The Guadalajara Reporter

Many Mexicans face a new year with a tincture of edginess, others with all-out skepticism, still others with belief

This nation leaves a lackluster economic 2013, stuffed with uncertainty for a new year that the Mexican street views as more of the same.

A good slice of the so-called, much-touted middle-class doesn’t have a reassuring impression of their government-changed economy or the man who’s responsible for that condition, Mexico’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto.  The fact that media reports slip into that adjective “new” indicates citizens‘ uncertainty about their present chief executive ... and his actions, or, at times, inaction.

Among the most important and hazily promising pledges made by Peña Nieto when he was both a candidate and when he was freshly inaugurated:  A specially trained gendarmerie, a large corps – first of 50,000, then of 10,000, then of 5,000 – a combination of police and military.  That now has become a vanished dream, not spoken of.  The much mentioned surge in the economy also quickly evaporated, as did the war against crime.  As the new year looms, no one seems to know what’s happened to the drug war.  The previously daily reports of its activities, of victims butchered and slain have disappeared – with the exception, primarily, of outbreaks in Jalisco’s neighboring state, Michoacan.

But almost every Mexican one speaks with has a woeful tale of kidnappings and extortions – be it personal, or involving family members or friends. “As other crimes such as murder went down this year (a contested assertion), kidnappings and extortion have increased, Dwight Dyer reported, according to one of Mexico City’s leading dailies, Reforma.  Other investigators and reporters across the nation put the rate at 1,000 a month. And the numbers of kidnappings and extortions are misleading because even the government has repeated that most kidnappings and extortions go unreported.

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