Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

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Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby harry ashburn » Sat Jun 23, 2012 5:13 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06 ... 1&ref=news
click link for full article
preview:
Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 23, 2012

MEXICO CITY (AP) — When it comes to the presidency, Mexico's voters are fed up and ready to throw the ruling the party out. But in the nation's capital, the progressive island known as Mexico City, they're about to hand the leftist political party that has ruled since 1997 an election-day valentine.
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Re: Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jun 23, 2012 7:30 pm

...

Times Headlines Still Waging Ideological War.

The device here is confusionism: The article is about how the left now holds a 50-point LEAD in polling for the Mexico City mayoral election. The article's not bad, except for the drive-by lie (primary in the headline) that the PRI has a lock on the presidential election.

Meanwhile, the students are on the move and AMLO may be within 5% of Pena Nieto with the run-off still three weeks away.


Op-Ed

Will we see a 'Mexican Spring'?
A student-led, social media-driven protest movement has become a key force for societal accountability.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 2904.story

Image
#YoSoy132

A man writes "Soy132" on his arm during a music festival in support of the #YoSoy132, or "I am 132," student movement in Mexico City. The movement rejects the possible return of the old ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ahead of Mexico's July 1 presidential election. (Marco Ugarte / Associated Press / June 16, 2012)


By Guillermo Trejo

June 24, 2012

The rise of a social media-based student movement is shaking up Mexico'sJuly 1 presidential race. This is happening just as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — which ruled for seven decades until its defeat in 2000 — seems poised to return to power.

The movement, led by students from the country's leading private universities in Mexico City, aims to prevent the return of a PRI government and to democratize the mass media. Spreading rapidly throughout the country since May, it already has had a measurable impact, particularly among young voters and independents who represent 30% and 42% of the electorate, respectively. The gap between the PRI front-runner and the second-place candidate decreased from 25% to 16% a few weeks after the launch of the movement, according to polls from El Universal-Buendia & Laredo, and from 13% to 4%, according to Reforma newspaper.

The rise of social protest during an election cycle should not be surprising. Research I have conducted on rural indigenous mobilization shows that the number of protests tend to increase by 30% during Mexican presidential elections. In states where gubernatorial elections are concurrent with the presidential election — like Chiapas, Jalisco or Morelos — protests increase by up to 150%. These effects are likely to be greater in Mexico's major urban centers, where university students have played a leading role in different cycles of protest.

What is surprising this time is the unprecedented rise of a social movement led by students from Mexico's leading private universities — middle-class and well-to-do students who will land elite jobs after graduation. Movements led by students from public universities historically have been associated with the radical left and have not always enjoyed wide voter support. This movement led by private students, however, seems to be attracting the sympathies of the average voter rather than frightening him or her. Polls show approval rates for the movement ranging from 41% to 47%.

Known as YoSoy132 ("I am number 132"), the movement began as a response to the contentious visit in May by Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI presidential candidate, to the Ibero-American University — a Jesuit school in Mexico City. Calling him "assassin," students harshly reminded the PRI candidate of his poor human rights record while governor of the state of Mexico. His police forces had brutally repressed protesters in a 2006 clash in the city of San Salvador Atenco. He defended his actions then as maintaining law and order, which angered the students, who chased him off campus.

Echoing Mexico's authoritarian past, PRI officials and Televisa — the leading network of Mexico's television duopoly and a close ally of the PRI — called the students professional agitators and accused them of working for the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. In the 1980s, this type of state response would have discredited the students. But after this incident, 131 Ibero students uploaded a video on YouTube showing their university IDs and condemning the PRI and Televisa for manipulating information. A second video, #YoSoy132, showing students from other private and public universities supporting their 131 Ibero peers appeared shortly after and has gone viral.

All this is having an effect in the polls. Voter support for the PRI candidate declined significantly among young, university-educated and independent voters, and the left has capitalized on this.

Three factors related to the dramatic deterioration of Mexico's social climate as a result of the war on drugs explain why young Mexicans are receptive to the message of YoSoy132.

Young males (ages 18 to 29) make up the vast majority of the nearly 60,000 deaths from Mexico's drug wars. Young unemployed men are being recruited into criminal insurgent groups to fight inter-cartel battles and the war against the federal government. Young university students with no criminal connections have become targets of cartels and government security forces in conflict areas.

The drug wars have transformed the daily lives of Mexico's youth. They can no longer go out freely to bars and discos and increasingly have had to limit their socializing to their parents' homes. Universities in Mexico do not have lodging facilities and students generally live with their parents until their mid-20s.

