Teaching Comparative Government

This is an analysis by the BBC's Marcos Martinez of the new Mexican president. Mexico's López Obrador pledges 'radical' change Left-wing politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador… Mexico's new president… has promised to bring radical change to his violence-plagued nation by eradicating corruption and ending drugs wars. "We're not planning to create a dictatorship, neither open nor disguised," Mr López Obrador said in his victory speech after winning the presidency on his third attempt on 1 July. "The changes will be profound, but these will be carried out with strict respect for the established legal framework." The 65-year-old, who is popularly known as AMLO after the initials of his full name, likes to cast the challenge facing him in historical terms. He sees his task as engineering a "fourth transformation" in Mexico's history, following its 1810 independence, the 1854-1857 liberalising reforms implemented by then-President B...

Is this a sign that the economic elite in Mexico no longer control government expenditures? Mexico's incoming president says he'll cancel partially built $13-billion airport Buoyed by the results of a controversial nationwide referendum, Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday that his administration will cancel construction of a partially completed, $13-billion international airport and instead move forward with plans for a less expensive alternative. Texcoco airport project “The decision is to abide by the mandate of citizens,” the president-elect, who assumes office on Dec. 1, said at a news conference. “This is democracy.” The revised plan, he said, would save Mexican taxpayers the equivalent of more than $5 billion. But abandoning the new airport in the Texcoco area northeast of Mexico City also means the loss of some $5 billion that already has been spent on the project. The airport in Texcoco, which would have been the third largest commercial air...

Journalists are renowned for using the terms government and regime as synonyms. At least one of the editors at The Economist studied comparative government and politics long enough to learn the difference. [Thanks to Paul Fitzpatrick in Texas for pointing this one out.] Mexico’s new president sets out to change his country’s course   But did voters want a new regime or just a new government? [W]hen Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared that he would be the first Mexican president since 1910 to use the [National Palace] as his workplace, he was making a statement that was both political and historical. Mr López Obrador (known as AMLO to Mexicans), who won a landslide victory in a presidential election on July 1st, promises a “fourth transformation”, after those of political independence, Juárez’s assertion of national sovereignty and the revolution in 1910-17. “This is a change of regime, not just of government,” says Lorenzo Meyer, a historian sympathetic to AMLO. Although he doe...

Changing the subculture of Mexican police is governance. Is it politics? As Violence Soared in Mexico, This Town Bucked the Trend In Mexico the police, often poorly paid and poorly trained, are frequently mistrusted or feared. The population sees them not only as incapable of tackling the country’s chronic violence, but also as often being its cause — at best, complicit in routine infractions like demanding bribes at traffic stops, and at worst, co-opted by criminal gangs… [C]ommunity meeting[s are] part of an effort by Bernardo León, a professor and writer turned police commander, to transform Morelia’s police officers into a qualified force that is welcomed by local residents. Three years into the effort, the program has shown results… In 2017, the deadliest year in Mexico in decades, the number of deaths also went up in Michoacán. But in Morelia, the state’s capital, the number of homicide victims decreased 18 percent… [E]xperts argue that Morelia’s experiment with community polic...

Politics can be a life and death "game" in Mexico. Mexico violence: Newly elected Congresswoman kidnapped A newly elected Mexican Congresswoman, Norma Azucena Rodríguez Zamora, has been kidnapped at gunpoint on a highway in central Hidalgo state. Two men shot at Ms Rodríguez's car, injuring an assistant and the driver and causing the vehicle to flip over. The gunmen pulled Ms Rodríguez from the car and forced her into their vehicle. The kidnapping comes little more than a month after the mayor of the town of Naupan was seized and killed in the same area. Ms Rodríguez was elected on 1 July to represent eastern Veracruz state in the lower house of Congress for the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The 32-year-old was due to take up office on 1 September. The state she will represent is one of the most violent in Mexico… The motive for his killing is not known but local politicians often become targets for criminal gangs if they are seen to interfere wi...

