Mexico's presidential election

Fresh face, same old party

The party that held power for seven decades is poised to take back the presidency. Is Mexico ready?

Jun 23rd 2012 | ATLACOMULCO

WITH its roving vendors of pork-scratchings and its stucco and ochre cathedral, Atlacomulco looks like a typical Mexican town. Its politics follow the traditional Mexican model too: plaques commemorate the good works of former governors, who all belonged to the same party and in some cases share the same surname. The newest notices hail the achievements of Enrique Peña Nieto (pictured), who completed his term as governor of Mexico state last year, the fifth man from his extended family to do so.

For seven decades this was the story of Mexico. Power remained within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and within what its founder, Plutarco Elías Calles, called the “revolutionary family”. Less blood was spilled on the road to democracy than in many Latin American countries, but it was a longer slog. Until 1989 the PRI ran all of the country's 31 states. It was another eight years before it gave up its majority in Congress. Only in 2000 was it finally prised out of Los Pinos, Mexico's presidential residence.

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Violence in Honduras

The eye of the storm

Timid steps to tame the world’s most violent country

Jun 16th 2012 | TEGUCIGALPA

LAST year Hondurans were about 80 times more likely than Western Europeans to be murdered. For men in their 20s, the odds were four times worse again. Poverty and a history of military rule meant that Honduras was never especially safe. But the murder rate has nearly doubled in the past five years. Barring war zones, this makes Honduras by most reckonings the most violent country in the world.

The cocaine trade, which over the past two decades was squeezed first out of the Caribbean and then from Mexico, bears much of the blame. “We are between those who consume drugs and those who produce them. Logically, we are a corridor of traffic,” says Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes, Honduras's security minister. In 2000 Honduras and the six other small Central American countries, all told, seized less cocaine than Mexico. By last year they captured 12 times more than their northern neighbour.

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Mexico's presidential election

Little pain for Peña

A much-watched debate fails to shake the front-runner

Jun 16th 2012 | MEXICO CITY

THE first of Mexico's presidential debates, aired last month, was snubbed by one television network in favour of a football match. The second and final one, broadcast on June 10th, attracted more viewers than any previous debate in Mexican history, as 15m tuned in at home and thousands crowded around giant screens in public squares. The election may be a done deal, according to most pollsters, but a somnolent campaign has at last come to life.

Browse our slideshow guide to the leading
candidates for the Mexican presidency

None of the candidates landed a knockout punch in the more than two hours the debate lasted. Enrique Peña Nieto, who leads most polls by around ten points, tried to remain above the fray. Rather than attacking his rivals, he took the opportunity to outline his policy pitch of “effective government”. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist leftist, improved on a slightly rambling performance in the previous debate, but did not seem to do much damage to Mr Peña.

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The media and Mexico's election

The battle of the airwaves

Curbs on election advertising have not broken the power of the media moguls

Jun 2nd 2012 | MEXICO CITY

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”.

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The Dominican Republic

After Leonel

The new president risks governing in his predecessor’s shadow

May 26th 2012 | SANTO DOMINGO

Fernández, Cedeño and Medina keep the party going

ECONOMIC storms have battered the Caribbean of late, blowing away the tourists and remittances on which most islands depend. Most of the region has barely seen any growth since 2009. Several governments have been washed away by the slump: in the past six months unhappy voters have kicked out the ruling parties in Jamaica and the Bahamas. But the sun still shines in the Dominican Republic, where growth has continued at over 5% a year. On May 20th Dominicans duly rewarded the ruling Dominican Liberation Party (PLD). But only just: Danilo Medina, its presidential candidate, won 51% of the vote, amid allegations of fraud.

Mr Medina faced a weak opponent in Hipólito Mejía of the Dominican Revolution Party, who campaigned under the enigmatic slogan “Here's Daddy”. Mr Mejía mishandled a banking crisis when he was president between 2000 and 2004. He cried fraud this week. Observers from the Organisation of American States certified the election result but confirmed reports of vote-buying. Participación Ciudadana, a local NGO, says that both main parties offered between 500 and 2,500 pesos ($13 to $65) to buy people's voting cards. No one knows the scale of the fraud, but the electoral authorities received 400,000 applications for duplicate cards in the weeks before the poll. The government's vote-buying appeared greatly to exceed that of the opposition, claims Francisco Álvarez of Participación Ciudadana.

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Mexico's drug war

Storm clouds with silver linings

A series of choreographed horrors belies an overall drop in killings

May 19th 2012 | MEXICO CITY

MURDER has become so common in parts of Mexico that gangsters craving attention must go to ever more appalling lengths. The 49 or so mutilated bodies dumped on May 13th on a roadside close to Monterrey, a wealthy city near the Texan border, were enough to make the front pages. The massacre was the worst since last August, when 52 people were killed in an arson attack on a casino in the same city. The latest outrage may be even deadlier: investigators are still not sure how many victims the body parts add up to.

The horror diverted attention from a rare drop in Mexico's overall murder rate. The opening quarter of 2012 saw the first year-on-year fall in killings since the government's assault on the gangs got going in 2007. The 5,037 murders (which include ordinary killings as well as mafia hits) represented a 7% drop compared with the same period last year, and a 17% decline compared with the worst three months of last summer. The government no longer breaks out mafia-linked murders, but Reforma, a newspaper, reckons that so far this year these are 10% down on last year.

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Central America's gangs

A meeting of the maras

Precarious truces between gangs have lowered the murder rate in two of the world’s most violent countries—but for how long?

May 12th 2012 | SAN SALVADOR

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  An alleged gang member arrested during a raid in Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador.

  AFP
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  More than 13 members of the "Mara Salvatrucha" gang were arrested on murder charges after a raid in Mejicanos.

  AFP

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MEMBERS of El Salvador's maras, or street gangs, make little effort to hide their affiliations: they can be spotted easily thanks to their head-to-toe tattoos. Formed in Californian jails and exported back to Central America by deported migrants, the mobs have made El Salvador one of the world's most violent countries. Last year 4,374 murders were committed, as the gangs fought for territory—a rate per head 15 times higher than in the United States.

But now quiet reigns in the country's roughest districts. In March the two main gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, declared a truce, cutting the murder rate by two-thirds overnight (see chart). Police say May has been even calmer. The rate is now close to that of fairly stable Brazil.

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