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 Editorials | January 2007 
Bold Start in Mexico
 Hugh Dellios - Chicago Tribune
| | Mexico President Felipe Calderon delivers a speech with Social Development Secretary Beatriz Zavala during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City. Calderon announced a new plan to help Mexico's poorest families. (Marco Ugarte/AP) |
Felipe Calderon's enemies cannot so easily dismiss him anymore as el chaparrito, or “the short man.”
A month ago, Calderon's inauguration as Mexico's new president threatened to break down into a fist-swinging melee, with opponents determined to stop him from taking the oath to protest what they say was his fraudulent victory. It looked as if his presidency could start out as another disappointment for Mexico.
But then Calderon did something his predecessor, Vicente Fox, wasn't known for. He stood his ground, refusing to cancel the ceremony and appearing in Congress to face down the hollering opposition lawmakers.
That set the stage for Calderon's bold first move in office. He deployed federal troops to the country's narco-battlefields. They poured into Acapulco and also disarmed corrupt police in Tijuana. They chased down traffickers in Calderon's home state of Michoacan, where the bespectacled, Harvard-trained lawyer donned an army cap and jacket and stood among them.
Calderon's firm-handed start has raised his stature and helped earn him more of the popular legitimacy he lacked after his disputed, razor-thin election victory, raising hopes that he will make a difference in the lives of 107 million Mexicans.
“Who would have known that Felipe Calderon, Mexico's mild-mannered, wonkish and uncharismatic president, would morph into an action hero?” Mexican political analyst Denise Dresser teased in a newspaper column.
The army mobilization is risky and controversial, and some Mexicans are skeptical. Some think it was mostly for show, while others question a reliance on the military when the country's poverty and crime need so many other solutions. But the public applauded, reflecting how desperate Mexicans are for safer streets.
The final judgment on Calderon may be cast by those who vote with their feet — the half-million Mexicans who cross into the United States every year to find jobs, people such as Sergio Ocotzi Martinez.
The son of a baker from Tlaxcala, Ocotzi, 23, is now a food runner in a fancy French restaurant in New York, where he makes $7 per hour — the wage he'd make in a day back home.
I encountered him last year during the presidential campaign in a migrants' shelter in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, after he'd been arrested in Chicago and deported while trying to return to New York.
Instead of giving up and going home, he started working as hard as he could in Juarez to pay a smuggler to take him back over the border so he could get back to working as hard as he could in New York. I met him outside the shelter, where he was returning from a day's work, his overalls spattered with paint.
“The U.S. is an opportunity for us that we don't have at home,” Ocotzi said in carefully practiced English.
Mexico needs to employ these industrious workers at home. But that means Calderon must help Mexico figure out how to start providing what Ocotzi said he never had: A cheaper education. A scholarship. A factory job in Tlaxcala.
The list of Mexico's needs looks all-too similar to what it was when Fox took office in 2000, ending Mexico's one-party rule, extolling the virtues of democracy and promising to cure all those ills.
While Fox is lauded for promoting democratic principles, his perceived weaknesses and failures helped promote the rise of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing ex-mayor of Mexico City who narrowly lost to Calderon. Lopez Obrador's followers still believe he won with his campaign to get Mexico to finally share its oil wealth and provide for its poor.
With Lopez Obrador shadowing Calderon, still campaigning as Mexico's self-proclaimed “legitimate” leader, the new president has rolled out a social agenda that includes universal health care for children and subsidies for companies that create first-time jobs for Mexicans.
But Calderon, 44, has wagered that Mexico first needs to reinforce its rule of law. The assault on drug gangs is among a number of proposed measures to make homemakers and investors more confident.
Calderon appears to have learned from Fox. Where Fox famously caved in and canceled a new international airport in Mexico City after a few thousand protesters waved machetes, Calderon arrested a top protest leader after clashes with police nearly destroyed beautiful Oaxaca last fall. Then he had federal officers crack down on local police who had failed to maintain order there.
“I know that to re-establish security will not be easy or fast, that it will take time, that it will cost a lot of money and even, unfortunately, human lives,” Calderon said on the day he took office. “But rest assured, this is a battle in which I will be in the front.”
The Napoleonic start furthers Calderon's strong-willed ascent to the top. A former energy minister and political apparatchik, he was virtually unknown when he maneuvered the nomination away from Fox's chosen successor within the church- and business-aligned National Action Party.
In his penny loafers and button-down shirts, he looks out of place among the boots and jeans and oversize belt buckles in the crowds in Zacatecas and Durango. But perhaps Calderon took note that looking and walking like Mexico's ranchers didn't help the towering Fox achieve what he promised during his six years.
Calderon's biggest battles still loom as he tries to get his initiatives through a badly splintered Congress. Mexico is watching to see if he can strike the deals that Fox could not — or if his Cabinet includes an enforcer to employ the persuasive presidential powers that Fox would not.
The violent drug trafficking is bound to continue as long as there is a lucrative market in the United States. But, as Calderon surely knew, the army assault also would help make him appear to be the tough leader that so many Mexicans admire and desire.
“From the point of view of a photo op, (deploying the army) is OK, but I don't think that's the way to fight narco-traffickers,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a Mexican historian and analyst. “It's a message not to the narcos, but to the opposition, that he is in charge and that he's got the army backing him.”
A poll showed that 78 percent of the public applauded Calderon's defiant appearance at the Congress to take the oath last month. If the election were held today, it's likely he would win comfortably. |
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