Comments

1
"What will this mean for us narcopornografistas?"
2
The PRI is the party of Total Corruption. They're the party that stole a billion dollars from Mexico under Salinas Gortari and his drug lord brother; the party that stole all the rebar out of thousands of new buildings so that they fell down in the 1986 earthquake. Peña Nieto's lackey was caught red-handed with a bag full of a half-million dollars of drug money on a flight from Veracruz to DF recently.

Anyone who thinks you can stuff these cartels back into the bottle they came from is dreaming, especially when you let them elect the president. Remember how the Mafia disappeared after prohibition ended? Yeah, neither do I.

Peña Nieto himself is lovely to look at but completely stupid and incurious on a level that GW Bush never approached. He has literally never had a policy idea, or even seen a book, in his life. He's not going to be running the country; he's going to be appearing on Televisa distracting the viewers from the thugs robbing the treasury.

This is a terrible day for Mexico. The PRI had already started shaking people down after they won a batch of governorships recently; that's how they operate. Look also for big demonstrations from the "unions", which unlike their US counterparts are extremely right-wing patronage organizations with very few workers in them, at least by choice.

Criminal governments mean collapsing economies in today's world. Mexico has a problem, and that means we have a problem too.
3
Meh. Who gives a flying fuck about what happens in Mexico anyway? It's a corrupt fucking shithole.

Oh, I forgot. Your drugs come from there. Mine don't — I really don't care.
4
Ooooh, so edgy, #3. You must be, like, sooo cool and jaded.
5
No. I just don't give a shit. We've got enough problems here.
6
Because nobody who lives in the US has friends or family in Mexico, or needs to travel to Mexico for work, or is otherwise affected by Mexican events, right? I'm pretty sure those people give a flying fuck.
7
Deberiamos borrar todo el poder de los narcos y quitarlos de la vide politica. Pueden Vds. quedar satisfechos que nosotros en el PRI pelearemos en contra los zetas, quiero decir, en contra a todos los narcos para asegurar la paz para le republica entera.
8
In general, I wish that more people in the USA would adopt an "I don't give a shit" attitude about the internal affairs of other countries. Not that concern isn't sometimes warranted, but the dubious history of our interventions, especially in Latin America, strongly suggests that we should be setting the bar much higher than we do, and default to the strong assumption that Mexicans are at least as capable of surviving bad leadership as we are.
9
@5 If you stop and think about the fact that Mexico is our third largest trading partner and the second largest importer of American made goods then you can pretty quickly figure out that Mexican problems are American problems. One of our most important trading partners just instituted a criminal government, it's an American concern. Oh there's also been about 50,000 deaths in the last 6 years, which should be a point of concern for anyone.
10
Don't mind 5280. His comments over the years have shown a consistent disdain for Latinos in any context. Before I even clicked on the comments for this post I was already assuming he'd had a chance to weigh in with some variation of "Mexicans blah blah who gives a shit blah blah." Everyone has their personal biases and sometimes it's best to just ignore it.
11
@9, you beat me to it. Mexico and the US are inextricably twined economically and culturally, which isn't surprising considering that our border is the most heavily-crossed in the entire world.

Of course 5280 wouldn't know this from inside his armed bunker, but any random stretch of Mexican soil contains more interesting history and culture than all of white Colorado combined -- a state noted for little else than skiing and hyper-religiosity.
12
@ 11, LOL. More than half of Colorado WAS Mexico once. Unlike Washington, which is so white that that's where all the Neo Nazis set up shop and claim as the White Homeland.

For someone who knows as much as you do, you have a bad habit of forgetting what you DON'T know.
13
@12 And part of Canada was part of Russia at one point. What the hell does that matter today? Lines on a map do not create cultural history by themselves.

The PRI is the modern version of the heavy hand that hijacked the Mexican Revolution a century ago, squashing that attempt at democracy with a combination of guns and ballots. How little some things change. Is the US going to pull another Vera Cruz if this century's goons screw up the coup too?

Failed narcostate
14
@ 13, it only matters to show that Fnarf doesn't know what he's talking about.

You're not all up on it, either - Southern Colorado was much more populated by Mexicans than Alaska or anything else the Russians claimed in North America. That Mexican tradition is still very much experienced by the families who became American because of a war and treaty and still live there to this day.

Bottom line - know what the fuck you're talking about, even if you're only talking shit.
15
For Mexicans, this is the equivalent of Mussolini's hot granddaughter coming to power in Italy. Nothing good can come of this.

It's also worth pointing out that the election was so dirty that if it had happened anywhere besides Mexico, the first world would be pushing for instant sanctions.
16
Let's see if I've got this straight. Fnarf — in super-ultra-white Seattle, is talking shit about how white Colorado is?

Wow. You need to stop reading Slog and get out and see the real world, dude.
17
The PRI's got a bad history, to be sure, but I'm not too bothered by their victory. It shows that the permanent PRI dictatorship of old is not going to be replaced by a permanent PAN dictatorship.

I really hope you're right about their strategy regarding narcos. The best thing would be to legalize the trade, of course, but since diplomatic pressure from the US prevents that from happening, the best thing for all concerned is the reestablishment of the Sinaloa monopoly and total destruction of the Zetas. What I've read about the Sinaloa cartel suggests to me that it is a corporation operating in a business that requires it to be a criminal gang, whereas the Zetas are just monsters who cannot be rehabilitated and must be destroyed.
18
You maybe be right that EPN will go back to a "lets make a deal" strategy with the cartels, but you have to take into account the amount of pressure coming from the US to wage war on them. The US government is providing a lot of support and has publicly applauded Calderon's militaristic strategy for confronting the cartels (although lets not kid ourselves, the PAN has made plenty of deals of its own), despite wide spread criticism of this strategy and the fact that most Mexicans (a vast majority of whom aren't involved in the drug trade) would tell you they are less safe today than they were 12 years ago. EPN is playing to middle class Mexicans who's business has been impacted by extortion, kidnapping and other organized crime activities.

What is incredibly worrisome are the grave human rights violations that have occurred under past PRI governments (and I'm not talking about vote buying), such as Atenco, Acteal, the Zapatista repression. The killing, rape and torture of civilians at the hands of security forces, ordered by PRI governments, sometimes in retaliation for not getting what they wanted (Atenco was in response to protests that eventually shut down the construction of an airport in Tlaxcala, which was Peña Nieto's pet project as Mexico State Governor, and he couldn't stand getting beaten by a bunch of peasants) is terrifying. It puts democracy and freedom of expression at risk in Mexico and has the same taste of "your with us or against us" as Bush employed over Iraq.

This isn't an issue to just sit around and be apathetic about, US policy directly impacts what happens in Mexico, and people's lives in the US are impacted by that. Want to stop "illegal immigration"? well then maybe you should be concerned about the safety and security of the country most immigrants come from-- and wouldn't leave, if they had access to decent jobs and a relative level of security.

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