Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Can the PRI save Mexico?

The Institutional Revolutionary Party had their way with Mexico for a long time. Ostensibly a leftist party they had long since abandoned any pretense of speaking for the dispossessed by the time they were turfed out two elections ago.

But the PRI is finding new life. Fed up with President Calderon's disasterous war on the drug cartels, which after claiming 45,000 Mexican lives has not made the slightest dent in the availability of drugs in the US, the people of Mexico are ready for a change.

But the PRI is running into trouble. Their star hopeful, Enrique Pena Nieto, is a slick American style politico with an American style campaign and American political advisors. How is all that north-of-the-border advice working for him? Not that well apparently.

At a recent photo-op Nieto was asked what books he'd read that mattered to him. Here is his list: the Bible.

That worked for W once upon a time, but it won't work in Mexico. Mexicans have higher standards.

When asked if he knew the price of tortillas, he replied that the little woman looks after the tortilla department in his house, so he didn't know.

When asked if he knew the minimum wage in the country he wants to be president of, he didn't know that either.

I think the PRI man is toast. Mexicans are consistently screwed over, but they're not stupid.

Hell, I know more about tortillas and the minimum wage than Enrique does, and the last book I read was by Malcom Gladwell, although I think the Bible has more depth.

The Mexican people are desperate to get out from under Calderon and his American sponsored war on the cartels. I don't speak much Mexican, but I'm thinking of taking a run at the Presidency.

The Mexican minimum wage when converted to dollars is about 80 cents an hour.

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