Americans seem to assume that the adversarial system of enforcing laws (used in the USA, Canada, and the UK) is "normal." It's not, but more countries are trying it out. Mexico is slowly making changes. Judging Latin America’s judges ONE morning this year, in a windowless modern courtroom, Jorge Alberto Rodríguez faced justice. He was accused of driving a stolen car with changed number plates. The judge began by explaining his rights to him. His lawyer then tried to trip up the policemen whom the prosecution had produced as witnesses. To no avail: after an adjournment to allow a missing defence witness to appear via video link, the judge found Mr Rodríguez guilty. That seemed to square with the evidence. Having been on bail for the nine months since his arrest, he was given a suspended jail sentence of five years and fined 15,000 pesos ($800). Such a trial could have taken place in a British magistrate’s court. In fact, it was in Mexico City. The case was conducted under ...

I doubt anyone in the last century would have predicted that the PRI in Mexico would fall to near irrelevance so quickly. In congress that seems to have happened. Mexico’s motley new congress THE change brought by Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Mexico’s congress is as startling as his election to the presidency on July 1st. His coalition, Juntos haremos historia (together we will make history), is expected to have three-fifths of seats in the lower house and the senate (see chart)…. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will become the fifth-biggest party in the 500-member lower house. The centre-right National Action Party (PAN), with 92 seats, will be the main opposition. Mr López Obrador’s legislative forces are a motley group of activists, celebrities and professional politicians. The heart of the coalition is his four-year-old Morena party. It also includes the anti-capitalist Workers’ Party (PT) and the conservative Social Encounter Party (PES), which has evangelical...

Mexico's newly elected president has run for this office twice before. Will this result be a charm or another disappointment? López Obrador, an Atypical Leftist, Wins Mexico Presidency in Landslide Riding a wave of populist anger fueled by rampant corruption and violence, the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president of Mexico on Sunday, in a landslide victory that upended the nation’s political establishment and handed him a sweeping mandate to reshape the country… AMLO, president of Mexico The outcome represents a clear rejection of the status quo in the nation, which for the last quarter century has been defined by a centrist vision and an embrace of globalization that many Mexicans feel has not served them. The core promises of Mr. López Obrador’s campaign — to end corruption, reduce violence and address Mexico’s endemic poverty — were immensely popular with voters, but they come with questions he and his new government may struggle to answer… He won by captur...

Maybe it's about the power of judges. This is an opinion piece. Look for confirmation or contradictions to these ideas. Opinion: The Tragedy That Changed Mexico Forever The disappearance of 43 college students on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero marked a turning point for President Enrique Peña Nieto. When he won the presidency in 2012, Mr. Peña Nieto was hailed as a modern reformer promising a more democratic and transparent government. But the disappearance of the students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the small city of Iguala shocked Mexico and the world, and plunged the Peña Nieto government into an ever-deepening murk of corruption and cover-ups… A ruling by a federal court on June 4 against the attorney general’s office may mark a new era of independence for Mexico’s justice system. In a unanimous 712-page opinion, the judges concluded that the government’s investigation into the attack on the students was faulty and irregula...

Some people in Mexico are serious about exposing online political manipulation. Mexico election: Concerns about election bots, trolls and fakes Political parties in Mexico are using bots and fake accounts in an attempt to influence voter behaviour and in some cases spread false stories ahead of the country's presidential elections on 1 July, according to researchers, journalists and activists… Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher with Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, has been tracking automated accounts, or bots, which attempt to manipulate public opinion by boosting the popularity of social media posts. But there are other tricks deployed in aid of politicians. "Troll farms"… are run by actual humans, each of which might control dozens or hundreds of accounts. And often accounts are semi-automated, pumping out messages with a mix of computer power and human know-how… In a paper published in 2017, Bradshaw along with researcher Philip Howard, conclud...

Strict laws about campaign financing don't mean much without enforcement. Mexican campaigns awash with dirty money, pre-election report finds For every peso spent by Mexican parties on campaigning and reported to electoral authorities, another 15 pesos goes unreported, according to a new study showing that the country’s political campaigns are awash in cash from dubious sources. The report, published… by the anti-graft group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, comes four week’s before the country’s presidential elections… Mexican political parties are showered with public funding and electoral laws impose strict spending limits in election campaigns. But individual campaigns regularly race past those limits while illegal money can also come from corrupt local governments, businessmen buying future concessions and contracts, and even drug cartels. Until 2000, the outcome of Mexican elections were never in doubt as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled uninterrupt...

