The Guadalajara Reporter

Candidates ducking drug war; but then they are being ambiguous about many things such as poverty and education

One solid, if awkwardly shaped, fact that stands out from the surging national certainty — and its backwash — that Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will win the presidency Sunday. That fact is that few of those citizens voting for Peña Nieto seem to have any clear, certain idea of what the new president will do with the party shaped by a dictator, General Plutarco Elias Calles, in 1929, as an autocratic instrument of a military/business elite.

Even to ardent supporters, that party at this moment seems a little slippery. For most of the party’s history its leaders have courted such ambiguity. PRI presidents and their spear carriers have tended to vehemently stake out half a dozen contradictory positions, grin triumphantly, and then act in a crowd of contrary ways. Calles originally, and noisily, baptized this political organization “The Party of the Mexican Revolution” (PMR). A bit later it was renamed the National Revolutionary Party. Finally, in 1946, the political jefes running the country chose today’s (fittingly) oxymoronic appellation.

Because the PRI ruled Mexico — corruptly and brutally most of the time — for 71 consecutive years, its unpleasant political, social and economic habits apparently have become Mexico’s permanent political norm. Clearly in state and village squares and ayuntamientos (city halls), the outgoing pro-church, pro-business National Action Party proved this to be dismayingly true.

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