Pubdate: Tue, 26 Jun 2012
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2012 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: David Usborne

IS MEXICO'S WAR ON DRUGS OVER?

After 6 Years, 10,000 'Disappearances', 50,000 Deaths and 1.6m 
Displaced... an Exhausted Nation Is Set to Elect a Leader Willing to 
Deal With the Cartels and the US Isn't Happy. David Usborne Reports 
 From Mexico City

Julia Fuertes digs into her handbag to retrieve a pair of earrings 
she has made at home. Simple circles of coloured card, they are 
adorned with photographs of a dashing man cut from celebrity 
magazines. He looks like an Mexican soap star, except that one day 
soon he might be running this country.

We are at a rally in a cavernous convention centre in the Santa Fe 
district of Mexico City for Enrique Pena Nieto, the candidate of the 
Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, in Sunday's presidential 
election. He has just ended a speech filled with pledges for a better 
future and has descended into the crowd of about 5,000 supporters. 
Young women and girls press against the barriers wailing his name, 
desperate to get close. A disco chorus is pumped from loud speakers, 
"Pena, Pena, Ooh-Ah-Ah". Somewhere at the back a brass band is striking up.

Mexico is on the brink of a leap back to the future filled with risk. 
For a start, the soap opera label sticks to the 45year-old Mr Pena a 
little too easily and not just because he is married to one  his 
second wife, Angelica Rivera, is known to everyone here as La Gaviota 
(seagull), a character she played on a steamy day-time drama. A 
former state governor, he is also light on qualifications. He doesn't 
speak English and has travelled little. At a book fair last December 
he struggled to name three titles he had read. He got two: the Bible 
and a Jeffrey Archer pot-boiler.

Stranger still, though, is his party affiliation. Twelve years ago 
Mexico broke 70 years of autocratic rule by the PRI and sent Vicente 
Fox of the conservative National Action Party, PAN, to Los Pinos, the 
presidential palace here. In 2006, he was succeeded by outgoing 
Felipe Calderon also of PAN. To the rest of the world it looked as if 
the partially discredited PRI had been broken and that Mexico was 
finally a fully-functioning democracy.

But if the polls are right, the PRI, with Mr Pena at the top of its 
ticket, is roaring back. Josefina Vazquez Mota of PAN, the anointed 
successor to Mr Calderon who hoped to be Mexico's first female 
president, is in third place. The nearest rival is Andres Manuel 
Lopez Obrador of the leftist PRD, who came within a squeak of winning 
in 2006. After a brief surge two weeks ago to within a few points of 
Mr Pena, even Mr Lopez Obrador may now be behind by a double digit margin.

If Mr Pena wins, debate will rage over how he will govern. The 
biggest worry of some, including the US, is that he will relax the 
bloody war on the drug trafficking that was launched by President 
Calderon when he came to office in 2006, and make deals with the main 
cartels as previous PRI presidents were accused of doing.

What millions of Mexicans crave, aside from jobs, is security on the 
streets. Since Mr Calderon launched his war against the drugs 
kingpins and sent the army in to help a mostly ineffectual and 
corrupt federal police force, as many as 50,000 lives have been lost 
and Mexicans are tired of the bloodshed. Mr Pena's campaign all but 
admits that his preferred strategy when it comes to challenging the 
heads of the cartels is negotiation rather than following President 
Calderon's approach: "It's not that we diminish the importance of 
going after the heads of the cartels," a Pena spokesman, Sergio 
Roman, tells The Independent, "but first and foremost it's about 
regaining control of the streets." The Calderon strategy "has not 
worked," he adds. "When you chop off the high heads you get the hydra 
effect, and suddenly you have seven new heads."

If there is nostalgia for the old days of PRI rule it might in part 
be precisely because of the perception that they and the kingpins 
were cosy. "Deals?" asks Consuela Erape, 57, a hairdresser at the 
rally in Santa Fe. "It happened before and the country was a lot 
quieter. Of course they can, because we want to see calm."

If Mr Pena is elected, many will also want to know how he pulled it off.

The easy answer has to do with a well-

funded and slick PRI campaign and the candidate's sex appeal. Ms 
Fuertes, who describes herself as an actress and screenwriter, admits 
that's a factor but says there is more. "He has good looks, but 
that's not really it. He has charisma also. You can be good looking 
as a candidate and still not connect with the people. That's what he does".

In the last few weeks, though, Mr Pena has battled election-buying 
allegations. After being heckled at a Mexico City university campus 
in May and taking shelter in a men's bathroom, he found himself the 
target of a student movement called Yo Soy 132  "I am 132", named 
after the number of those who stood up at the event to show their 
student cards. Foremost among the movement's allegations is that 
Televisa, the biggest television broadcaster, has given him biased 
coverage in return for favours it expects later and advertising 
dollars from the campaign.

For a moment early this month, Yo Soy 132 appeared to pose a threat 
to Mr Pena by throwing the support of students behind the Lopez 
Obrador campaign. Two Sundays ago they staged the biggest protest 
Mexico City had seen in years  an estimated 100,000 Mexicans marched 
to the Angel de la Independencia to hang a huge banner that read: 
"Pena Nieto, this is the reality of Mexico not Televisa. The people 
have woken up."

Or maybe not. "I think it has fizzled away now, Mexicans are not 
naive, they know when they are being manipulated," a Pena spokesman, 
Sergio Roman, told The Independent. "The voters understand that his 
message has always been positive. Mr Lopez Obrador got some momentum 
from the '132' but he is always against everything, trying to 
disqualify statistics, the media and other institutions. People don't 
like that negativity."

As at every one of his rallies, Mr Pena closes his speech here in 
Santa Fe by signing a pledge undertaking to fund some huge public 
works project or another. Today, it is about providing better housing 
and water supplies in a dusty district on the eastern edge of Mexico 
City. So far he has put his pen to more than 600 of these public 
works covenants. The slogan on ubiquitous Pena billboards here is 
simple: "You know I'm going to deliver".

But Ms Fuertes, the actress, admits she still has qualms about voting 
PRI again and pays homage to Mr Calderon for tackling corruption in 
Mexico. He has also helped create an economy that is growing at over 
4 per cent, something the neighbouring US can only dream of. By some 
estimates Mexico is on course to be the world's fifth largest economy 
by 2050. But clearly she is enamoured of Mr Pena and finds herself 
torn between him and Ms Vazquez Mota of PAN. "I am going to say a 
Hail Mary when I vote and ask the Lord how to mark the ballot."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom