Mexican President's Big Ambitions May All Come Down to Oil America Economia
go to original October 8, 2013

Pena Nieto in August (América Economía)

Ten months after taking over the presidency of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto has found himself at a critical moment. His ambitious project to reform practically all Mexican institutions is meeting opposition from the right and the left, at a time when his popularity is beginning to wane.

The right opposes his proposal to increase taxes on businesses and individuals with high incomes, while the left disagrees with his education reforms, which call for reorganizing the National Union of Education (SNTE, the biggest trade union in all of Latin America, with 1.5 million members).

Peña Nieto is preparing to remove cushy jobs and other privileges from teachers. During September, the teachers orchestrated huge protests in Mexico City, taking over a main avenue in the capital twice, creating long traffic jams that paralyzed a large area of the city for hours.

The left also opposes his proposition to open the state’s monopoly on Petróleos Mexicanos, the petroleum company better known as Pemex, to the private sector — a move that will require a constitutional amendment.

And still the Mexican president needs to get other promised reforms underway, like breaking the monopolies of the telephone and TV companies — both have already passed — and modernizing the judicial administration and the electoral systems.

Read the rest at Worldcrunch

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