N Y Times Mexico News

Updated: April 3, 2012 Mexico is the United States’ third-largest trading partner and a majority middle-class country, but one held back by corruption, poverty, red tape and monopolies. Felipe Calderón was elected president of Mexico in 2006 in a hotly disputed election. After a turbulent first year in office, Mr. Calderón cemented his hold on power, divided the main opposition party and launched a full-scale offensive against drug cartels. The wave of violence that followed has all but consumed his presidency. More than 34,000 Mexicans have been killed since Mr. Calderón dispatched his military to take down the traffickers. His time in office will end after the July 2012 elections, as Mexico’s presidents are limited to a single six-year term. Mexico’s 2012 presidential campaign began with low expectations, according to experts. Mexican voters, polls show, have been losing faith in democracy as their nation teeters between modern success and violent failure. Whoever wins the election will inherit a Mexico disillusioned and stuck, caught between forces of the past that resist change and the frustration of those who have begun to expect more from their leaders. But cynical commentators joke that the race is essentially a battle between the Pretty Boy, the Quinceañera Doll and the Tired Has-Been. Enrique Peña Nieto, the telegenic front-runner sometimes called the Pretty Boy (or Gel Boy because of his styled hair), will need to persuade voters that he represents a new, corruption-free Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., the party that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. Josefina Vázquez Mota, a former education secretary under the current president, has perhaps a greater challenge. She has been called the Quinceañera Doll because she is always smiling, but her party — the P.A.N., or National Action Party — has been in charge for 12 years, a time of rising violence and continued corruption. And even for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a liberal former mayor of Mexico City who lost the last election in 2006 by 0.6 percentage points, the past and future compete. The oldest of the candidates, sometimes called the Tired Has-Been, he must answer the question of whether he has put aside the radical populism of his last campaign to govern as a moderate. The real test for all three candidates will come with undecided voters, who make up nearly a third of the electorate, polls say. Read More... Enrique Peña Nieto Even before Mr. Peña Nieto appeared at 12:01 a.m. on March 30, the first moment he could legally begin campaigning, the rally in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, felt more like a victory party than a campaign kick-off. Criticizing blights like poverty, insecurity and corruption, offering change and “light and hope” Mr. Peña Nieto played to the crowd’s emotions. It was part of an expansive, orchestrated show of confidence. Rallies for P.R.I. candidates were also held at midnight in other major cities. Some analysts described the campaign as a throwback to the classic giveaway politics of what the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called “the perfect dictatorship” because the P.R.I. maintained control with mass mobilizations, not ideology, through the cover of democratic elections. Others, however, said that over the last 12 years when it was out of power, the P.R.I. has come to recognize that with Mexico more democratic, the party can fulfill its promise of effective government only with a landslide victory, not just for president but also in the legislature. Josefina Vázquez Mota Ms. Vázquez Mota also started her campaign early on March 30, with a smaller rally at her party headquarters in Mexico City, where she immediately argued that the P.R.I.’s years of control “are still holding us back.” Her campaign slogan — “Josefina Diferente, Presidenta 2012” — also signaled to voters, perhaps with a wink, that she was not like those other guys in her party, Mr. Calderón and his predecessor, Vicente Fox. She is not just a woman, her campaign suggests. She is a woman who understands struggle, having grown up in a shabby one-story home. Andrés Manuel López Obrador Workers. Love. And change. On March 30, Mr. López Obrador pounded the podium in his hometown of Macuspana, in Tabasco State, as if he were determined to disprove his recent admission that he has “less vigor” now, during his second run for president. Tabasco and other southern states gave Mr. López Obrador lots of love in 2006. Poverty is worse in the region than in other places, and voters are more open to the leftist ideas of Mr. López Obrador and his Party of the Democratic Revolution. But even in friendly territory, he seemed to sway between his brand of populism and the more moderate approach that analysts say he must adopt to climb from third place, where he has stagnated for months in opinion polls. He has toned down his campaign slogan, from “For the good of everyone, the poor come first,” to the less confrontational “Real change is in your hands.” He also pledged to revitalize the economy by focusing on the working class, suggesting that he saw work, perhaps even more than government aid, as a vital tool for lifting Mexicans from poverty. Hide

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