{"id":21432,"date":"2014-11-08T21:09:22","date_gmt":"2014-11-08T20:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/?p=21432"},"modified":"2014-11-09T16:59:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T15:59:53","slug":"21432","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/21432\/","title":{"rendered":"Mexico Retreats"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mac Margolis writes: Just a couple months ago, Enrique Pena Nieto\u00a0was on a\u00a0roll.\u00a0 The young, telegenic Mexican leader\u00a0had crossed the aisle to\u00a0pass a bold suite of economic reforms\u00a0designed\u00a0to remake the country’s infrastructure.\u00a0At last, Mexico seemed ready to change the\u00a0stale\u00a0conversation\u00a0over the\u00a0failed war on drugs to\u00a0embrace\u00a0progress and modernization.\u00a0“There is no return to the past,” Pena Nieto said.<\/p>\n

Then came\u00a0Iguala, a\u00a0small\u00a0semi-desert\u00a0town in\u00a0Guerrero State in the Mexican\u00a0southwest.\u00a0On the evening of \u00a0Sept.26, police intercepted buses carrying dozens of students from a\u00a0nearby\u00a0teachers college\u00a0to town for\u00a0a protest.\u00a0What happened next is still\u00a0unclear, but\u00a0apparently Mayor\u00a0Jose Luis Abarca, fearing the rebel students would sabotage his wife’s speech in the town square,\u00a0reportedly called on amigos in the local\u00a0narco\u00a0gang, Guerreros Unidos, said to be on the city payroll. When the night was over, six people\u00a0lay dead and 43 students\u00a0were missing, now\u00a0presumed murdered.Abarca and First Lady Maria de Los Angeles Pineda fled but were arrested\u00a0on the outskirts of Mexico City.\u00a0Federal troops\u00a0have yet to locate\u00a0the missing students, but\u00a0everywhere they look,\u00a0they stumble on clandestine graves. Public horror\u00a0has turned to fury,\u00a0sparking a nationwide\u00a0revolt that led to the ouster of Guerrero’s governor.Now\u00a0Pena Nieto\u00a0is\u00a0scrambling to\u00a0rescue not just his own\u00a0mandate\u00a0but Mexico’s\u00a0best chance at\u00a0modernization\u00a0in decades. \u00a0Pena Nieto had set out to modernize crime fighting by centralizing policing and corrections\u00a0under the\u00a0powerful\u00a0Interior Ministry,\u00a0and\u00a0unifying\u00a0the country’s confusing patchwork of regional penal codes.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0strategy paid off,\u00a0including the capture earlier this year of\u00a0Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s dreaded drug overlord.\u00a0Overall, homicides \u00a0fell 13 percent\u00a0last year over the year before, and Pena Nieto recently stated that murders were down too.<\/p>\n

These\u00a0advances have emboldened Pena Nieto\u00a0who hoped to\u00a0distance himself from\u00a0his\u00a0hawkish predecessor, Felipe Calderon, whose\u00a0offensive against the narcos\u00a0had claimed 60,000 lives from 2006 to 2012.<\/p>\n

Nearly 94 per cent of Mexico’s crimes\u00a0go unsolved. \u00a0Patriotic Mexicans once surrendered their wedding rings and gold to pay off the national debt when foreign oil assets were nationalized; now they don’t wear jewelry\u00a0so they won’t be mugged.<\/p>\n

No one is saying Pena Nieto’s courageous reforms are finished, but the new Mexico will mean little as long as the shock of the old persists.<\/p>\n

\"Iguala\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mac Margolis writes: Just a couple months ago, Enrique Pena Nieto\u00a0was on a\u00a0roll.\u00a0 The young, telegenic Mexican leader\u00a0had crossed the aisle to\u00a0pass a bold suite of economic reforms\u00a0designed\u00a0to remake the country’s infrastructure.\u00a0At last, Mexico seemed ready to change the\u00a0stale\u00a0conversation\u00a0over the\u00a0failed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-news-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t