Author: michelle

Elba Esther, destroyed but not defeated

La Maestra finally stepped down from her PRI post, saying that she could be destroyed but not defeated, to quote Hemingway. This article has a very good history of her conflict with Madrazo over the last 5 years. Madrazo is relieved. Other PRIistas are relieved. And the PRI leadership has already been reorganized.

Meanwhile, La Maestra has not ruled out her own presidential bid, though finding a registered party that doesn’t already have a candidate may be a challenge. She’s not ruling out a small party, however. She had much more to say, and most of her statement is reprinted by La Jornada.

If I were a Mexican politician, I think I would be more worried now that she’s untethered to any one party. At least if she’s in your party, you can try to reason with her. On her own, who knows what trouble she can cause.

AMLO PRD candidate by default

The PRD will submit the paperwork to officially make AMLO its candidate for President in 2006. (Though the exact timing of the submission will be delayed because of election rules and legal concerns.) They will forego the open primary that was planned. Lopez Obrador is the only candidate that registered with the party for the nomination.

How’s that for democracy?

Capital flight?

Between January and July of this year, Mexicans have sent over 1 billion US$ abroad for safekeeping. Moving your money abroad before an election is nothing new in Mexico, especially given the devaluation after Salinas left in late 1994. (Although, in 1994-95, a lot of the capital that left was foreign in the first place.) This year, however, Mexicans have already sent more money abroad than they did in 2000, which should give you a good sense of public sentiment and uncertainty concerning the 2006 elections.

From my inbox….

Need a place to send that manuscript of non-results lying dormant in your bottom drawer? Try this new journal this new journal. (Thanks for the correction, Chris.)

I wonder, what would Munger think? Would a publication in the Journal of Spurious Correlation be better than no publication at all?

As a Popperian social science, I often wonder why major political science journals only publish results that support hypotheses and few that falsify them. Since political science is a Popperian social science (in general), why do major journals in the discipline only publish results that support hypotheses and few that falsify them? Maybe this is one step in that direction.

No campaigning in the U.S. in 2006

The Mexican Federal Electoral Institute finally issued some guidelines for absentee voting by Mexican nationals living abroad and campaign activities abroad in 2006.

According to La Jornada:

Estas opciones, impulsadas en principio por el PRD, permitirían subsanar la ausencia de campañas que por disposición expresa de la legislación operará en el proceso electoral de 2006. En el documento que este miércoles habrá de aprobar el Consejo General del IFE, se establecen prohibiciones mas allá de las campañas y se alude incluso a las actividades ordinarias:

“Durante el proceso electoral federal, en los plazos establecidos por el Código Federal de Instituciones y Procedimientos Electorales -en cuanto arranque del proceso electoral, en octubre próximo-, los partidos políticos no podrán erogar recursos provenientes del financiamiento público o privado, en cualquiera de sus modalidades, para actividades ordinarias en el extranjero”, definidas éstas como todas aquellas que no estén comprendidas en las actividades de campaña.

Ello, además de ratificar las disposiciones de ley, subrayando la expresión “en ningún tiempo”, que fue el supuesto que argumentaron para sugerir al aspirante perredista, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, no salir a Los Angeles. En el artículo 2, se cita que “se entienden como actos de campaña las reuniones públicas, asam-bleas, marchas y en general aquellas actividades en las que los partidos políticos, sus candidatos o voceros se dirijan al electorado para promover sus candidaturas” a los diferentes puestos de elección.

En este supuesto se considera que los partidos políticos que realizan actividades de campaña a través de sus candidatos, dirigentes, militantes, simpatizantes, empleados, e incluso personas ajenas a estos organismos, si los actos de estos últimos inciden en el cumplimiento de las funciones del partido político, así como en la consecución de sus fines. Asimismo se estipula que los partidos tienen prohibido contratar en México o en el extranjero, por sí mismos o por interpósita persona, mensajes o propaganda electoral que se difundan fuera del país, cualquiera que sea su duración, contenido o formato.

