Tuesday, March 13, 2018
A wave of Independent Politicians Seek to ‘Open Cracks’ in Mexico’s Status Quo
Posted by DD Republished from NYT
READ IT HERE
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Lopez Obrador driving a lot of Mexicans loco
READ IT HERE
What happens in Mexico, well it’s not Los Vegas. We need to pay at least some attention. Not the end of National Action Party [PAN] or Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] I think we may see a move Left here. They do mention Occupy Wall Street. The same one also mentions José Mujica.
Kinda like out of the frying pan into the fire if that happens,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s leading presidential candidate, declared that if he wins the July 1 elections, his choice for head of NAFTA renegotiations will be Oxford economist Jesús Seade Helú. Seade Helú has worked as senior advisor at the IMF, principal economist at the World Bank, ambassador to the GATT, and chief negotiator at the World Trade Organization. He is currently professor of economics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Manuel_L%C3%B3pez_Obrador
Only one of the three independent candidates have appeared to fulfill the necessary requirements to compete in the Mexican presidential elections on July 1st, AP reports. The National Electorate Institute (INE) stated that conservative lawyer Margarita Zavala, two-term elected legislator and former First Lady during Felipe Calderón’s administration, was able to gather more than 866,593 signatures, or 1% of the electoral register, across at least 17 Mexican regions. The other two candidates—Nuevo León state Gov. Jaime Rodríguez and Guerrero state Sen. Armando Ríos Piter—were unable to pass the signature threshold, an INE spokesperson stated. Expected to have four contenders, the final presidential ballot is set to be announced on March 29 by the INE.
Mexican presidential frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Sunday that, if elected on July 1st, he will ask outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto to halt two upcoming oil auctions scheduled to occur before assuming office on Dec. 1st. Speaking in Mexico City on the 80th anniversary of Mexican nationalization of oil, the left-wing candidate of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) spoke about the prospect of reducing the privatization of energy, enshrined in a 2014 reform that aimed to eliminate state-owned oil monopoly.
Monday, April 2, 2018
Narcos promise Bishop they will “try” not to kill more candidates
Canadiana for Borderland Beat republished from Mexico Daily
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/narcos-promise-bishop-to-try-not-to.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
How Violence Could Hijack Mexico’s Presidential Elections
ANALYSISWritten by Patrick Corcoran – MARCH 28, 2018
https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/how-violence-could-hijacking-presidential-elections-mexico/
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
In narco mantas, leader of Los Rojos advises of ” rivers of money” for the Anaya campaign
Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Proceso article
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/in-narco-mantas-leader-of-los-rojos.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Sunday, April 8, 2018
3 body guards of the Chihuahua Governor shot in attack
Chivis Martinez Borderland Beat from Noreste and Chihuahua Governors Facebook page
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/3-body-guards-of-chihuahua-governor.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Friday, April 6, 2018
“Is Mexico’s democracy at risk? Is electoral fraud possible in the presidential elections?” Interview with John Ackerman
Posted by DD from TeleSur
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/is-mexicos-democracy-at-risk-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Thursday, April 19, 2018
‘We are watching you’: Political killings shake Mexico election
Posted by DD Republished from Reuters
By Lizbeth Diaz
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/we-are-watching-you-political-killings.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Mireles heads “pluris” of Morena in Michoacán Congress
Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from El Universal
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/04/mireles-heads-pluris-of-morena-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Mayor seeking state assembly seat slain in southern Mexico
Published: May 9, 2018
http://www.tampabay.com/mayor-seeking-state-assembly-seat-slain-in-southern-mexico-ap_world34750a28e8a44c35a3f2d16e3c50b051?utm_source=Today+in+Latin+America&utm_campaign=80cb03ef5b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73d76ad46b-80cb03ef5b-15293803
As vote nears, cartels stalk, kill
candidates
35 office hopefuls slain; 1,000-plus abandon races.
BY JEREMY SCHWARTZ JSCHWARTZ@STATESMAN.COM
HIGH STAKES FOR TEXAS IN ME XI CAN ELECTIONS
This story is part of the American-Statesman’s in-depth coverage of the July 1 Mexican
presidential election, which will have significant consequences for the evolving
relationship between Mexico and the U.S.
The stakes for the U.S. and Texas are high: Mexico’s next president will shape issues
including the flow of Central American migrants to the Texas border, the cooperation
with the U.S. in Mexico’s drug war and the future of commerce with Texas’top trading
partner.
A record number of Mexican immigrants living in the United States and Central Texas
are expected to vote, potentially playing a crucial role in determining Mexico’s next
leader.
STATESMAN IN-DEPTH ME XI CAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Around 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning earlier this month, a convoy of trucks carrying
heavily armed men entered the small, rural town of Ignacio Zaragoza, about 200 miles
south of El Paso in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua.
