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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
New President Faces Challenges that Defy Easy Solutions
 Carrol Dadisman - tallahassee.com
Two months after new Mexican President Felipe Calderon was declared the victor in a disputed election, he is left with an immediate, imposing agenda of national challenges.
Those that got repeated attention in January when I joined 15 active and retired American newspaper editors on a trip to Mexico were:
• Out-of-control trade in illegal drugs, most directed by cold-blooded cartel kingpins.
• Rampant poverty and unemployment, dramatized by unrest over the recent escalation in price of tortillas, the staple of Mexican diets.
• Widespread corruption and incompetence in government.
• Large business monopolies that keep prices of many goods and services unrealistically high.
• Pressure from the U.S., along with self-imposed pressure, to curb the flow of Mexicans illegally crossing the border.
Mexican drug cartels are said to earn more than $10 billion a year smuggling Mexican-made heroin, marijuana and amphetamines and Colombian cocaine to the U.S. Last year, the drug lords were blamed for killing more than 2,000 people in law enforcement, competing cartels and anyone else who got in their way.
While much drug activity stems from poverty-ridden southern Mexico, a senior American official in Monterrey said drug traffic and its accompanying violence and corruption increasingly threaten the Monterrey business climate and have spawned widespread police resignations.
In the presidential campaign last year, Calderon promised to smash the drug cartels. Dan Lund, president of a Mexico City demographic and public policy research firm, said Calderon frequently, for dramatic effect, wears a military uniform and orders crackdowns.
“But it is a minefield of political problems down the line, as we can see from the daily reports of ongoing executions in the drug cartel areas,” Lund warned.
The bottom 40 percent of Mexico's 107 million people, sharing only 11 percent of the nation's wealth, live below the poverty line. Joblessness continues to drive many across the U.S. border.
The plight of Mexico's poor stems in part from monopolization. Marta Sanudo, an immigration specialist in Monterrey, told us that Mexicans pay exorbitant prices for two basic needs, telephones and gasoline, because of monopolies.
And on our first day in Mexico City, demonstrators filled the huge city's central square, protesting high tortilla and gasoline prices.
Mexico is the world's seventh-largest oil producer, but most retail gasoline flows from the state-owned petroleum giant, Pemex, which Lund described as the country's "cash cow," that supplies 35 percent of the federal budget.
Lund thinks Calderon will go quickly after some monopolies - including two TV networks that control much of the nation's news consumption - but that his pledge to “open up markets” in other areas will remain “a long-term goal.”
Meanwhile, corruption in Mexican government stems from drug payoffs and monopolies paying to keep out competitors. Journalists who might expose it are frequently hamstrung by stringent libel laws and limited access.
“The worst part (of the drug trade) is corruption,” the American official in Monterrey said. “They have to buy protection, so there's a lot of money being spread around.”
No Mexican with whom we talked, however, rated illegal immigration to the U.S. as a high-priority issue for Mexico. One said, in effect: You've got jobs where immigrants are needed. We don't have jobs for them. What's the big deal?
But Calderon's personal pollster, Rafael Valdes, noted that the new president is from an area affected by immigration and “is much more concerned (about the problem) than was (former President Vincente) Fox.”
He'll probably get a lot of encouragement during the visit in March by President Bush, whose own political problems include the raging U.S. controversy over Mexican immigration.
Carrol Dadisman, publisher of the Tallahassee Democrat from 1981 to 1997, was part of an American Society of Newspaper Editors' "fact-finding trip" to Mexico this winter. He can be contacted at Jcdadisman@aol.com. |
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