The Guadalajara Reporter

Mexico and the U.S., women and politics: In America it’s called 'war on women,' here it’s called 'the slaughter of women'

A Mexican judge March 6 ordered authorities to investigate the killings of hundreds of women in the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City, which took place during the former governorship of Enrique Peña Nieto (2005 to 2011), now the leading contender in the July 1 presidential election.

In the United States, the Republican party is losing women voters, according to both polls and widespread interviews. This abrupt and quickly growing trend among moderate Republican and independent female voters — a critical electoral swing sector — could hobble the already badly wounded GOP.

Peña Nieto was ahead even before he announced his presidential candidacy. His closest competitor is former education secretary, Josefina Vazquez Mota, Mexico’s first female presidential nominee for a major party, the ruling National Action Party (PAN). Peña Nieto averages about 47 percent to Vazquez Moto’s 27 percent. This is not surprising in light of the dismal record the administration of President Felipe Calderon and his pro-church, pro-business PAN has posted during the past five years.

The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 years, utilizing corruption, intimidation and assassination as its primary tools of governance. In those seven decades, most Mexicans agree, there was only one fair presidential election, that of Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Since their defeat in 2000 by Vicente Fox, who out-maneuvered his own PAN leadership to become the first successful opposition president in nearly a century, the seen and unseen rulers of the PRI have been preaching that their political organization has transformed itself. It’s true that, for a brief time, the facade of PRI’s political culture seemed to wrestle with change. But all that changed was getting rid of some of the most attention-getting manipulators. Mexico’s soiled political history was too long and too strong for such good intentions to last. Besides, it soon became clear that the PAN, while it had waited helplessly for years in the ante-room of Mexican political life, had carefully and unfortunately absorbed the nation’s legacy of political bad habits. Thus, by the time the second PAN president, Felipe Calderon, took office December 1, 2006, that political party, like regimes before it, was unable to take on the major challenge of Mexican society: “to construct its own limits,” as one Mexican analyst termed it.

Peña Nieto was reared in the environment of a priista dynasty. He’s benefited from politically powerful relatives on both sides of his family. Several male members were governors of Mexico State, and/or extremely wealthy and influential priistas. All of them at one time or another have been viewed by outspoken Mexican political assessors as arrogantly corrupt: two families enjoying immunity because of their political influence. And as his own marred term as the governor of the State of Mexico — seen by PRI kingmakers as a success — unfolded, it was clear that he knew how to behave as a respectful courtier in the company of powerful handlers. Simultaneously, Calderon’s naive 2006 declaration of war against drug lords and “organized crime,” for which neither he nor the PAN hierarchy did any analysis or preparation, spiraled into failure. Unfortunately for the PAN, and Mexican society, this has created something that seemed impossible a short time ago: nostalgia among voters for an authoritarian past — the PRI.

Troubling Peña Nieto at the moment is the February 27 order by Judge Jose Alvarado directing Mexican authorities to investigate the killings and disappearances of more than 1,000 women in the State of Mexico during Peña Nieto’s tenure. This recalled the campaign for justice waged by relatives of women killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of women were tortured, raped, killed and disappeared, igniting a women’s rights movement that attracted sympathetic international attention.

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