Mexico Ex-President: Unite for Old Ruling Party

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox of the ruling conservative PAN party angered his fellow partisans and leftists alike today by seemingly endorsing front runner Enrique Peña Nieto of the opposition PRI party.

The Associated Press: Former President Vicente Fox is asking Mexicans to unite behind the Institutional Revolutionary Party's candidate if he wins the presidency, a stunning call given that Fox ended that party's 71-year grip on power in historic 2000 elections.

Fox's comments over the weekend angered members of his own governing National Action Party, whose candidate is badly trailing Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI, as the former ruling party is known, in the polls.

"It is clear there is an apparent winner" in the July 1 election, Fox said, referring to Pena Nieto's lead in the polls. He added that "we should unite around the winner."

When Fox defeated the PRI as the National Action candidate, his victory was seen as heralding the arrival of true democracy to Mexico. The PRI had governed Mexico since 1929 with what critics said was a blend of authoritarianism, corruption and electoral fraud. Read more.

Mexico's Pena Nieto feels the heat with finish in sight

Reuters: Two months before Mexico's presidential election, Enrique Pena Nieto was strolling to victory. But with just a month to go, he may suddenly have a race on his hands.

Long dormant opposition to Pena Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has welled up over the past three weeks to throw the result of the July 1 election into some doubt, raising the risk of yet another government with no majority in Congress.

Fired by youth activism on the Internet, a protest movement tapping into allegations of corruption and authoritarianism that dogged the PRI in the past has arisen to dent Pena Nieto's once-commanding lead.

"This is a danger to him because it could cause a kind of snowball effect, bringing together several things at the same time," said Federico Berrueto, director general of Mexican polling firm GCE. Read more.

For Mexico’s middle class, drug war deepens trust deficit

Throughout the country, not only are levels of trust in public institutions - government, courts, and police in particular - very low, but now even among ordinary Mexicans. As cartels shift their focus from the wealthiest Mexicans, the middle class is increasingly the target of extortion and other crimes and less trusting of neighbors and co-workers. 

Washington Post: CUERNAVACA, Mexico - By many measures, this country has made great strides in recent decades toward becoming a middle-class society, with broader access to education, consumer goods and professional careers that promise upward mobility.

And yet, while prosperity has expanded here, researchers and polling experts say Mexico remians stricken with a form of social poverty that presents a vexing obstacle to the emergence of a more developed, democratic neighbor on the southern U.S. border. 

Mexico's trust gap is considered especially threatening as the country struggles to keep the corrupting powers of billionaire drug cartels from further undermining democracy and the rule of law. If Mexicans don't trust police and political leaders, and they're too wary of fellow Mexicans to join citizen campaigns and social movements, scholars say, there may be no one left to turn to. Read more. 

Mexican youth protest in streets against corporate media and PRI candidate

Washington Post: MEXICO CITY - Compared with historic, brutal, high-stakes presidential elections here in the past, this has been an important but blah campaign season in Mexico. But recent protests by college students and other young people have added a spark. 

Members of the under-25 demographic are calling out the country's duopolistic media companies and politically cozy broadcasters as propaganda masters and kingmakers - while warning that the front-running candidate, the telegenic Enrique Peña Nieto, is an empty suit.

The only problem with this narrative is that more young people support Peña Nieto than they do his challengers, according to polls, which may make the protests here, led by urban university students, a well-meaning but ultimately meaningless blip. Read more. 

The media and Mexico’s election: The battle of the airwaves

The Economist: WITH a month to go until the presidential election, Mexicans switching on their televisions and radios can hardly avoid the candidates vying to win their votes on July 1st. In a country with more televisions than refrigerators, dominating the airwaves is crucial to being elected. But ownership of the broadcast media is highly concentrated.

Most people get their news through free-to-air television, a duopoly shared by Televisa and TV Azteca. Televisa, with about 70% of the audience, is forever associated in the public mind with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000. In 1990 the network’s chief commented that it was “a soldier of the PRI”.

Many suspect that the media are still for hire: Reforma, a newspaper, published receipts last month suggesting that Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI’s presidential candidate, during his six years as governor of Mexico state spent about $3m for journalistic “mentions” as well as $90m on public information. Mr Peña says the payments were all for legitimate publicity. Read more. 

Mexico drug war displaces families in Sinaloa highlands

latimes.com: CULIACAN, Mexico — For generations, the extended Hernandez family tended fields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madre highlands.

They sold their crops to representatives of the Sinaloa cartel for a fraction of what the drug would bring at the U.S. border and eked out a pittance.

Barefoot children never went to school; they just helped their dads with the planting and harvest. Women washed clothes in the river. They burned pine sap for light at night because there was no electricity.

But a couple of weeks ago, the fighting that has raged as the Zeta paramilitary force tries to encroach on the Sinaloa cartel's turf reached the string of ranchitos where the Hernandezes and scores of other families farmed. Read more. 

Mexico left in the dark on Fast and Furious, ambassador says

latimes.com: WASHINGTON — The failed federal gun-tracking operation called Fast and Furious showed an "outstanding lack of understanding of how criminal organizations are operating on both sides of our common borders," the Mexican ambassador to the United States said.

In a forum Thursday on Capitol Hill, Arturo Sarukhan complained that his government had been left in the dark about operations to stop gun smuggling at the border. He also revealed that his government was conducting its own official investigation into how some 2,000 U.S.-purchased firearms made it across the border and into the hands of drug cartels amid the escalating violence in Mexico.

"Mexico was never apprised how the operation would be designed and implemented," Sarukhan told officials at a forum hosted by the New Democrat Network, or NDN, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization, and the New Policy Institute, one of its sister organizations.

"Regardless of whether this was or was not the intent or the design of Fast and Furious," Sarukhan said, "the thinking that you can let guns walk across the border and maintain operational control of those weapons is really an outstanding lack of understanding of how these criminal organizations are operating on both sides of our common borders." Read more.