Year: 2006

Early yesterday, the state government of Oaxaca decided to raid the encampments of striking teachers in the capital city. Many people were injured. La Jornada has several stories covering the events. Though Oaxaca is the center of disident teacher unions, the central leadership of the SNTE headed by Elba Esther Gordillo has denounced the government action, and other sections of the teachers’ union have announced their solidarity with the Oaxacan teachers.

In the aftermath, the national Secretary of State (and former Secretary of Labor) has announced that there will be no more displays of force in Oaxaca; human rights groups are calling foul; and Subcommandante Marcos chimed in.

Or, perhaps, pre- and post-debate.

There’s this NYTimes article from June 4.

And, there’s this LATimes article from June 15.

Both about AMLO.

Refoma’s latest poll gives AMLO a narrow lead over Calderon following last week’s debates. This is signifcant since the Reforma polls were the first to suggest Calderon had a lead in early May. Since AMLO claimed the May polls were bogus when they said he was behind, it will be interesting to see how he responds to news that he is now ahead.

Trivia tidbit: The lead pollster for Reforma is a U of Michigan political science Ph.D. (ITAM professor, Publications, and CV)

Here’s the Bloomberg update.

Two.

And the second one is tiny.

This poll suggests that AMLO has a slight edge over Calderon, even a little beyond the margin of error. It’s the first to be published (that I know of, since Reforma requires a subscription for their content) since the televised debates last week.

Here’s Bloomberg’s coverage.

Here’s the Milenio article in Spanish.

UPDATE: The poll by El Universal suggests that Calderon has a narrow lead. Just goes to show how subtle differences in question wording and order may have an effect on poll results.

From my periodic series of photos of people in funny suits…..

It’s periodic because I only seem to be able to take these photos when I’m in Mexico.

Other photos from my Monterrey trip are posted to flickr.

Today I spent time trying to figure out how to keep a baby possum out of our kitchen (getting a trap from the county animal control and taking a trip to Lowe’s to figure out how to cover the hole s/he uses behind the oven), getting a new Mexico guide for my trip tomorrow (since I gave my old guide to a D.F. friend who was planning a trip to Oaxaca when I last left Mexico; getting the new guide required stops at 2 BnN), packing for my trip tomorrow (clothes and work-related stuff); and fending off a really bad headache (unsuccessfully).

So no progress.

And there will probably be no posts for the weekend, since I’m taking a trip to Monterrey to set up a new study abroad program for Summer 07 at ITESM. It’s not the D.F. (by a long shot) but it will have to do. At least there will be real tacos and chilaquiles, and maybe some fruit salad or Mexican-style sushi (which reminds me….I should tell you my story about trying to find good, authentic chilaquiles in Atlanta, sometime). My trip may also include a baseball game, but only because I need good photos to help recruit for the study abroad (uhmmm, right).

Anything else I should do?

Stay on task.

On YouTube.

Typed up more notes. Not as much as I’d like.

But also had a very productive 2 hour meeting for a service project that I am working on. Since the project is paying some of my summer salary, I shouldn’t complain too much. Also, I handled some things pending for a scouting trip I’m taking to Monterrey on Thursday to set up a study abroad for next summer.

Tomorrow, I’m doing nothing but staying at home to work, though.

So earlier today, a commenter asked my opinion about recent developments in Mexico, and I said I’d have to follow-up later. Specifically, anonymous (who appears to be from the D.F.) wants to know what I think about the fact that gunmen shot at the armored SUV of the wife of a businessman who is in jail after videos surfaced two years ago showing him bribing a D.F. official and close aide of Lopez Obrador. This happened this morning, the day that new videos, documenting corruption by another AMLO-government official, were to be presented.

Since I can’t watch the debates, and I’m too zapped to work on the book (ok, that’s a bit of an excuse, I am just procrastinating a bit, but I’ll get back to work after I post), I poked around the interweb a bit to see what I could find.

Here’s the crop of articles that I skimmed quickly, followed by my reaction:

Milenio overview
Hearsay description of contents of videos that weren’t released (El Universal)
(I won’t speculate or comment on the fact that Robles and Ahumado chat on the phone.)
Lopez Obrador’s campaign claims videos won’t hurt him (El Economista)
Some inconsistencies hamper the investigation of the gun attacks (El Economista)–this is the story that is repeated most often

My summary of what happened and a little background for readers

A couple of years ago, while AMLO was Mayor of Mexico City (affectionately known as the D.F.), videos surfaced of a businessman (Ahumado) giving large bribes to a close aide of AMLO in the city government. The videos showed the aide grossly stuffing large bills into his pockets, etc. Lopez Obrador was able to claim that he didn’t know what his aides were up to and pretty well distanced himself from the corruption scandal. Some, however, continue to be skeptical…and skepticism is always helpful when you’re talking about Mexican politics.