A half-hour later, a dozen buildings were ablaze and eight people were dead. The
extreme violence was targeted against candidates and officials with a left-leaning
political party hoping to gain seats in upcoming municipal elections.
Liliana García, a city council candidate with the Revolutionary Democratic Party, known
as the PRD, was among those assassinated. Mayoral candidate Felipe Mendoza, also a
PRD member, disappeared, his businesses burned to the ground and three of his
campaign workers killed.
The May 7 Ignacio Zaragoza massacre was the latest in a series of killings that have
claimed the lives of a record number of Mexican political candidates ahead of July 1
elections, when citizens will choose not just a new president, but thousands of state
and local office holders.
According to the Mexico City-based risk analysis firm Etellekt, at least 35 political
candidates have been killed since the campaign season started in September. An
additional 60 sitting office holders were killed over the same time period. The firm has
counted more than 300 “aggressions,” which include threats and assaults, against
candidates and elected officials in 222 municipalities, a staggering 9 percent of the
Mexican political landscape.
Some experts say the violence threatens to topple democratic norms in wide swaths of
the country.
As a result of the violence, candidates have dropped out of local races by the hundreds,
leaving electoral vacuums in parts of Mexico. In the state of Chihuahua alone, more
than 80 candidates have withdrawn from their races, according to the state election
secretary. The Excelsior newspaper has counted more than 1,000 resignations across
the country.
“It’s a troubling phenomenon, but what’s troubling is not just the violence, but the
underlying causes of the violence,” said Michael Lettieri, a senior research fellow at the
Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, in an interview.
As powerful drug trafficking cartels have fractured into smaller crime groups in recent
years, they have branched into peripheral activities like oil theft, extortion of local
businesses and kidnapping, activities that bring them into more conflict with local
authorities.
To some extent, the violence is aimed at installing friendly politicians or ensuring local
police won’t interfere.
But Lettieri said some groups now view municipal governments themselves as moneymaking
opportunities.
In the state of Michoacán, crime groups have demanded a percentage of municipal
budgets. In other parts of the country, they have demanded lucrative construction
contracts or forced local officials to put cartel members on municipal payrolls.
That means elected officials and government workers have become “unavoidable
targets,” according to Lettieri.
“The central problem is not necessarily the potential for corruption of elected officials,”
he wrote in a January analysis. “But the risk that local politics become a sort of plaza,
disputed by competing groups.”
Candidate undeterred
Against that backdrop, some analysts and supporters have expressed alarm about the
lack of personal security for presidential front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
who famously campaigns around the country without a noticeable presence of
bodyguards. In April, he generated headlines when he attended a campaign rally with
no apparent security detail in the tumultuous border city of Reynosa, across the Rio
Grande from McAllen and suffering from a protracted battle between cartels.
López Obrador, a left-leaning populist making his third run for the presidency, leads
most polls by double digits, and analysts say the race is his to win. A López Obrador
presidency would mark a dramatic shift from the current administration of Enrique
Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolution Party, known as the PRI, and some experts
believe he would challenge the United States on issues like Central American migration
and security.
On the campaign trail, López Obrador has signaled he might step back from the
strategy of direct military confrontation against the cartels and has floated the idea of
providing amnesty in exchange for the laying down of weapons.
The candidate, who left the PRD six years ago to form a new party called MORE NA, has
remained unconcerned about his personal safety during the campaign.
“My conscience is very clear; he who fights for justice has nothing to fear,” he told the
newspaper Tabasco Hoy. “I don’t bring protection, and I’m going to keep acting the
same way. Nothing is going to happen.”
His campaign manager has said the candidate is more worried about “espionage” than
his personal security.
But Mexico is just 25 years removed from its most notorious campaign trail
assassination.
In 1994, another presidential front-runner, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was killed in Tijuana
during a rally. Colosio had vowed to reform the PRI, which at the time was in the midst
of what some scholars call the party’s “perfect dictatorship,” a 71-year run of
uninterrupted rule based on deep electoral corruption.
Though Colosio’s killing remains unsolved, many believe his political enemies sought to
prevent the reforms he advocated.
López Obrador supporter Alejandro Solalinde, a well known human rights activist and
priest, has said he worries about political violence in the current climate, with a bitterly
divided electorate and more traditional candidates aligned with entrenched interests
trailing badly in polls.
“If they killed Colosio … my worry is that the same thing could happen to Andrés
Manuel López Obrador,” he said earlier this year at a press conference in Oaxaca.
“If they have taken out members of the opposition in a violent way, what says they
won’t do the same with Andrés Manuel?”
Recently, a well-known Mexican columnist was fired from several outlets after
appearing to float the idea of a López Obrador assassination on Twitter.
