failure to solve—a series of grisly murders of teenage girls and young women in the border city of Ciudad Juarez...

...None of the culprits have been caught," she maintains...

...Madrazo has not sparked the PRI's resurgence alone...

...But Fox' role in freeing Chiapas ecological guerrillas Teodoro Cabrera and Rodolfo Montiel is praised...

...Vicente Fox, whose fortunes are waning at present, will face his next big political test in 2004, when 10 governors' seats go up for grabs...

...Just after Fox' triumph, the PRI's detractors gloatingly described it as having passed "from omnipotence to oblivion...

...During the 2000 campaign he projected himself as a tough, no-nonsense rancher as well as a decisive businessman who would bring to government the qualities that had made him Coca-Cola's top executive in Mexico...

...When he first sought the presidency, Obregón was aided by the fact that his opponent, the ludicrous Ignacio ("Meester") Bonillas (a candidate handpicked by Carranza), had spent so much of his life in the United States that he had to take Spanish lessons before beginning his campaign...

...signaled that in contrast to the PRI's quagmire of bureaucracy and corruption, he would tackle the country's troubles promptly and forcefully...

...This is less of a triumph for the PRI than a disaster for Fox and PAN," observed Carlos Elizondo Mayer-Serra, director of the Center for Economic Research and Instruction...

...For nationalizing Mexico's oil and instituting a number of "socialistic" reforms, he was widely castigated by the Right as a dangerous radical...

...Senora Marta," he says, "is as much a victim of these persons as the President...

...At least 137 of the victims were confirmed to have been raped, and some were also mutilated...

...During the midterm campaign he made the astonishing assertion that Mexico's unemployment rate was 2.7 per cent, a figure that outstrips the best days of the Clinton Administration...

...Such a trend, he added, "would shatter the hopes" of those who saw the PAN victory as a triumph of transparency...

...His predecessor, Rodolfo Elizondo, was kicked upstairs to become Secretary of Tourism, and Leticia Navarro, whom he replaced, was eased out altogether...

...But he does not believe, as some foes of the regime have contended, that Fox' wife, Marta, is involved in the dark maneuvers...

...In the PRI's Nuevo Leon victory, Madrazo won kudos for bringing together contending party factions...

...After three years," said Saiz, "President Fox' administration has not attacked the deep causes of [civil] liberties violations with the urgency and seriousness that such a move requires...

...As political analyst Denise Dresser wrote, "The country awoke next to a dinosaur that was not dead...

...Alfonso, a softspoken, quietly efficient professional, served as secretary to Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI presidential candidate who was mysteriously murdered in 1994...

...Both Navarro and Elizondo are lifelong PAN stalwarts...

...His unofficial motto, "Hoy...

...He also persuaded Ricardo Canavati, who was ousted as a federal deputy by a PAN candidate in November 2002, to run for mayor of Monterrey...

...Some Mexicans think his attitude toward pressing economic issues is naive...

...To counteract this perception's potentially divisive effects, Camacho, Lopez Obrador, Robles, and others have gone out of their way to emphasize their friendly relations with the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, the most popular president in Mexican history...

...He added that he "sadly expected the [PAN] paralysis to continue...

...AI's report further claims that bodies have been misidentified and autopsies poorly handled...

...At a press conference in Mexico, AI Secretary General Irene Kahn charged that law enforcement authorities have responded to this national disgrace with cover-ups...

...Calling them "nothing but falsehoods," Robles denounced press reports that the party's debt had jumped to $55 million under her watch...

...Thus it counts among the employed at the time of a survey those who have worked as little as one hour in the past week, who operate illegal sidewalk stands, who deal in contraband, who "planned" to open a business within the last month, or who were promised a job or worked for food in the past week...

...The International Labor Organization uses the open employment method of measuring unemployment, but only in developed countries where the underground economy is minimal to nil...

...Now a PRD deputy, Camacho has lately been voicing concerns about the political situation in Mexico...

...As for PRI, a headline about the midterm elections in a prestigious Mexico City weekly read, "The Heart of the Dinosaur Still Beats...

...It was Congress that declared the national hero the victor...

...Addison De Witt is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist who lives in Mexico...

...He argues that if PAN and the PRI were to join forces in an attempt at massive structural reform, the effort would divide the country rather than unite it...

...At a recent press conference, he said he would not play favorites in selecting a candidate for the 2006 presidential elections...

...State prosecutors in Chihuahua (where Ciudad Juarez is located) deny the torture charge...

...After winning the Reform War in 1859-62 (against the conservatives) and executing the French-backed Archduke Maximilian in 1867, Juarez could do no better than get caught in a three-way tie in the 1871 election...