Finally, as a result of the drug wars, the nation's young people have turned to social media as their main source of information on local politics and violence. When cartels call for a de facto curfew in conflict areas, information flows through Facebook and Twitter. Major TV outlets and the print media are no longer the most reliable sources of information for Mexico's youth. And their active participation in a number of social media outlets facilitates the spread of the movement's message beyond the core group in Mexico City.

Public opinion surveys show that Mexico's youth — like the rest of the electorate — had initially accepted Peña Nieto's law-and-order message and the PRI's self-portrait as an experienced party that could solve the country's unprecedented drug war violence. But the incident at Ibero-American University and the subsequent manipulation of it by the media alerted the students to the fact that an uncontested PRI victory could be the prelude to a return to old authoritarian practices. Mexico could be the next Russia and Peña Nieto the Mexican Putin.

Young voters and independents have begun to migrate by default toward Lopez Obrador, who has become Peña Nieto's major challenger, while support for the candidate from the incumbent National Action Party, or PAN, has begun to languish. This has opened the possibility of strategic voting: PAN voters and independents leaning toward their second choice — the leftist PRD — to avoid returning the PRI to power. The question is whether the student movement's message will trigger enough anti-PRI sentiment to prevent a PRI victory on July 1. Evidence from the latest poll trackers suggests that the initial anti-PRI sentiment triggered by the movement may be reaching its limits.

Whatever its final electoral effect on the presidential election, Mexico's student movement has joined the movement of victims of the war on drugs as a powerful force for societal accountability. In a country where democratic institutions prevent, rather than facilitate, electoral accountability, social pressure from below has become a crucial means to keep political elites in check. In a country where political elites and the mainstream media continuously try to thwart the citizens' voice, the sound and fury of the streets have become a beam of hope — a hope for a "Mexican Spring."


Guillermo Trejo is an assistant professor of political science at Duke University and the author of the forthcoming book, "Popular Movements in Autocracies."


The Times article:


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06 ... nted=print

June 23, 2012

[Obnoxiously False Headline Need Not Be Repeated]

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


MEXICO CITY (AP) — When it comes to the presidency, Mexico's voters are fed up and ready to throw the ruling the party out. But in the nation's capital, the progressive island known as Mexico City, they're about to hand the leftist political party that has ruled since 1997 an election-day valentine.

Boyish mayoral candidate Miguel Angel Mancera of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, holds an astonishing lead of about 50 points in polls going into the July 1 vote, which coincides with the presidential election.

The PRD, which is struggling in the rest of the country, expects a landslide in Mexico City because the giant metropolis that once instilled fear in Mexicans and foreigners alike for kidnapping, street crime and air pollution is now an island of calm in a country ravaged by drug violence.

Crime is down. Environmental friendly bicycles can be rented for short trips and green buses are everywhere. And progressive laws make it a Mecca for gay marriage and safe, legal abortion, both unthinkable in the rest of the conservative Roman Catholic country. A Sunday program that shuts down the city's main boulevard for bikers, rollerbladers and skateboarders has managed to create a growing sense of community even in a city this size, while the government now gives pensions to the elderly and aid to single mothers.

"There has been a change, to a more liberal, more progressive city," said Eva Villarreal, who grew up in Mexico City and now works as a television executive. "It's not so much as a question of political consciousness, but rather what benefits you as a citizen."

In the rest of the country, voters are tired of the drug violence that has killed more than 47,500 people and the lack of economic opportunities. They are so desirous of change that they're poised to give the presidency back to the old guard, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, despite its reputation for 71 years of autocratic rule.

On the national level, they're rejecting PRD presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and President Felipe Calderon's conservative National Action Party after 12 years of rule. Calderon can't run for re-election and his party's candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota, is running third in most polls.

That leaves Mexico City as the laboratory for a new leftist current, and a counterbalance to what some fear will be a return to the dark old days of one dominant political group.

"I think that is what is coming in July, that a new project will start, to reform the progressive forces in the country," said Manuel Camacho Solis, who acts as coordinator for a broader coalition of left-leaning groups in Mexico.

Under the PRI, the president appointed Mexico City's mayor. Since the city won the right to elect its own leader, the PRD, which broke off from the PRI a decade earlier, has had a lock on the mayor's office.