The statements by the journalist, Ricardo Alemán, have echoed the dark language used
against López Obrador for more than a decade. During his ill-fated 2006 presidential
run, López Obrador’s opponents labeled him a “danger to Mexico,” a strategy that some
analysts credit with both Felipe Calderón’s razor-thin victory and an ever-increasing
polarization of Mexico’s political life at the national level.
Threat to democracy Yet the vast majority of violence this election season has not
stemmed from clear political or ideological differences.
The Etellekt firm’s analysis shows assassinations have been spread throughout the
country’s major parties, with 32 assassinations of candidates and office holders with
the ruling PRI, 17 with leftist PRD, 10 with the conservative National Action Party,
known as PAN and six with López Obrador’s MORE NA.
The PRI has the largest footprint at the local level.
Laura Calderón, an analyst with the Justice in Mexico project at the University of
California-San Diego, likewise found little correlation between political parties and the
slayings of Mexican mayors between 2002 and 2017.
“There is enough evidence as to say that corruption is not exclusive to a single political
party,” she found in a January study. “(T)here is no substantial basis to target one
political party over the other under the assumption that they tend to be more
corruptible and bought by organized crime groups.”
The bulk of recent assassinations have taken place in the center of the country, the
scene of fights between crime groups over drug-producing areas, as well as the
profitable practice of theft from pipelines belonging to the national oil company Pemex.
Chihuahua and fellow border state Tamaulipas have seen a combined seven
assassinations, according to Etellekt.
In Ignacio Zaragoza, rival bands connected to the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels have been
fighting an extended battle for control that has consistently targeted political officials.
In March, the municipality’s treasurer, a PAN member, was taken from his government
office by armed men.
His body was later found in a neighboring town. According to El Heraldo de Chihuahua,
politicians in the town have long been linked to the warring cartels.
State officials with the PRD, to which the kidnapped mayoral candidate and slain city
council aspirant in Ignacio Zaragoza belonged, have called on the federal election
commission to suspend elections in the region.
Lettieri said the violence represents a fundamental threat to democracy in Mexican
towns and cities, a sad irony given that political action at the municipal level helped
bring the PRI’s uninterrupted rule of the country to an end in 2000, when Vicente Fox of
the PAN won the presidency.
“Local elections is where you saw democratic culture take root, where democracy
started in its embryonic form,” he said. “The risk is that if you have a withdrawal from
local politics because of fear, you could have a rollback of democracy at the local level.”
Despite the grim panorama, Lettieri believes there is reason for hope. He points to the
state of Sinaloa, home to one of the country’s most powerful cartels, where there has
been a rebirth of civic activism in some cities, as citizens struggle to reclaim public
spaces.
“We have to pay attention locally,” he said. “That’s where there are risks, but also
possibilities.”
Contact Jeremy Schwartz at 512-912-2942.
SILVIO CANTO, JR.
Sunday, June 03, 2018
Presidente Lopez-Obrador?
https://cantotalk.blogspot.com/2018/06/presidente-lopez-obrador.html
Mexico: Three More Female Politicians Murdered In 24 Hours
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mexico-Three-More-Female-Politicians-Murdered-In-24-Hours-20180602-0019.html?utm_source=Today+in+Latin+America&utm_campaign=58485c6666-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_04_01_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73d76ad46b-58485c6666-15293803
Thursday, June 7, 2018
PAN headquarters in Tamaulipas attacked
Translated by El Profe from La Silla Rota
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/pan-headquarters-in-tamaulipas-attacked.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Friday, June 8, 2018
Risk Atlas higlights vote buying and violence hot spots in Mexico
Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from Animal Politico
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/risk-atlas-higlights-vote-buying-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Video: Piedras Negras Federal Candidate Killed as he exited debate
By Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat
“We took back the city from the Zetas!” said Purón in the debate minutes before his murder
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/video-piedras-negras-federal-candidate.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
“The Bullet of Impunity”
Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: El País
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/the-bullet-of-impunity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Authorities issue arrest warrants in the murder of candidate Purón..his widow announces pregnancy
Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat ,,,Big thanks to mi Amiga Lacy
Purón was 112th candidate murdered in the past 14 months of Mexico’s bloody election campaign
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/authorities-issue-arrest-warrants-in.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Friday, June 15, 2018
Presidential Campaign in Mexico Gets Dirty (Dirtier)
Posted by DD Republished from The Real News Network
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/presidential-campaign-in-mexico-gets.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BorderlandBeat+%28Borderland+Beat%29
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Mireles: I ask Pena Nieto to keep his hands off the election
Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Sinembargo article
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2018/06/mireles-i-ask-pena-nieto-to-keep-his.html