...A PRI member until 2000, he was the standard-bearer in that election for the hastily organized and short-lived Party of the Democratic Center...

...Two other AI functionaries, Ignacio Saiz and Rupert Knox, pointed out the discrepancy between Mexico's international advocacy of human rights and its own shoddy domestic record...

...Durazo's appointment produced a ripple effect, to the considerable dismay of PAN loyalists...

...But in 1923, when Treasury Secretary Adolfo de la Huerta led a revolt against him, 60 per cent ofMexico's Army backed the upstart...

...the less friendly regard him as the political equivalent of a snake oil salesman...

...Meanwhile, to the surprise of many, the Left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) nearly doubled its seats, from 53 to 98...

...But Norma Ledesma, whose 16year-old daughter was found murdered in Chihuahua City last year, dismisses their denials as self-serving...

...The callousness and shoddy professionalism continues, said Kahn, because the "victims are young, poor women with no power in society, whose deaths have no political cost...

...Fox' take-charge persona has not held up well either...

...Today...

...Particularly among PAN conservatives, the growing belief is he is being manipulated by a shadowy but powerful eminence grise, 49year-old Alfonso Durazo—no relation to "El Negro" Durazo, the brutal, clownish crony of former President José Lopez Portillo, who was Mexico City's police chief...

...But just three years after Fox and his Center-Right National Action Party (PAN) put an end to the 71 -year reign of the Center-Left Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), it appears to be rising like Dracula from his crypt...

...Today, no hamlet in Mexico is without street signs bearing the names of Juarez, Obregón and Cârdenas...

...Today...

...In Hunt's view, he rightly stands accused of gussying up poor Peterto make him look good next to rich Paul...

...Take his Panglossian view of unemployment...

...The names Benito Juárez, Alvaro Obregón and Lâzaro Cárdenas come to mind...

...Veteran pan members, especially those who have been affiliated with groups like Amigos de Fox, are troubledby the President's ceding so much power to a johrmie-comelately...

...The PRI Strikes Back Mexico's Identity Crisis By Addison De Witt Guadalajara The euphoria and high hopes that greeted President Vicente Fox' victory in the 2000 election resembled a wild, joyous celebration...

...In an interview with a Mexico City weekly, Livas warned that "a concentration of power in the hands of two persons, Durazo and [his assistant] Ramon Muniz, could cause the departure from government of highly respected officials...

...It would be exaggeration to claim that the PRI has redeemed itself, but increasingly Mexicans are looking back with nostalgia to the era of one-party rule...

...Hypocrisy...

...Livas opposes the concentration of unofficial power in a few hands because he fears it will mean the marginalization of "thousands of talented individuals" who performed so impressively in the 2000 campaign...

...PRD leader Leonel Godoy Rangel has similarly stressed unity...

...Elizondo's views have been echoed by Mexico-watcher Armand PeschardSverdrup, head of the Washington-based Project Mexico at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

...His thinking is in step with an editorial in a widely circulated liberal weekly headlined, "You Don't Govern Through Popularity...

...The one-armed strongman Alvaro Obregón emerged alone at the top in 1919 after a decade of revolutionary turmoil, having defeated such redoubtable foes as Pancho Villa, Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata...

...More important, he insists, is "reform of Congress (as opposed to the federal structure), campaign finance reform and moves toward unity...

...The number came from the government's National Institute of Geography, Statistics and Information (INEGI), whose methods are not quite scientific...

...Fox is using it where an underground economy accounts for over 30 per cent of the nation's commercial activity...

...Roberto Madrazo, an effective conciliator and "chairman of the board" in the PRI's comeback, is credited with skillfully forging unity between his party's troglodytes and Young Turks...

...Although still personally well liked, Fox no longer seems the Ajax White Knight of swift resolute problem solving...

...Also in the running are his predecessor, Rosario Robles, and PRD founder and hardy perennial Cuauhtemoc Cardenas...

...They thereby elevated the Ciudad Juarez deaths to a federal rather than only a state affair...

...Mexico's history is studded with presidents who were not widely popular while in office but whose policies history, as the saying goes, treated kindly...

...AI credits the President's good intentions even as it faults him for a lack of leadership in promoting the necessary structural reform of Mexico's judicial system...

...The editorial names the President's wife and Mayor Lopez Obrador as the two most popular political figures in Mexico...

...Though it is bruited about as little as possible, in some quarters Cardenas is considered a has-been...

...Distinguishing between good public relations and concrete political results, he said: "Fox has made admirable advances in increasing transparency and in raising the level of government responsibility in Mexico...

...In Mexico's midterm Congressional elections this past July PAN'S representation in the 500-member Chamber of Deputies tumbled from 207 to 151, and PRI's rose from 208 to 221...