Mexico: Election politics of violence: Mexico's pattern of nose-thumbing at the law tied to deadbeat business culture

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Leaving aside the recent swarming of American law by illegals and their friends, the pall of Mexican law-breaking volatility has settled on that homeland too (should we call it "The Source">?). No longer a phenom of the Mexican side of the border, close to the USA, as in the case of Nueva Loredo, where renegade anti-drug forces have joined forces with the Mexico's drug mafia, la violencia mexicana has spread to Acapulco and other points, even more southerly, in honour of the upcoming national elections. El Presidente Vincente Fox may have displaced the 77-year one-party state of the then-archcorrupt Partido revolucionario instituto (PRI), but he has not been able to overcome his own complaisant approach to business, nor that of his owning-class, nor of the Mexican banks, and has allowed the internal economy of Mexico to drift aimlessly, dependent on tourists from the US and Canada, and the wages sent home to relatives by the illegals gone north.

While Mexico reproduces its population with a huge surplus yearly (modern medicine helps to the extent that the infant mortality rate is reduced), yet the entire infrastructure of the society is incapable of either educating or employing that ever-burgeoning population. Indeed, business investment doesn't happen, dosn't create new jobs, even tho they mite be as labour-intensive as the low-pay jobs found by the emigrants once they arrive illegally in the USA as immigrants. Mexican business doesn't generate jobs.

The news of the day is that election campaigns in Mexico are increasingly marked by horrific acts of violence, only sporadically and not so much an election death-squad movement yet (we are led to believe). But it's clear that the Iraqi war imagery, the TV newscasts of illegals filtering out and across the border to challenge los gringos of the new Minutemen movement statside, and the massing of the Mexican millions in cities all across the states - all this is having its combined effect within Mexico itself.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Street riots, decapitations of police officers by drug gangs and the worst union conflict in years have raised tension in Mexico's presidential race with the government under fire for its handling of the violence.

Thousands of police swarmed a town near Mexico City this week to free fellow officers taken hostage in riots that left a 14-year-old boy dead and led to scores of arrests.

The violence, triggered by a dispute with police over unlicensed flower sellers, came two weeks after two steel workers were killed during running battles with police sent in to break a long strike.

The same day, the heads of two policemen decapitated by presumed drug gang hitmen were found outside government offices in Acapulco, a symbol of the spiraling drug violence that has spread from the US border to Pacific coast resorts.

The events are unrelated and localized, and foreign analysts see little risk of wider instability. But they have raised the temperature of the election campaign, with one candidate warning of worse to come.

"Things are going to be violent," said Roberto Madrazo, who is running in third place as candidate of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for 71 years before it was ousted in the last election in 2000.

"We are going to have a very heated climate for the election."

While the Reuters report by Catherine Bremer, "Violence unsettles Mexican election campaign" (May5,2k6) downplays any pattern with the phrase "events are unrelated and localized," she gives the actual schematics away when, one page later, she adds that the machete-mob-run town of San Salvador Atenco has been linked up to the "rebel army on alert" under "Subcommandante Marcos" (no he doesn't command a submarine) in far-away Chiapas state to the far south - a strongly anti-evangelical terrorist movement manipulating the "Catholic" Mayan population there.

Fortunately there is some good news coming out of Mexico amidst all this mayhem, as in the last few weeks the Conservative Party's candidate for President, Felipe Calderon, has cawt up rapidly on his leading opponent, Luis Manuel Lopez Obrador. But not for love of Calderon's predecessor, the hapless Vincente Fox, whose lethargy in the face of a lethargic business culture and in policing the drugs and violence overload, has created the vacuum the left has tried to fill with further violence, tho the head of their ticket claims he's "a pacificst." The vote will take place July 2, 2k6. - Politicarp

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