‘It would be unforgivable if El Chapo escapes again,’ Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced back in February 2014 when resisting calls for the notorious drug baron’s extradition to the US. By the end of July the following year, Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán had slipped into a sophisticated mile-long purpose-built tunnel and escaped from Mexico’s most secure penitentiary. Ever since December 2012, when Nieto restored to power the kleptocratic Party of Institutional Revolution (PRI), things have gone this way: sweeping promises with meagre results.
Mexicans had already had 71 years to get to know the corruption and systemic human rights abuses that always accompany PRI rule. But amid cries of voter fraud, 38 per cent of the electorate supposedly cast their ballots for Nieto – the new pretty-boy face from an old PRI family in central Mexico. Nieto’s programme was the usual boilerplate neoliberalism, promising security for foreign investors and privatized prosperity from which all would benefit. Fatigue with former President Felipe Calderón’s prosecution of the US-funded ‘war on drugs’ was certainly a factor – some 60,000 Mexicans died on his watch in the futile effort to keep drugs from crossing the border. ‘Poor Mexico,’ lamented Porfirio Diaz, Mexican president back in the 19th century, ‘so far from God and so close to the United States.’ Perhaps PRI voters had a certain nostalgia for the Pax Mafiosa that had accompanied previous PRI governments – make a deal with organized crime and maybe they won’t kill so many of us.
