Calderón inherits a nation in grip of violence, turmoil
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20061118-9999-1n18...
By S. Lynne Walker
November 18, 2006
OAXACA CITY, Mexico – Drug traffickers are fighting for control of the north. Radical leftists are fighting for control of the south. And some states,
like Guerrero, which houses Acapulco, are in the clutches of both.
Welcome to the brave new Mexico, where the fragile illusion of a nation ruled by laws is crumbling in the days leading up to Felipe Calderón's Dec. 1
presidential inauguration.
This is a Mexico where a leftist group trying to get rid of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz seized control of a capital city and for nearly six months imposed
its own justice on 500,000 residents.
This is a Mexico where guerrilla groups detonated bombs at the Mexico City headquarters of Ruiz's Institutional Revolutionary Party and the country's
top electoral court, then threatened more explosions if their demand for the governor's resignation was not met.
This is a Mexico where drug cartels have killed almost 2,000 people this year, and where a newspaper editor was found dead in a hotel room in Guerrero
last week, the latest victim in a wave of attacks on journalists who write about drug trafficking.
This is a Mexico where outgoing President Vicente Fox, faced with the worst political crisis of his administration, was preparing to leave on a
nine-day trip to Australia and Vietnam when the Congress voted to stop him.
“We are at the breaking point,” said political commentator Jorge Fernández Menéndez, who warned of a possible “confluence of organized crime, of armed
groups, of social movements.”
“Either the government takes measures to attack this problem or we will face a setback that we will be unable to overcome,” he said.
The spread of political and drug-related violence has sparked deepening concerns in the United States.
“The U.S. interest in Mexico is stability because we are neighbors,” Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer said. “If there is instability in Iraq, well,
there is a lot of distance between the U.S. and that country. But if there is instability on the other side of the border, that is a different
matter.”
U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza issued a new travel alert to Americans on Wednesday.
“Protesters may use the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution on Nov. 20th and events surrounding the presidential inauguration on Dec. 1st to
initiate additional acts of violence in Oaxaca, Mexico City and elsewhere in the country,” Garza said.
Americans are heeding his warnings.
Hoteliers in Oaxaca say their occupancy rate during this typically popular tourist season is averaging a dismal 8 percent. At least 1,200 hotel
workers in Oaxaca's capital have lost their jobs since the conflict began.
The impact also has been felt in the state's coastal resorts of Huatulco and Puerto Escondido, said Fredy Alcántara, president of Oaxaca's Hotel and
Motel Association.
The state has lost $400 million in tourism since the group calling itself the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO, seized control of the
capital in June, he said.
“They have caused more damage to hotel maids, to waiters, to artisans than they have to hotel owners,” Alcántara said. “We are facing the worst crisis
in the history of Oaxaca.”
Frustrated by months of scraping by as the conflict drags on, more Oaxacans are talking about migrating to the United States. Nearly half of the
state's population has already crossed the border, and many have found jobs in California.
Martín Martínez, 40, has family in Napa Valley. For the first time, he's thinking about joining them.
He works as a chauffeur during the day and a taxi driver at night, but he still doesn't earn enough to support his wife and two children.
“I have lived in Oaxaca all my life and I have always found work,” he said. “But now, because of this conflict, I am thinking about going up there.”
Calderón acknowledged the magnitude of the problem Thursday in a powerful speech to business leaders.
“Violence and organized crime have grown at an alarming rate,” he said. “This is the moment that we have to decide as a country to put a stop to this,
to draw a line and not let criminal organizations continue advancing. The face of Mexico . . . cannot be daily executions and bloody acts that are
never punished.”
Calderón vowed to “use all the power of the state to return to the citizens the peace and tranquility that has been lost.”
But he cautioned it will not be easy.
“It will take time, because there cannot be immediate results,” he said. “It will take money. And – this must be said – it will very probably cost
lives.”