Fast forward to now. Sometime recently (I don’t know exactly when; I haven’t followed it that closely), the businessman’s wife and/or others have said they would be releasing additional videos that further implicate officials in Lopez Obrador’s government of corruption. Those videos were to be released today. This morning at 6:30am, someone shot at the wife’s SUV as she took her children to school. Nine to ten bullets hit the vehicle.

The following items currently being reported lend themselves to interesting speculation and/or conspiracy building:

The presentation of the videos has now been postponed indefinitely, according to the wife.

The wife says all this could be cleared up if they would allow journalists to interview her husband.

The police claim that there are some problematic inconsistencies in the witness accounts of the shootings.

I’m fairly agnostic about the interpretation of events, but I can imagine how the pro-AMLO and anti-AMLO camps will try to spin these events.

The pro-AMLO spin:

This is just another example of the conspiracy against AMLO (possibly even engineered by Salinas). The videos won’t prove anything and probably don’t even have anything damaging. It’s all a stunt to try to make AMLO look bad. The videos, the shooting (the Suburban was armored, after all, so it wasn’t a serious attempt), the withdrawal of the videos is all a well-orchestrated stunt to smear AMLO just before the debates. If the videos really were damaging, they would have presented them anyway. They were trying to use the videos to blackmail the PRD city government into giving Ahumado certain privileges. This just goes to show how far the anti-AMLO forces will go to keep him out of office.

The anti-AMLO spin:

This is just more evidence of the bad, marginal, corrupt way that AMLO and his clique do politics. It’s not surprising given the types of seedy types his government has cultivated for support. (I’m imagining here people thinking about AMLO’s ties to leaders in some poor barrios of Mexico City.) Of course, some gangster shot at Ahumado’s wife to try to intimidate her into not releasing the videos, and apparently it has worked. If we elect AMLO, this is the type of gangsterism and lawlessness that we can expect to continue. Oh, and of course the pro-AMLO police are going to make it seem like a set-up; we all know we can’t trust the police.

So which is the truth? Heck, if I know.

The pro-AMLO position smacks of conspiracy-theory craziness, and the anti-AMLO position makes you wonder if supporters of AMLO would really be dumb enough to think that shooting at Ahumado’s wife would be better for AMLO than the videos being released. If his supporters are that simple-minded….Well, it doesn’t say a lot for him even if he is elected.

Or, at least I can’t get the feed to work. Maybe it’s blocking foreign IP addresses?

So, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to watch the videos on YouTube.

Bummer. I guess that means I get back to work now.

If you’re interested in watching or listening to tonight’s second debate among Mexico’s presidential candidates for the upcoming election, the Federal Electoral Commission Institute will be streaming it online at 8:30pm CST. This is the only official debate feed of the debate among the candidates.

Update: Read more about the rules and content of the debates.

Yesterday, I gathered all the materials for one chapter and typed notes for the chapter, too. Not as much progress as I would have liked, and I would hope that today would be better except that I have a service-related meeting this afternoon and will need to spend about an hour preparing for that. Grrr.

NOTE TO SELF: Next time I plan to write a book (or even just in general), type notes/summaries of the things I read as a I read them.

Read this FT article.

Pages written: 1-2
Chapters reorganized and outlined, but not entirely revised yet: 1

Goal for tomorrow: Finish outlining/taking notes for rest of chapter. Begin shaping it into final form. Get more done!

PS. Of course, I know no one really cares about my progress except me…but I find that it’s helpful to think that I’m going to post my progress each night before bed.

Caleron and Lopez Obrador in online news and searches.

Overall, today’s NYT Magazine story about the Lopez Obrador and the upcoming presidential election in Mexico is pretty good. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the conclusion:

As the presidential campaign enters its final and critical phase, there is no longer any question of where this campaign is being fought: on the terrain of populism. The fact that Calderón has chosen to challenge López Obrador there, on what had always been AMLO’s home ground, is a testament to how much López Obrador’s campaign has changed Mexican politics. Of course, if López Obrador goes on to lose an election that, three months ago, most Mexicans thought he would win, that fact is not likely to be much of a consolation to him.

I say that I don’t entirely agree only because I’m uncomfortable with the emphasis on populism, especially given its recent association in the press with several South American leaders. Rather than try to categorize candidates or races, why not provide a better explanation of their positions? But, I guess it wouldn’t be as catchy without a way to group a whole range of candidates and positions together.

