In Pena Nieto's Third Year, Despite Some Changes Things Stayed the Same Adela Navarro Bello - Sin Embargo
go to original September 7, 2015

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks during an event at Los Pinos presidential residence in Mexico City. (Reuters)

Since Enrique Peña Nieto’s arrival as President both he and the Party of the Institutional Revolution have promised change. In presidential rhetoric that was the "Moving Mexico" campaign. The allusion is clear in political terms: Mexico was stagnant before, so the way to change it is moving it forward, advancing, because it is hard to believe that we were being warned since then that there would be a regression.

But the changes that the country, the President himself, his team, and his party have gone through, have not exactly benefited all Mexicans. The needs are the same, but the level of urgency has intensified. The economy is not going through its best moment and growth predictions are down for the remainder of the year. In politics, if, certainly, the composition of those winning elections has varied somewhat, the crisis of the credibility of the parties, institutions, and government has also been heightened.

There is also a higher level of perceived corruption, impunity on the part of society. This didn’t happen for no reason. The change comes from the discovery by Carmen Aristegui’s reporting team regarding the acquisition of the "White House" by the President's wife through a subsidiary of the Higa Group construction company. The latter has been favored in the past and in the present with building contracts from governments led by Peña Nieto. And of course the suspicion remains after a collaborator of Enrique Peña [Virgilio Andrade, Secretary of Public Administration] determined that neither he nor his wife, nor the Secretary of the Treasury (who bought his house from the same construction company) committed any crime or fell into influence peddling.

Another change: Poverty has spread. According to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, two million more Mexicans have fallen into that category in the last three years.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Related: President Pena Nieto Praises Progress and Safety Despite Failed Security Strategy (Breitbart) Translated by Thomas Mosley

Mexico Voices is a blogging endeavor aimed at raising the awareness of U.S. citizens regarding the destructive impact of the U.S. economic policy and the War on Drugs on Mexico — on its people, their economic and physical security and their human rights, on the nation’s dysfunctional justice system, and on the rule of law and Mexico’s fragile democracy. Visit the website at MexicoVoices.blogspot.mx

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