Return of the Dinosaur: Mexican Elections 2012

Zocalo’s last act of the Mexican election campaign Lopez Obrador
Photo: Carlos Solís

There will be ‘no truce with the criminals’ pledges Mexico’s newly-elected President Enrique Peña Nieto.

He has slick shiny black hair which he combs into a small mountain at the front of his head, a nugget of gold for political cartoonists.

But this statement will come as a blow to many Mexicans, who are desperate for respite (however achieved) from the bloodshed, fear and chaos of the Drug War.

Over 60,000 have died as a result of this conflict in the last 10 years. The number is bigger still if you factor in the unidentified bodies in the growing number of mass graves around the country.

It’s not just those involved who become statistics. All Mexicans are affected in some way by the widespread extortion, corruption and thriving kidnapping industry radiating from the drug cartels as they compete for trafficking routes to the world’s biggest drug market: America.

The president elect, Peña Nieto, represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which took power after the Mexican Revolution ended in 1929 and held it for more than 70 years.

They were ‘the perfect dictatorship’ according to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

He was talking about the impressive knack they had for staying in charge; a delicate balance of nepotism, vote-buying, intimidation, media control, handing out gifts to poor communities and courting artists and intellectuals. Critics would only be made to disappear if none of the above techniques worked.

Their reign came to an end in 2000. It had taken two severe economic crises, a badly handled earthquake and a student massacre to change the system. The right-wing National Action Party (PAN) won the election, and Mexico was a democracy at last.

But now, 12 years later, the dinosaur (as it’s known in Mexico) is back.  Sunday’s preliminary election results give Peña Nieto 38 per cent, a 7 per cent margin over his leftwing rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador at 31 per cent. The incumbent PAN’s candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota was left with only 25 per cent of the vote.

Reports of PRI-style irregularities (vote-buying and coercion) were quick to surface. Leftwing candidate Obrador and his supporters want a total recount before they concede defeat.

Police guarding the Federal Election Institute (IFE) Photo: Carlos Solis

The Federal Election Institute (IFE) has just announced that legally there were enough anomalies for half the vote booths to be counted again.  But with Peña Nieto’s 3 million-vote margin it looks unlikely a re-count will be enough to change the results.

So, in an election that at this stage looks at least partly legitimate, it seems the country has chosen a party that few would dispute is at its core authoritarian.

Perhaps it wasn’t all bad under the PRI. After all, a firm hand had been appealing in the bloodstained aftermath of the revolution.

Now, with similar feelings of insecurity and helplessness, a certain nostalgia hangs in the air for the government’s cozy relationship with the cartels back in the PRI days, a relationship that seemed to keep things under control.

But rather than cooperate with the gangsters, Peña Nieto is opting for more cops. He plans to bring in 35,000 more federal police and strengthen ‘intelligence gathering’.

Beefy intelligence agencies and political police will be familiar to anyone who lived under the old regime.

This plan aside, Peña Nieto has announced few changes from the status quo.  He is set to continue with the incumbent President Felipe Calderon’s militarisation of the country, an approach that many argue has led to widespread human rights abuses and escalating violence as soldiers are given free reign over  communities.

The line between the military and the cartel members is blurry – it’s unclear how many soldiers end up serving as body guards for the drug gangs.

The Zetas cartel, which began life as an elite anti-narco division of the army, is now one of the most powerful and sadistic competitors for the drug market.

Peña Nieto has also indicated he wishes to stick with the current right wing economic policies such as building on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – a policy that has almost entirely destroyed the country’s food security, forcing many farmers off their land to be turned into human fodder for the drug war.

Now that a third of maize in Mexico is imported from America the price of tortillas, the life blood of most Mexicans, is highly susceptible to price fluctuation.

But this is no concern of Peña Nieto, who when grilled by a journalist from the Spanish newspaper El País, had no idea of the cost of a kilo of tortillas, “I’m not the señora of the house” was his response.

His señora of the house happens to be the queen of Mexico’s soapie stars, Angélica Rivera, not someone you would typically imagine buying tortillas at the local market.

As Mexicans digest the election results, many contemplate the irony that the more things change, the more they remain the same.