Self-Promotion is Key for Mexican Politicians, and Gov. Velasco Has the Right Fluff David Agren - macleans.ca
go to original February 21, 2014

The southern Mexican state of Chiapas, with its poverty-stricken indigenous villages and history of armed uprisings, is a long way from the mansions of Lomas de Chapultepec in Mexico City, home to the country’s business and political class. Yet late last year the young governor of Mexico’s poorest state plastered his image all over Mexico City’s most upscale neighbourhood, where a large Starbucks coffee costs more than many of Chiapas’s coffee farmers make in a day.

Gov. Manuel Velasco Coello’s plan was to get known beyond his backwater on the Guatemala border. And given the scandal that greeted his self-promotion in the capital, and the country at large, he accomplished his goal. His $10-million publicity campaign (for a governor of a state where 74 per cent of the people live in poverty) was denounced in opposition circles as obscene.

Velasco, 33 - already the country’s youngest-ever senator and governor - denies having presidential aspirations. But his campaign follows what’s becoming a familiar script in Mexico, where politicians bolster their images through billboards and banal radio and TV spots rather than tackling big issues like poverty. Velasco is taking a page directly from President Enrique Peña Nieto, who also spent big on self-promotion, targeting telenovelas (sappy soap operas) as much as nightly newscasts. Elected governor in 2012, Velasco is “sort of following a Peña Nieto strategy: very early promotion on the basis of fluff, having a pretty lady at your side and showing up at all the events and smiling broadly,” says Federico Estévez, a political science professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico.

Read the rest at macleans.ca

Photo: Notimex/Newscom

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