Chiswickite - formerly The Croydonian

Labels: Canada, Common sense? What's that?, Mexico, Truly the Apocalypse is upon us, United States.

Conservative forty-two year old Felipe Calderon won the presidency of Mexico last year with the slenderest of majorities – just under 1% in a heavily supervised recount. His opponent, Andres Obrador, the Evita Peron des nos jours who has built his career working for “social justice” - meaning wealth transfers for Mexico’s admittedly millions of uneducated disadvantaged - reacted by threatening to set up an alternate government. He also swore to disrupt the Inauguration ceremonies on 1 December last year, and indeed, he could have mobilized at least one million people, many of them armed, to do so.

Calderon, the outgoing conservative President Fox and other senior members of the PAN (National Action Party), knowing the damage such disruption of the swearing-in could do to Mexico’s image overseas, and the damage it could do domestically in light of the tiny majority, arranged for President Calderon to be sworn in, in a secret ceremony, at one minute past midnight on 1 December, 2006. It was a legitimate ceremony, with well-respected witnesses, the most important of whom was President George W Bush’s father, President Herbert Walker Bush. The presence of Mr Bush signalled a drive to greater unity with Mexico and, obviously, he was there with his son’s blessing.

This ceremony meant that if Obrador tried to pull anything during the official Inauguration later that day, Calderon was already chief executive of the country and could order out the military. And would. The man is not a ditherer.

President Fox, Mexico’s first ever conservative chief executive, had adopted a softly, softly approach to civil disorder, devoting himself to developing a capitalist infrastructure in a country that had none. He was criticized for not being confrontational enough, but I think he didn’t want to frighten the voters, new to conservative theory, off. So Mexico had six years of stunning growth, but with civil disorder, mainly due to powerful drug interests, in a few areas.

Calderon, who has two Master’s degrees, one from the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico and the other from Harvard University, and who speaks fluent English, is not as conciliatory as President Fox and has already ordered the military out on several occasions – the most notable being to Oaxaca, where unions and drug interests had paralysed the city’s sanitary department. There had been no garbage pick-up for three months. The effect of this in the tropical zone is unimaginable. Calderon wasted no time in ordering the military in with orders to shoot union officials if necessary, which indicates an astute grasp of the tenets of trade unionism.

Since Canada finally elected a conservative prime minister last year, the entire N American continent – around 440m people – is now governed by conservative principles. Calderon has pledged to President Bush that he will be an ally in the war on drug dealers, and he has already proved it.

Mexico and the US have problems on the border, but they are working together to solve these. (It doesn’t hurt, by the way, that President Bush’s sister-in-law – Florida governor Jeb’s wife – is Mexican and that his nephews and nieces are Mexican-Americans.)

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Association brought in under President Fox – has been a powerful engine for economic development. Drive into a Wal-Mart, or Home Depot parking lot in a Mexican city and you would think you were in the United States with row upon row of shiny new cars and full shopping trolleys.

Capitalism and conservative management are working. A friend tells me that as little as 10 years ago, it was against the law to criticise the Mexican government, and anyone heard doing so would be arrested. Today, anyone can voice any opinion they like about the government.

Who would have dreamed, seven years ago, that a Mexican president would win an election in 2006 by promising “to take Mexico further into the global economy”? When President Calderon leaves office, that will be 12 years of conservative government. That means an entire generation of young Mexicans who have never known anything but capitalism and conservative government.

Labels: Mexico

Labels: Canada, Mexico, The arts, United States