I guess that means that we won’t get any campaign stops in the U.S., nor we will get to watch campaign ads on Spanish-language television in the U.S. On the other hand, I wonder how this will affect parties with foreign offices, like the PAN. Will they have to close?

Calderon “feels like a winner”

At an impromptu news conference (that, not incidentally, was covered in the leftist La Jornada), Calderon said he already felt that he had won the PAN nomination and was looking toward the elections in 2006.

He said that Creel’s problems had to do with his strategists and that Cardenas Jimenez sought to divide, rather than unite, PANistas.

When asked about whether there was a place for Elba Esther in the PAN if she is expelled from the PRI (see related story about procedures to expel La Maestra), Calderon said he didn’t think La Maestra was looking for another party and that he wanted to “dialogar con los maestros de México, encontrar las diferencias y resolverlas por el bienestar de la educación nacional.”

This is fairly consistent with the PAN’s strategy toward teachers in general; try to talk directly to teachers without engaging the union. Such a strategy seems more feasible in the post-2000 world, where the teachers’ union, too is being pulled this way and that by political alliances with the PRI and the PRD at different levels of organization.

Fighting fire with fire

As I’ve mentioned before, the workers of the Mexican Social Security Institute, which is the largest public health care institution in Mexico, have an on-going conflict with the Institute’s administration.

This week, the union plans to submit a counter-reform proposal to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies in order to overturn the August 2004 reform. Essentially, since all its legal options via the Mexican courts have not stopped the reform, the union has decided to try fighting the reform in Congress.

As the article points out, the union will need to get support not only from the PRD, but also smaller opposition parties like the PT and Convergencia and a section of the PRI. The Congressional committee that will need to vote to pass the reform initiative to the flow is chaired by a PRDista and leader in the teachers’ union. Several of the committee members are PRDistas, who are more likely to support the union’s counter-reform proposal since they voted against the August 2004 initiative. On the other hand, most of the PRIistas on the committee voted in favor of the reform in August 2004, even though they are union reps themselves. I’d give the initiative a 50-50 chance of getting out of committee, though the union official cited in the article talks about it as a sure thing. If it does make it out of committee, I’d say pre-election politics have a lot to do with it.

The strike deadline for the new contract expires in mid-October. The union could shut down the public health care system by striking and maybe even rally enough support for a general strike. In the past, the union leadership avoided such measures, in large part because its leadership was closely associated with the PRI. At the same time, the union is technically an “unofficial” union (i.e., not formally allied with the PRI) and is one of the founding members of the UNT, an organization of “independent” unions.

In August 2004, the main leader of the union was roundly criticized by the rank-and-file and other independent union leaders for not standing up to the social security administration and mobilizing the full weight of the union. Since then, delegations and sections of the union have been cozying up to the PRD, and the umbrella organization to which it belongs (the UNT) has formalized its alliance with the PRD in 2006. It’s not likely that the union leadership will be able to maintain its close ties with the PRI if it’s being pressured from above and below to rethink that alliance. Further, it’s not likely that the PRI would consider credible any union promises for future electoral support of the party. (See also: Some say Elba Esther can’t promise the PRI the teacher vote either.)

All this leaves me wondering whether the union leadership will indeed strike in October and try to force the administration’s hand. The current political context makes it seem more likely than ever.

Viva Mexico Cabrones!

Go to story from El Universal.

Today is Mexican Independence Day. Tomorrow, everyone will be crudo and sleep in.

If you want to smear your enemy….

Say they hang out with Salinas. At least, that strategy works in Mexico.

Lopez Obrador cancels campaign stop in L.A.

As I mentioned before, now that the government has approved absentee voting, politicians have an incentive to court the 1.5 million voters (of an estimated 3 million citizens) who reside in the U.S. AMLO was going to visit a Mexican Independence Day celebration tomorrow in L.A., but cancelled it due to warnings from IFE that it might violate election law.