The job has always been considered a launch pad for presidential politics. Lopez Obrador, who is in distant second this time to PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto, nearly won the presidency in 2006 after a stint as a very popular Mexico City mayor.

His successor, the popular and urbane Mayor Marcelo Ebrard tried to run this time and is a sure mention for the 2018 presidential race. Mexico City's leader can only serve one term.

The city's education and income levels, while marked by great inequality, are among the highest in the country. With the biggest concentration of university students, it also has always had the largest base of political opposition.

Mexico City also saw up close the repression and corruption that marked PRI rule before it was voted out of the presidency in 2000.

At the Tlatelolco housing project just north of the city's center, older residents still recall the hundreds killed in a 1968 massacre of student protesters there, and the hundreds more killed in the 1985 earthquake when a government-built apartment block collapsed because of sub-standard construction.

In the 2012 mayoral race, Mancera is campaigning on his reputation as the city's attorney general and a 12 percent drop in crime from 2010 to 2011. Federal figures show that under his entire term between 2007 and 2011, homicides were down by about 4 percent, and kidnappings fell by over 50 percent, even as the rest of the country saw a rise in such crimes.

While the capital continues to have a fifth to a quarter of the country's violent robberies, far outstripping its share of the population, it hasn't had the massacres, mass graves or wild drug gang shootouts seen in other parts of the country.

Mancera's main opponent, Beatriz Paredes of the PRI, touched the most sensitive defect of the PRD, petty corruption and bribery of people needing city permits.

"It's obvious that overcoming corruption in Mexico City is an enormous challenge," Paredes said in a recent debate, "and that implies overcoming the mafias that make their nest in the PRD."

The low-key, seemingly unflappable Mancera shrugged it off, partly because the PRI's own reputation for corruption is legendary, but also because he is not a PRD, having worked for the party's administration but never joining. Some hope that will give him some independence.

"I don't see the need to join any ... of the parties," Mancera said, a position that seems to resonate with Mexicans tired of the country's political groups. But the tasks before him are daunting in a city that produces 9,000 tons of garbage daily and needs 16 million square yards of pavement replaced.

The very size of the city with 13,000 surveillance cameras and a 70,000-officer police force is also what keeps it fairly immune to the drug war, Mancera said. The city's contentious traffic complicates transportation and it would be hard to bribe the entire city police force, as cartels do in some smaller cities.

"Mexico City is hard for them to stage the kind of ostentatious operations they are accustomed to," Mancera said. "They operate in convoys of five or six vehicles ... that's hard to do in the city."

It also doesn't hurt that under recent PRD mayors, other bribes known as "mordidas," exacted by police officers stopping motorists for alleged infractions, seem to have dropped dramatically. The problem was once so bad that drivers kept containers of five-peso (50-cent) coins ready on their dashboards.

Now only specially designated transit officers can issue tickets using hand-held computers.

The changes are drawing voters, but so is Mancera's style.

"He's completely cool ... a modern politician," said writer Guadalupe Loaeza. "He's our George Clooney."


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Re: Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby DrEvil » Sat Jun 23, 2012 8:19 pm

Good article from LA Times, but I laughed out loud when I read the last sentence:

In a country where political elites and the mainstream media continuously try to thwart the citizens' voice, the sound and fury of the streets have become a beam of hope — a hope for a "Mexican Spring."
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby harry ashburn » Sat Jun 23, 2012 10:57 pm

thanx for the feed back Comrades! ahahhaha Is the Times still fit to line the bottom of my birdcage? My bird registered republican! pluck pluck
A skeleton walks into a bar. Orders a beer, and a mop. -anon
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Re: Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby harry ashburn » Sat Jun 23, 2012 11:01 pm

to Jack Riddler: re: Nam myoho renge kyo, mothers. I'm guessing that says "the south shall rise again, Mother fu**ers?" ...in vietnamese???
A skeleton walks into a bar. Orders a beer, and a mop. -anon
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Re: Fading Political Left Still Thrives in Mexico City

Postby SonicG » Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:10 am

They're still trying to kill it...

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Mexico’s “dangerous” foreign policy per The Hill:

✅ Limited U.S. ambassador’s freedom
✅ Cozy with Cuba
✅ ‘Humiliated’ Spain’s king
✅ Won’t sanction Russia/Iran
✅ End to sanctions
✅ Biden snub
✅ Won’t attend Climate Summit
✅ DEA tensions
✅ Won’t denounce Maduro


https://x.com/resisres/status/1848418192290681188
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