A festering problem
Calderón's most pressing problems – political unrest in Oaxaca and drug violence – are linked to his struggle to defeat leftist Andrés Manuel López
Obrador in the July 2 presidential election.
López Obrador tapped the simmering resentment of Mexico's poor to draw support in impoverished southern states like Oaxaca.
Fearful that a bloody battle in Oaxaca's streets would hand López Obrador victory, Fox – who like Calderón is from the National Action Party, or PAN –
allowed the conflict to fester rather than send in the federal police.
Calderón beat López Obrador by just 234,000 votes in balloting so marred by irregularities that it took the nation's top electoral court two months to
rule on all the challenges.
“Oaxaca is the price for winning the election,” political analyst José Antonio Crespo said.
By the time Fox sent nearly 4,000 federal police officers to Oaxaca on Oct. 28, more than a dozen people had been killed, including American
journalist-activist Bradley Roland Will.
More than half the nation's federal police force is still in Oaxaca, and 500 more police officers are standing guard outside the Congress to protect
against violence on inauguration day. That leaves fewer than 2,000 federal police officers to patrol Mexico's drug-plagued states.
The result of the shifts in police personnel has been grim.
Six police officers in Michoacan were ambushed this week as they patrolled near opium poppy and marijuana fields. And the mayor of a small town in
Tabasco was gunned down as he drove up to his ranch.
An ambush on a busy Tijuana thoroughfare last week left a police commander, an assistant police chief, two officers and two bystanders injured. The
next day, the body of the injured commander was found handcuffed to his dead brother.
Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy said last week that the state's crime problem is overstated.
“I think there is a much higher perception than reality in relation to security,” Elorduy said.
But in September alone, 44 people were killed in Tijuana. The number dipped to 27 last month, then rose to 11 during the first eight days of November,
according to statistics from the state Attorney General's Office.
“We do obviously recognize that it is a serious problem,” Elorduy said. “We do not underestimate it.”
'Political terrorism'
Instead of distancing itself from Mexico's escalating violence, López Obrador's leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, expressed its support for
the APPO in exchange for the group's backing for the party's elected officials.
The PRD has said it will stop Calderón from taking the oath of office by blocking him from stepping onto the congressional podium where the oath is
traditionally administered.
Meanwhile, López Obrador plans to inaugurate himself as Mexico's “legitimate president” on Monday, a national holiday celebrating the Mexican
Revolution.
His strategy is risky, analysts say, because in this new Mexico “political terrorism” is emerging as a tactic to press the demands of an impoverished
people whose long-simmering anger has finally boiled over.
“There are people who want to provoke a revolution,” said Soledad Loaeza, a professor of political science at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico. “We
are at the beginning of a new kind of political violence.”
Decades of government neglect – and in some cases, abuse – of southern Mexico's indigenous people have deepened resentment against the country's
institutions.
“When we go to a government office and they see us in huaraches, they treat us badly. They call us ignorant,” said Margarita Gaspar, who supports her
four children by cleaning houses. “If I did not go to school, it is because my family did not have the money.”
Calderón knows he must reach out to the people at the bottom of the economic ladder.
“He's got to undercut López Obrador in two ways,” said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary. “He's got to have
tangible programs to help poor people. Soon. And secondly, he's got to apply the law.”
Analysts agree that Calderón must meet those tough challenges before the pent-up anger of Mexico's poor erupts again.
“What's happening in Oaxaca is important for the whole country because it will define who we are,” said Edgardo Villanueva, a Zapotec Indian who is an
architect and an artisan and who sympathizes with the APPO. “Do we want to be Americans? Do we want America's system of government and its companies?
Do we want an indigenous world that has suffering and misery?
“In Oaxaca, we can find the alternative for these two Mexicos,” he said. “But if Mexico does not resolve the problem in Oaxaca correctly, we will be
constructing a wall that divides this country.”
[Edited on 11-19-2006 by BajaNews]
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