Belated Mexican politics update

Last Sunday, the PAN held its first stage of the internal election to determine its presidential candidate for 2006. The forerunners were Santiago Creel (Secretary of State under Fox) and Felipe Calderon. Caleron won with 45.6% of the vote, while Creel came in second with 35.5%. (You can listen to audio of the press conference online.) Creel had been criticized for his involvement with the desafuero of Lopez Obrador and more recently, his approval of gambling concessions that were ultimately rescinded.

Since the elections, some have asked what high levels of abstention mean for the democratic process within the PAN. You can visit Calderon’s website and read a summary of his experience.

Updated to add: You can visit the PAN’s election website and view a map of the remaining elections.

The remaining stages include votes in the North and South and the D.F., but it’s likely that Calderon will stay in front. Creel is unlikely to garner a larger margin in many of those states, and will certainly do worse in his home district, Mexico City. His performance as Secretary of State and participation in the desafuero has not endeared him to many, including many PANistas (who in the past voted for the PAN as a vote against the PRI). Cardenas Jimenez is a very distant third, and while he may do well in his home state of Jalisco (where he was governor), Calderon also has yet to compete in his home state of Michoacan (though his ties to the state are perhaps weaker than Cardenas’s ties to Jalisco). I think Cardenas Jimenez will have a difficult time overcoming Calderon. Calderon has had a high profile in the party (former President of the Party in the late 1990s) and publicly, but has also avoided major posts with controversy (with the Secretary of Energy being a possible exception), which gives him legitimacy without all the baggage of Creel.

That Calderon had already begun distancing himself from Fox and Creel will only be to his advantage, now that some claim that Fox is trying to interfere in the internal struggle tearing apart the PRI.

Essentially, as I have explained before (but am too lazy to dig through the archives to find the links), the President of the PRI was Madrazo and the Secretary General (#2) of the PRI was La Maestra or La Profesora or Elba Esther. Madrazo wants to be the PRI candidate for President of the country, but to do so, he must step down as President of the PRI. The statutes of the PRI dictate that the Secretary General would automatically take his place. Since La Maestra is such a polarizing figure and many PRIistas do not support her, this has caused many problems. Non-Elbista PRIistas fear, and perhaps rightly so, that once in control of the PRI as President, she would control the PRI with an iron-fist as she has the teachers’ union for decades.

This means that since April, the PRI has been trying to figure out some way to allow Madrazo to step down without allowing Gordillo (Elba Esther) to entrench herself in the PRI Presidency. Talks were made of a pact allowing a short-term transition and then the election of a new PRI President and CEN (National Executive Committee), but few of the PRIistas trust each other to not defect from any pact, and again, probably rightly so. [There’s probably a really neat game that could be used to model the interactions, and since the PRI institutions are weak, defectors are probably not likely to be punished, making cooperation that much more difficult.]

It seems that the PRI figured out a way to get a new President without allowing La Maestra to take the post, but it involved calling a meeting and making some changes and decisions that didn’t necessarily follow the letter of PRI statutes. And, unfortunately for the PRI, there is now external oversight of internal party processes, including a court designed to resolve conflicts and hear disputes, to which La Maestra filed a petition contesting the decision to replace Madrazo with Mariano Palacios Alcocer. The tribunal has decided only some of the issues under review, granting a small procedural win to the PRI, but the main claim by La Maestra has yet to be reviewed. I wouldn’t bet on the remaining cases filed by either side.

Madrazo is now saying that Fox has been working with La Maestra to undermine the PRI and is especially interested in supporting the Elbistas now that his horse in the PAN race has lost. (There have been other instances where the media have suggested that Fox and La Maestra have formed pragmatic alliances. Again, too lazy to look up my previous posts, but they exist.) There’s talk of expelling her from the Party, but she won’t go without a fight. (Though she has had several health problems in recent years that may make it more difficult.)

