As he heads to Washington this week to meet with US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves behind a year that was hardly what he had envisioned.
The Mexican president and his team started last year carrying out a slew of newly passed reforms, from breaking up telecommunications monopolies to opening the nation’s energy sector, earning him international plaudits, including a Time magazine cover with his image above the caption “Saving Mexico.”
Then came a one-two-three punch of scandals: Soldiers killing 22 civilians in a questionable “shootout;” the abduction and presumed murder of 43 college students, allegedly at the hands of local officials and police in league with a drug cartel; and revelations that Pena Nieto and his treasury secretary live in luxury homes built and financed by a favorite government contractor.
Photo: Reuters
What was supposed to be “Mexico’s moment,” a new era of transparency and reform, felt a lot like the same old age of violence and corruption.
Tens of thousands have taken to the streets since the 43 college students disappeared on Sept. 26 last year. Even institutions normally cautious about criticizing the government, including the Roman Catholic Church, have spoken out, and a Mexican protester even disrupted the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, to draw attention to the tragedy.
“The protests are an expression of people fed up with impunity, and indignant at the complicity between some authorities and criminals,” said Luis Raul Gonzalez, president of the normally politic Human Rights Commission, speaking directly to Pena Nieto at a recent public event.
When Pena Nieto took office two years ago, he promised Mexico would see a new Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had ruled Mexico for 71 years, often through coercion and corruption. After losing the presidency in 2000, the party portrayed itself as repentant and reconstructed.
Disillusioned by 12 years of opposition rule, many Mexican voters returned to the PRI on the theory it at least knows how to govern.
However, the purported “new PRI” has turned out to be younger politicians operating with the old playbook. Though its leaders were lauded for passing reforms, they had nothing to fall back on when violence knocked them off their message of economic growth.
They sent police to crack down on protesters, calling the unrest a plot to “destabilize” the government and undermine reforms.
Pena Nieto told the country it was time to “move beyond” the case of the 43 students just weeks after their abduction and he took a month to meet with their families.
The administration has tried to explain away the president’s US$7 million mansion by saying it belonged to his wife, former soap opera actress Angelica Rivera, and it said Mexican Secretary of Finance and Public Credit Luis Videgaray bought his house before he officially took office, although he was part of Pena Nieto’s transition team.
Yet, he is facing a Mexico much changed in the years since the PRI left office, when the country was still largely isolated, had very little investigative media and no citizen watchdogs armed with mobile phone cameras and social media.
Mexicans have responded irreverently to Pena Nieto’s defenses, which they have seen as arrogance and disconnect. One protest sign declared that it is not demonstrations that are destabilizing Mexico, but “your narco-government corruption.”
Mexican Cabinet Secretary Aurelio Nuno admitted to Spanish newspaper El Pais that the government did not have an adequate plan to deal with insecurity because it had not understood the dimensions of the problem.
Nevertheless, he said the answer was in economic reform.
“We’re not going to substitute the reforms for theatrical acts of grand impact,” Nuno said, describing protesters as being interested only in “blood and circus.”
Pena Nieto’s economic strategy has yet to pay off in investment or growth — one of the main reasons his approval ratings recently hit 38 percent, the lowest for any Mexican president since the peso crisis of 20 years ago.
Oil prices are in the basement, just as Mexico is opening its energy sector to foreign bidders, and job growth is stagnant.
The question for most Mexicans as the year begins is whether Pena Nieto will take the opportunity to finally tackle corruption and impunity — the main obstacles they see to the bright future he espouses.
For many in the country, that would be Mexico’s moment.
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