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 Editorials | December 2006 
Mexico Gets Tough
 Investor's Business Daily
| | President Felipe Calderon |
Flavio Sosa is remarkably relaxed for a wanted man Mexico: After surviving challenges to his election, President Felipe Calderon is showing he can give as well as take. He has crushed leftist thugs in Oaxaca and is running down bandidos in Michoacan. Not bad, as starts go.
Calderon's first move after his Dec. 1 inauguration was busting Flavio Sosa, a leftist who'd been openly challenging Mexico's democracy for months as chief of a rebellion in the southern state of Oaxaca. Oaxaca is beautiful but poor, with a corrupt government, and tourism its key income outside immigrant remittances from the U.S.
Preening for the cameras as a longhaired leftist, Sosa said he represented "the people" as leader of the APPO movement of 300 grievance groups. But his contribution to Oaxaca's people was to trash shops, burn buses, terrorize hotels and chase off tourists.
In reality, his rebellion, which arose from a teachers strike, was little more than a gangster's power grab without the bother of elections.
Mexico's leadership, then under President Vicente Fox, sent in troops on Oct. 28, but to little effect. The troops just seemed to add to the mystique of the rebellion, which was spreading. By the time Calderon got in, Sosa, who claimed to be a "moderate" a la Yasser Arafat, was burning barricades, taking over radio stations and calling on the government to negotiate concessions to him.
Calderon saw though it, and his chief lawman, Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez, a tough ex-Jalisco state governor who had cracked down on leftist WTO rioters earlier, told Sosa they didn't do negotiations. Instead, they sent 4,000 troops into Oaxaca and arrested Sosa in Mexico City, charging him with vandalism, armed robbery, theft and aggravated assault.
Cooling his heels in a Mexican hoosegow must have been a shock to Sosa, who had gotten away with trashing Oaxaca for months.
"Flavio Sosa is remarkably relaxed for a wanted man," AP cluelessly reported in October, reading Sosa's brazenness as relaxation.
But Calderon didn't misread him. In his first days of office, his federal police quietly spirited 170 of Sosa's APPO goons, group by group, from the barricades, before lassoing Sosa himself. If he'd tried a frontal assault, Calderon knew that the media could paint him as repressive.
Since Calderon's crackdown, popular support has withered for Sosa's APPO. Where once hundreds of thousands of people had gathered for Sosa in October, fewer than 1,000 showed up at Sosa's high-publicity APPO rally in Oaxaca on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Sosa, realizing that his barricade enforcers were disappearing fast, did a laughable about-face, putting on a clean shirt and cutting his long hair, saying he had never been the leader of APPO at all before he was arrested seeking "negotiations."
APPO isn't gone for good, but it's crumbling and Mexicans are applauding. A Dec. 9 Milenio poll shows that 70% of Mexicans support Calderon's crackdown.
Calderon continued hot pursuit and Sunday went after Oaxaca's cops, sending federal troops in a surprise raid, arresting five.
Besides probing possible links between the Sosa gang and the cops, Calderon also may see a connection between the Oaxaca rebels and the far more dangerous warring drug gangs of neighboring Michoacan state, where Tuesday he sent 6,700 troops.
What goes on in Michoacan, just north of Oaxaca, is likely to affect the U.S. because it's Mexico's leading exporter of illegal immigrants. If Calderon can break the gang stranglehold there and make Michoacan livable, the U.S. could be seeing far fewer Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande.
But a war against Mexico's most barbaric drug traffickers won't be an easy war. Already, there are signs Calderon may pay a price. On Thursday, a Calderon relative was murdered by possible traffickers in what some fear is retaliation.
Still, Calderon seems to be showing real leadership. His opening strikes have sent a forceful message to every predator seeking to undermine Mexico's governability that there is a new sheriff in town. |
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