The other five pre-candidates for the PRI (remember Todos Unidos Contra Madrazo, TUCOM?) are notably quiet during this fracas. I’m thinking it can only hurt Madrazo and make him even less likely to “win” the PRI nomination, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still nominated.

(What’s the difference? Well, I think this public struggle with La Maestra will only hurt even more his public image and he will lose any waning public support he might have had. Since internal PRI election procedures are closed to registered members of the party and the potential for fraud is still real, I wouldn’t be surprised if Madrazo was still “elected” to be the PRI candidate. I think he’s one of the weaker PRI candidates in a race against Calderon and Lopez Obrador, though.)

In a Calderon, Lopez Obrador, and Madrazo race, I would put my money on either Calderon or Lopez Obrador. I think Jackson would be a poor choice, too, given his role in the desafuero. It’s going to be an interesting election year.

Number of spam in my mailbox this morning?

18.

You might think that teaching at a Tech school with a top ranked CS department would mean that your IT department would filter this stuff better than gmail or hotmail, but it doesn’t.

Favela tourism

See Rio the way thousands of favela residents see it:

“In a very central part of the city (Laranjeiras/Santa Teresa), inside Rio´s most beautiful and tranquil favela, the unique Hostel “Favelinha” welcomes travelers from around the world. It gives backpackers and other interested tourists the opportunity to discover what life is like for a great majority of Rio´s inhabitants. You will be amazed at how friendly you will be welcomed by the people in the favela and you will not believe your eyes when you step out on your balcony and start to overlook the bay of Guanabara, the sugar loaf and some of Rio´s famous beaches like Botafogo and Flamengo.”

Favela where Pousada Favelinha is located.

According to this story in a major Brazilian news magazine, only 20% of Rio residents live in favelas.

Favela tourism has been around for a while, though the local guide we used for our study abroad trip in 2003 told us that it was too dangerous to visit the favelas at that time. (And, maybe it was too dangerous to take 20 young U.S. students. On the other hand, he took us to see live, street capoiera in an area crawling with paint-huffing street children, so it’s all relative.)

Here’s a satellite photo of Rio’s largest favela (Rocinha), which is less than a kilometer from the beach and very close to some of the most expensive real estate in Rio.

If I remember the geography of Rio correctly, you can see the favela Rocinha in the background of this Ipanema beach photo. It’s the area sloping up the hillside.

I was only in Rio 4-5 days with our study abroad program, but I was amazed at the extent to which the violence and poverty associated with drug running and the favelas was kept away from the touristy areas near the beach (where our study abroad was centered). The order in the Copacabana and the Ipanema areas belied the poverty and dangerousness associated with urban Brazil. Whereas, even when you’re in ‘nice’ parts of the D.F., you can still sense the poverty and disorder and feel that the city is living on the edge of chaos.

For a Amores Perros-like look at life in the favelas, you can watch City of God. (I admit that I haven’t seen this one yet. We missed it on the big screen, and then didn’t really want to watch it while living in Mexico City. Just like I wouldn’t watch Amores Perros while living in the D.F. It would just heighten anxiety about living in the city.

For a Hollywood-esque look at life in the favelas, you can watch Orfeu, with music by Caetano Veloso.

For a sense of the optimism of the late 50s when economic prospects looked good for Brazil, I recommend Black Orpheus. (Orfeu is a bad remake of the classic.)

Thanks, Elena Mary, for the suggestion.

New site on Brazilian politics

Here. Not much content yet, but it has the potential to grow.

According to an article in the Comparative Politics section newsletter, five percent of all comparative dissertations are about Mexico. Maybe I should start a Mexican politics site. Any takers?

Privatizing Pemex?

Mexican President Fox had a substantial reform agenda when he took office in 2000. Among the proposed reforms were privatization of government employee pensions, complete fiscal reform, and privatization of the energy sector, including both Pemex and electricity. So far, the administration hasn’t made much progress on its neoliberal reform agenda; competitive politics seems to keep getting in the way. With just one legislative session left in his administration, Fox has stepped up plans to privatize public sector pensions and allow private investment in the petroleum sector.