It's not just on the levels of regime and government that violence affects the political culture. Mexico violence: Clowns protest over Acapulco murder rate Clowns dressed in white marched down a central street in the Mexican resort of Acapulco on Monday demanding an end to the city's crime wave. With their faces painted and carrying signs reading "peace", they said that they were "tired of so much violence". They complained that they were losing business because residents no longer threw parties out of fear of becoming targets of crime… Officials said they had recorded almost 50 more murders in the first three months of 2018 than in the same period last year. Most of the murders are believed to be related to warfare between rival criminal gangs in the region… In January, the US state department prohibited US government employees from travelling to the state of Guerrero, including Acapulco. It warned of armed groups "operating independently of the gove...

How are the demands on government and the state in Mexico similar to and different from those in Nigeria? Mexico’s murder rate heads for a new record IN APASEO EL GRANDE, a town in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, the bodies are stacking up… In the first three months of this year the municipality of 85,000 people had 43 murders, up from 20 in all of 2016. That is about the same as London, a city 100 times larger and currently panicking about its high murder rate… The town and the state it belongs to are suffering from a double blow. One is a national crime wave, during which the murder rate broke through its previous record of 2011. That peak came after the then president, Felipe Calderón, deployed the army to fight drug gangs. His tactic of capturing or killing kingpins caused the gangs to split into warring factions and to enter new lines of business. The current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in 2012, promised to halve the murder rate. Instead, after an ini...

A candidate without a party might upset Mexican presidential election. Mexico adds fifth name to presidential ballot despite fake signatures Mexico’s electoral tribunal has included a colourful independent candidate on the ballot for this July’s presidential election, despite the fact 58% of the signatures supporting his nomination were invalidated. Jaime Rodríguez In a midnight ruling on Monday, the tribunal found in favour of Jaime Rodríguez, a cowboy turned state governor better known as “El Bronco”, allowing him to become the fifth candidate in the election. Analysts said that his inclusion in the race, potentially pulls votes from the current frontrunner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador – a leftwing populist who courts the same anti-system voters as Rodríguez… Three candidates achieved the 866,593 signatures – or 1% of the voters’ list – necessary to register. Two of them were disqualified for turning in signatures deemed fake or otherwise inadmissible. Left off the ballot was María...

Politics can be a deadly business in Mexico — especially for local candidates Widespread killings of candidates cast shadow over Mexican elections Authorities have confirmed the slayings of at least 30 candidates, according to Alfonso Navarrete, Mexico's interior secretary. Some reports indicate the toll since last year may be almost twice as high. The killings — mostly of local candidates in provincial areas far from the Mexican capital — form a chilling backdrop to the July 1 elections, which include races for president, Congress and local posts across the country. In all, more than 3,000 offices are up for grabs, the most ever on a single day. The slain candidates represented a range of political affiliations and movements, suggesting that the killings are more about local power grabs and gang rivalries than national conflicts among parties… Most of the killings have garnered little attention from national news outlets, which are heavily focused on the presidential contenders,...

The presidential election in Mexico will be held July 1, 2018. This year, you'll know something about what the results mean when you read about them during the first week in July. Mexican leftist has 18-point lead as campaign kicks off - poll Mexican left-wing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has an 18-point lead ahead of the July 1 election, according to a poll published on Monday that showed him with a growing advantage at the start of formal campaigning. Lopez Obrador Lopez Obrador, who launched his campaign on Sunday, holds 38 percent of the vote, according to the poll by Parametria, published by Reuters… A Lopez Obrador victory could usher in a Mexican government less accommodating toward the United States… Neither second-place Ricardo Anaya nor third-place Jose Antonio Meade showed any sign of catching up with former Mexico City mayor Lopez Obrador… Anaya, running for the right-left “For Mexico in Front” coalition, holds 20 percent of vote preferences… ...

Instead of Whack-a-mole it seems that the Mexican government is "playing" Whack-a-cartel. Rise of new cartel leading to more violence, USD study shows Mexico’s strategy of targeting top organized crime figures, or kingpins, for arrest and extradition has led to the spread of a new crime syndicate and driven up homicide numbers in many parts of the country, according to a new policy brief by the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project. The report, titled “The New Generation: Mexico’s Emerging Organized Crime Threat,” focuses on the rise of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (New Generation Cartel Jalisco), commonly known as CJNG. The group’s recent and rapid expansion across Mexico has been accompanied by high levels of violence, the report states, with a countrywide record of 29,000 homicides in 2017… Authors Lucy La Rosa…  [and] professor David Shirk, the Justice Project’s principal investigator, say that the Guadalajara-based CJNG has benefited from the weake...