| | |  Editorials | December 2008 
Mexico's Calderón Faces More Obstacles Ahead
 Patrick Corcoran - World Politics Review
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| | Felipe Calderón's legacy as a reformer is already better than Fox's, but it is also incomplete. | |
Torreón, Mexico - Felipe Calderón arrived to the Mexican presidency two years ago with a weak mandate and amid wild controversy. The presidential election's runner-up, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, alleged electoral fraud and called the new government illegitimate; his supporters took over the streets of Mexico City for weeks, and congressional allies tried to physically prevent Calderón from taking the oath of office. Calderón raced through his swearing-in ceremony in front of a crowd of scuffling legislators, before stealing off to give his inaugural address elsewhere.
The inauspicious opening belied what would become a remarkably bold first year in office. Days after arriving, Calderón began breaking security taboos. First, he deployed the army to fight drug runners in Mexico's most violent regions. He furthered his security bona fides when he extradited 14 kingpins to the United States in January 2007, including Gulf Cartel boss Osiel Cárdenas. The government's strategy helped precipitate a pact among the different cartels in June 2007, which led to a temporary drop in violence. After a couple of months in office, Mexicans rewarded their earnest president with approval ratings that exceeded 60 percent, almost double his level of support in the elections that brought him to the presidency.
Calderón converted that popularity into a series of legislative gains, something that always eluded his predecessor Vicente Fox. Despite the lack of a congressional majority for his National Action Party (PAN), Calderón's team found common ground with the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), which led to the passage of social security, fiscal, and electoral reforms. Calderón's first year alone represented a greater legislative haul than Fox's six years in office.
But as his first year in office gave way to his second, Calderón found ever more obstacles in front of him. Security was the trickiest of these: The cartel pact didn't hold, and in 2008 cities like Tijuana and Juárez have witnessed months of bloodletting. The indignation about the constant drumbeat of cartel executions was exacerbated by a series of scandals revolving around official collusion with criminal groups. While Calderón is not suspected of any wrongdoing, such outrages tar him as an impotent scold, powerless against the malign influence of drug money.
Politically, the fortunes of the PAN went south as well; it was consistently beaten in state and local elections, and the rival PRI turned into the party to beat in the 2009 mid-terms.
Despite the setbacks, there were some notable sophomore successes for the president. Congress overwhelmingly passed a Calderón-supported judicial reform in March, and just days ago it passed a thorough security reform package. Calderón's team also managed to tease together a coalition strong enough to pass oil reform, a historic step forward for a nation long limited by a retrograde energy policy.
But now, with all of the parties shifting their focus toward next summer's congressional elections, the already uneven Calderón presidency could conceivably fade into irrelevance. During the last half of both Fox's and Ernesto Zedillo's terms, a majority opposition prevented the president from enacting any major part of his agenda. Unless the PRI or the dominant leftist party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, breaks from this pattern, Calderón's final act will be four years of gridlock.
Calderón's legacy as a reformer is already better than Fox's, but it is also incomplete. The deepening of existing reforms, not to mention much needed labor and education reform legislation, will likely have to wait four years before having a chance for passage under Calderón's successor.
Public security might represent the only way for Calderón to overcome this second-half jinx. The security agencies depend wholly on the executive branch for direction, so Congress' reluctance to support Calderón would be irrelevant. And while they remain somewhat stoic regarding ephemeral legislative reforms, Mexicans are exceedingly sensitive to changes in security. So while it's not likely, there remains the possibility that Calderón, buoyed by tangible gains in the public-security climate, could still advance some of his agenda.
For the time being, though, security improvements remain out of the government's reach. Calderón has already made public security his highest priority, only to see it decline precipitously across the nation over the past two years. The administration's creative tactics - deploying the army to states in the midst of electoral campaigns, an increased emphasis on political controls over rogue police - may have weakened the cartels. But the latter still retain the capacity to kill several thousand people a year, which drastically reduces the salience of Calderón's successes.
Security certainly won't come easily. But should the opposition parties block his legislative agenda, it remains the only card Calderón might play to make the second half of his presidency productive.
Patrick Corcoran is a writer based in Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico. He blogs at ganchoblog.blogspot.com. |
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