Essentially, revenues from the state-owned oil company, Pemex, have been used to support the government and too little has been invested in the petroleum infrastructure. (Petroleum is largest source of GDP in Mexico. Tourism is the second largest source of GDP, though some estimate that remittances from Mexican workers in the US may move into second place sometime this year or next.) Now that the Pemex infrastructure needs significant investment, some politicians are calling for private investment in petroleum development. Some on the left want to allow private pension fund administrators (Afores) to invest in domestic petroleum. Others want to open it up to both domestic and foreign investors.

It appears Fox is making one last push to get a reform that would allow some private investment and participation in the petroleum sector in Mexico. Opposition will be fierce, and some say it’s the beginning of a slippery slope to privatization. There’s also a proposal to develop the natural gas market, as well.

New Social Statistics Blog, led by Gary King

According to the email sent to the POLMETH list, the new blog has been:

…created by a group of graduate student affiliates of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard and me [Gary King]. The graduate students represent a wide range of academic disciplines, and plan daily posts intended to make public some of the hallway conversations about social science statistical methods and analysis at the Institute. We plan to cover a wide range of topics including current methodological trends, ongoing research results, papers presented (and discussion at) recent conferences and seminars. Some of the first posts are about the summer meetings of the Society for Political Methodology just held at FSU. Comments posted from those interested are encouraged.

I wonder what Tribble (via) would think of a Harvard grad student that blogs? Would they hire a Harvard blogger? Do Harvard bloggers get special permission to be creative, interesting and blog, while mere mortals must blog for all the wrong reasons? That a leading political scientist would organize a group of graduate students into a blog suggests, to me at least, that the Tribbles of the academic world may eventually be proven wrong.

What? APSA meetings boring?

Or, so the article in The Roll Call suggests.

The article, At Poli Sci Conference, Even the Wonks are Bored [sub required], begins thus:

Only an hour into the start of last week’s annual gathering of the American Political Science Association, Henry Kim, a doctoral student at the University of California at San Diego, is already playing hooky.

It’s “5 a.m. to us,” harrumphs a bleary-eyed Kim, as he hunches over his Starbucks coffee in the lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. After a cross-country flight and little sleep, Kim has no intention of attending any of the morning’s first slate of panels. Nor for that matter do his buddies Justin Phillips and Nathan Batto….

And

…But back to Kim and his buddies, who don’t appear that enamored with their fellow political scientists, either.
“It’s a boring crowd,” says Phillips, an assistant professor at Columbia University. “It can be a little on the dry side.”

Case in point: When Batto, a classmate of Kim’s at UC San Diego, points out a late-morning session on “Advances in Roll Call Analysis,” Phillips just rolls his eyes and laughs. “I will not be going to a panel on roll call votes,” he cracks.

Their sentiment is shared by prominent political scientist Stephen Wayne, who first started attending the 101-year-old conference in the 1960s as a graduate student. “I’m a glutton for punishment,” he quips, adding that he has no intention of going to any of the “proliferation” of mainly “boring” (and often sparsely attended) panel discussions, opting instead for a roundtable on political psychology…

And…as Paul pointed out, we’re poorly dressed in addition to being boring. From the Roll Call:

When it comes to the cool department, [Jeremy] Elkins says, most political scientists are woefully lacking, opting for spectacles and conservative suits. The wannabes, Elkins says, “dress in all black” or wear “workshirts” like his pal Norris. “You can be cool in political science and in the rest of the world you are just a big dork,” he adds. “Here, if your pocket protector is mauve you are cool.”

Within minutes, as if on cue, another friend, Joe Mink, a professor at Mount Holyoke College who hails from Texas and is clad in all-black, heads over to shake hands with Elkins. Mink describes his style as “alt-country” and shows off his stingray cowboy boots. “They sparkle in the sunlight,” he notes proudly.

But Mink appears to be in the minority when it comes to shining shoes.

