Frontera NorteSur
Fourteen youths massacred at a house party in Ciudad Juarez. Fourteen men gunned down in a Tijuana drug rehab center. Bodies tossed about the suburbs of Acapulco. Indigenous leader Catarino Torres Pereda assassinated in Oaxaca. Secretly-taped audiotapes and anonymously-posted videos on the Internet stir the sordid pot of a political drama that seems to have a bizarre new twist every day.
Such are the headlines from Mexico in recent days.
Now, in a new book, an emblematic Mexican political leader assesses the political state of affairs in his nation-and the prognosis is not cheery.
For nearly four decades, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo has been a key personality in Mexico’s political class. Moving between left, right and center, Muñoz Ledo has performed various roles in national political life.
Interviewed about his new book by Proceso magazine, Muñoz Ledo, or Don Porfirio as he is sometimes called, termed Mexico not only a failed state, but one that had been thoroughly corrupted by organized crime. “(Narco-power) is already a political power, and in open defiance,” Muñoz Ledo said.
The Mexico City native once served as the head of the PRI political party that ruled Mexico with an authoritarian bent from 1929 to 2000, but then together with Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas and others formed the center-left PRD party that took on the old party of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
A 2000 presidential candidate for yet another party, Muñoz Ledo drew condemnation from the left when he ran against Cárdenas and then threw his support at the last minute behind Vicente Fox of the center-right PAN. Later, in 2006, he swung back to the left and supported Fox’s nemesis Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the latter’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency.
Muñoz Ledo also has served as a diplomat, representing Mexico in both the United Nations and the European Union.
The 77-year-old politician laid out two possible political scenarios ahead for Mexico. Stoked by Washington hawks, the first possibility implies deeper US intervention-including military-with the domestic effect of a “political substitution of civil authority for military authority,” according to Muñoz Ledo.
The veteran political leader blamed the administration of former President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88) for allowing the US drug war to encroach on “Mexican territory.” The fallout, he contended, resulted in the 1994 assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, as well as the collapse of the national state.
Muñoz Ledo is far from alone in taking aim at US policy in recent days. This month, several leading Mexican lawmakers urged a reevaluation and even suspension of the anti-drug Merida Initiative between Mexico City and Washington. Currently being tweaked as “Beyond Merida,” the multi-billion dollar policy has centered on law enforcement and contraband interdiction. It has been the pillar of US-Mexico policy under both the Bush and Obama administrations.
PRI Senator Francisco Labastida, a former governor of Sinaloa who ran as the PRI’s unsuccessful 2000 presidential candidate, blasted Merida as a big mistake. “(Merida) never should have been signed,” Labastida insisted. “They are surrendering sovereignty for a plate of lentils.”
The criticisms of Labastida and other senators from the PRI, PRD and PAN parties coincided to some degree with complaints from Mexican Defense Secretary Guillermo Galvan that little US aid had been delivered under Merida, and that US attempts to condition assistance represented an interference in Mexico’s internal affairs. For some time, the minimal human rights conditions attached to Merida by Washington have been a sore spot for the Mexican armed forces.
However, a growing network of international organizations and activists is demanding the suspension of US military and security aid to Mexico precisely on human rights grounds.
On October 26, several human rights groups issued a call for a broad revamping of US policy. In a statement, the groups cited the nearly 30,000 homicides linked to the drug war since late 2006, and “a huge increase in human rights violations by the armed forces and growing citizen opposition to the bloody ‘war on drugs’.”
Among others, the signatories included Global Exchange, Friends of Brad Will, former Mexican General Francisco Gallardo, Mexico’s Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, and the Guatemala Human Rights Commission.
For Muñoz Ledo, the reinvention of Mexican politics by a new generation, which he considered a more utopian possibility, presents the other potential solution to Mexico’s crisis. He said a “fantastic social mobilization” was needed to sweep away the rot of political corruption.
Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico