Yucatán 2007

Elections will be held today in the mexican state of Yucatán. I shall briefly discuss some issues of pertinence and what I believe are issues of significance to mexican politics as a whole.

Normally state elections in the highly centralized Tenochtitlán don’t get much attention but these elections are being used as a barometer for the credibility status of beleaguered president, Felipe Calderón. The current cynicism that prevails in the masses is already giving out the outcome to the duo of the PRI and PAN otherwise known as PRIAN since many don’t see any difference between the two latter political parties.

The Felipe Calderón camp is betting, of course, for a continuation of the PAN and current thinking is that the PAN has negotiated the favorable outcome in Yucatán in exchange for a less and minor victory in the next state elections of the aztec federation which are to be held in Baja California in August of the present year at hand.

The problems are not little because in Yucatán the forces there are controlled by the nefarious personality of Don Diego Fernández de Cevallos. This politician casts a very dark shadow steeped in the most conservative of mexican politics that it has to give. He is often portrayed in political cartoons as an old Conquistador because he likes a strange kind of power which dates back to master and servant relations in México. He seems to prefer a weak mexican state because his political trajectory has been one to favor big business and old rich mexican families which traditionally dislike all sorts of government interference in their daily affairs. Ever since the so called alternancia,, that is, the transition of powers in México, and before that in the Salinas government, he has been an important power broker in mexican politics and hence it would be most unlikely that he would let his native land fall to his bitter and staunchest enemies, the left. Having accumulated so much power over the years it almost seems impossible that he’d not use that power to influence the outcome of the elections and that to his favor. So the governorship of the most secessionist state of México, will most likely continue to be held in the hands of the PAN although it is going to be disputed to add a pinch of credibility to the elections.

Of course, the PAN is also not keen to be to seen as a continuation of the perfect dictatorship as the Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa once called the PRI so this year we also have the novelty that for the first time in México’s political history independent candidates are being allowed to partake in the kerfuffle of mexican politics. However, it is unlikely the PAN is ready to let go of Yucatán since they firmly believe most people still believe they are democratic and the huge oil interest that abound in the yucatan peninsula, which happen to be of interest to those who trickle down the Potomac, lie underneath the struggle for power in that state.

This puts the Calderón posse in a bind because it is also unlikely they will want to give up the cradle of their symbolic democracy movement which happens to be Baja California. But if anything is true of the PAN these days is that ideology means nothing to them. I say this not lightly because current criticism of the PAN is that they have forgotten their political roots in exchange for a status quo that endangers the very institutions of the mexican nation. They are in fact prolonging a politic ideology that prefers a weak state, one that easily subyugates to the whims of the West wing.

Yucatán then is a good barometer not just for democracy in México but also as a thermometer which can tell us how hot things are to get the next coming days. Remember, México is undergoing dramatic changes as we speak even though one wouldn’t hear it from the major media outlets of the world.