The attendant of the hotel’s shoe-shining stand, Perry Ross, sits idly, with few immediate hopes of a customer. There may be no scarcity of shoes “that need service,” Ross says, but “they won’t come over. It’s the worst [conference] I’ve ever seen. … I don’t think I’d be a political scientist after seeing them.”

Conference fun

I didn’t attend APSA last week but will be attending a smaller conference this week. I’ve recently decided that smaller, focused conferences are more fruitful for disseminating research and networking than the big APSA-style events.

Just think, how many times have you heard someone complain at APSA that everyone walks around staring at everyone else’s name badge to figure out if they are worth talking to or acknowledging?

Well, I’ve come across (thanks to Brian) name badges that could make staring at everyone’s chest at conferences even more interesting.

Essentially, the badges have 4 LED lights that light up when you get within infrared range of other attendees with similar profiles. So, if Paul was standing in line to use the email stations at APSA and another public opinion researcher was waiting in line behind him, their badges would light up. And, Paul would automatically download all of that person’s contact information into his badge!

How creepy cool is that?

Mungowitz for Gubner?

Possibly, but only if NC will allow the Libertarians to appear on the ballot. Chris’s MungowitzWatch notes that Munger published this piece criticizing NC policies that effectively shut out third party or independent candidates. At the end, it indicates Munger’s intentions to run if the Libertarians are allowed on the next ballot.

NC is certainly not the only state with restrictive ballot rules. Kinky is also facing an uphill battle to get on the ballot in Texas.

Mexican social security news

Considering the tendency in Mexico to use social policies for political gain, the Secretary of Health, Julio Frenk, insisted this week that Seguro Popular , a program providing health insurance to those not covered by social security, would not be used for political purposes by the president’s party, the PAN. The criticism would be that benefits are targeted to current PAN supporters or selectively given to potential PAN supporters, rather than being distributed according to objective criteria of need or eligibility. In general, since Zedillo, most targeted poverty programs have received better marks for not being so obviously politically manipulated, but recent studies, including an on-going one by a Berkeley student, suggest that programs are still targets for political manipulation, at least at the margin. (I would link to her work, but it’s not online, that I know of.)

As a follow-up to my on-going coverage of the conflict between the social security union and the social security administration, there are two important items to report. You can find background on the conflict at these posts.

First, as many of the people I interviewed predicted, the courts rejected the union’s petition for an injunction against the law passed in August 2004 that changes the pension system for all new social security workers. The union can appeal again, but it is more likely that the union will look for new ways to fight the administration’s attempts to curtail their benefits and cut labor costs.

Second, the union’s claim that failures of the administration to efficiently collect and handle resources may represent that new strategy. The union is claiming that mismanagement has cost social security $1,500 million pesos (about 1.3 million US$). The claim was made at the presentation of a new book by the union:

En la presentación del libro La lucha de los trabajadores del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social 2003-2004, de Eduardo Pérez Saucedo, actual secretario del exterior del sindicato, los expertos hicieron una recapitulación de lo que ha significado la administración de Levy para el deterioro del instituto y el menoscabo de las relaciones laborales.

Pérez Saucedo hizo ver que el propósito de la investigación es dejar una memoria de la batalla que han librado los trabajadores para defender sus derechos laborales; evidenciar y documentar la política anti laboral del actual director del IMSS, así como la intentona por privatizar este instituto, entre otros de seguridad social.

Pérez Saucedo was one of several union leaders that I interviewed in May or June, and he was finishing this book at the time of our interview. I think it’s interesting that he is quoted as arguing that one of the intentions of the IMSS administration is to privatize the institution, something I have suggested may be a motive for confronting the union.

Others at the book presentation included a former Director of the social security institute in the 1980s, whom I have also interviewed before.

One researcher who consistently criticizes the social security administration was also there to point out that salaries and labor costs of the administration have increased by 400% over the last few years.

The court decision and the union’s criticisms of the administration are all going to color the upcoming labor contract negotiations that will occur before October.