Luckily, in the rest of the article, the author tries to provide a more nuanced portrait of Lopez Obrador and his positions:

López Obrador himself scoffs at these fears. “Change is possible,” he told me when we spoke in April on the patio of his home in the gated community of Galaxia in Villahermosa, the capital of his native state of Tabasco. “Of course I understand that globalization is a fact and that one has to act within its parameters. But this does not mean that we here in Mexico have to continue as we have been doing. This country is immensely rich. Its problems are problems of maladministration — above all, of corruption.” And he added, “The point is that the Washington consensus” — as the neoliberal model of development is known — “was applied more rigidly here, by successive Mexican governments, than it ever was in the U.S. and Europe, where there are many protected sectors, above all agriculture.”

The passage above suggests that Lopez Obrador is critical of neoliberalism but also understands that a return to the economic policies of the 1970s (i.e., populist spending) would be unwise. Which is why it is surprising that the author would then go on to write this statement about AMLO:

In fact, he insists, the model has not worked, and he vows that if he is elected, he will pursue a very different set of policies, ones that serve the poor rather than the rich.

What I’ve read doesn’t suggest that AMLO will pursue a “very different set of policies.” Instead, it seems that he will keep many of the neoliberal reforms in place (i.e., keep free trade provisions, will not nationalize industries that were recently privatized, respect central bank policy, etc.), but what he has promised to change is spending on the poor. Granted, how he’ll pay for all that is a difficult, and unanswered, question.

This passage about migration also reflects a more subtle picture of AMLO, the candidate:

“If I am elected,” he told me, “I will propose a conference on migration with the United States. Building a wall is not a viable solution. The only thing that will work is creating jobs in Mexico. Fox was not able to maintain good relations with Washington. But I can’t see any reason why I can’t succeed in doing so.”

This accomodationist language toward the United States might seem surprising coming from the politician the Calderón campaign has tried to associate with Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro’s greatest ally and the Latin American politician Washington fears most these days. But, in fact, it is consistent with the position López Obrador has taken throughout the campaign. His aides often point out that he has no quarrel with the United States, and in his campaign he reserves his scorn for the political and business establishment of Mexico. Although some American observers remain fearful of his leftist tendencies — The Wall Street Journal ran a column in March worrying that AMLO might be “laying the groundwork for an assault on the private sector” — none of the Americans I spoke to in Mexico seemed to believe that López Obrador will nationalize oil and gas resources, as Evo Morales has done and Hugo Chávez has threatened to do.

Update: After poking around the blogosphere some more, I find that Greg had a similar reaction to the article. The article is inconsistent–perhaps the effects of an editor trying to spice it up?

3.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the most economically advanced Latin American countries established extensive welfare institutions for government and industrial workers, only to begin the process of dismantling some of those institutions, notably pensions, in the last two decades of the century. Social insurance, including extensive pension, health, and worker’s compensation programs, protected formal sector workers, or those in the regulated labor market, in the majority of Latin American countries by mid-century. These welfare institutions were often central to the fabric of political life. The debt crisis of the 1980s ushered in a new economic orthodoxy and efforts in most countries to substantially reform social insurance institutions, though with varying success. The reform or privatization of public pensions was the most notable of this trend, though public health insurance was also targeted for reform. Given their political importance, the reform of these welfare institutions was (and is, where reform efforts are on-going) highly contentious. Despite the centrality of these welfare institutions to Latin American politics, few studies have systematically examined their political origins and historical development. This lacuna is conspicuous when compared to the extensive comparative literature on similar welfare institutions in the advanced industrialized economies of Western Europe and North America. This book begins to bridge this gap in our understanding of the dynamics of welfare in Latin America through a comparative historical analysis of social insurance institutions in Mexico since the Mexican Revolution.

The study of welfare in Mexico provides a good opportunity to deepen our understanding of the politics of welfare in Latin America because Mexico suggests a number of interesting theoretical puzzles. For instance, why would a country that was predominantly agrarian in the 1940s opt to invest considerable political and economic resources into welfare institutions that benefited a small, but growing, number of primarily urban, industrial workers? If the creation and expansion of welfare in Europe is associated with the expansion of suffrage to workers and the consolidation of democracy at the turn of the twentieth century, why were welfare institutions created during the consolidation of authoritarianism in Mexico? And, if organized labor was so co-opted and weak during the height of Mexican authoritarianism in the 1950s through 1970s, why was this the period of greatest expansion of welfare coverage and benefits? And more recently, if the regime that dominated Mexican politics for the majority of the twentieth century had so completely established control of organized labor, why was the regime unable to impose all the pension and health insurance reforms it favored during the 1990s? The answers to these questions, I argue, can be found in the relationship between organized labor and the state and in the processes of institutional change. My explanation is not one that stresses Mexican exceptionalism, though Mexican history does reveal certain particularities. Because my explanation is theoretically grounded in the literatures on welfare and institutional change, it emphasizes the theoretical affinities between the Mexican experience and those in other countries that have faced the incorporation of an organized working class into national politics.