“Power Corrupts”

Our Spanish forefathers brought many blessings from Europe to America; horses, Christianity, beef, wheat, rice, government, the concept of private property, literacy, a mean streak of white racism and the mordida, the “bite.”
“Mordida:” Corruption, political and financial; bribes to bureaucrats, politicians and the gendarmerie, the cops, Border Patrol, etc.
Coupling the “mordida” with power and Sir Edmund Burke’s axiom that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and applying the two to Mexico we see a 2nd world country crumbling before our eyes.
The political and economic progress made by National Action Party (PAN) Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon between 2000 and 2012 is being frittered away by the return of the 70-year-long quasi-dictatorship of the 84-year-old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its ultra-leftist illegitimate off-spring, the “revolutionary” Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
The PRD was founded in 1989 by Cuauhtemoc (QWAH-TEHM-OHK) Cardenas, the son of former leftist private property-seizing President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940), who ran for President and lost the 1988 Mexican election by fraud he claimed. He had served as the PRI governor of the important state of Michoacan (MEECH-WHO-AH-KAHN) from 1980 through 1986. He governed as a leftist PRI governor and ran as a leftist candidate for President. He organized his new political party as a leftist alternative to the entrenched center-left PRI and the center-right up-start PAN.
The PRD was and is ultra-leftist in philosophical orientation and corrupt in practice.
The current political chaos in Mexico is caused by PRD local politicians in the State of Guerrero (Acapulco) being directly involved in the disappearance of 43 college students on September 26th and the subsequent discovery of dozens of burned corpses in mass burial sites.
Local police officers directed by the local PRD mayor and his wife – Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de Los Angeles — allegedly disappeared the 43 students with help from the local drug cartel leader.
More: PRD Governor Angel Aguirre of the State of Guerrero resigned his office in light of the student disappearance just a few miles from his governor’s mansion and the involvement of PRD officials.
When Mexicans demanded real investigations into the mass disappearance of the students and the dozens of bodies discovered in mass graves they had to turn to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto who thought that his economic policies would divert attention from the war on “narcotraficantes” – drug cartels – that his predecessor. Felipe Calderon, waged during his presidency.
President Pena Nieto directly and indirectly pledged to ease up on the “war” and concentrate on economics thinking that such would raise Mexico’s standing in the world economy and that rising prosperity would continue Mexico’s march towards a top-six world economy in less than ten years.
A “war” weary Mexican nation voted for Pena Nieto in 2012 and he has made some innovative moves on oil, real property ownership, law enforcement and judicial processes as well as public relations to entice foreign investment. Predictably he has fallen short on the war on crime, drugs and now, mass student executions. Whether or not Mexicans will punish his PRI associates next year in congressional elections, no one knows but as certain as the disinfecting sunlight showing on the PRD one can expect a potential political disaster in those elections for the PRD.
Ever since “Governor” Cardenas founded the PRD, it has been a political problem. In the 2000 election it managed to run second after Fox’s PAN and split the normal PRI vote allowing Fox to win with less than 50 percent. Six years later a former PRI Tabasco State governor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (MANLO) ran for President and was barely beaten by PAN’s Felipe Calderon. The PRD swept southern Mexico and lost Northern Mexico.
MANLO protested his loss claiming to have won. He called for a nationwide worker strike and shut down Downtown Mexico City for weeks. Mexico’s economy took a huge hit. He organized a rump “government” by swearing himself in as the “real” President of Mexico and traveled around the country “appointing” officials to his rump government. Mexicans tired of his pompous disregard for their vote and he slipped out of sight.
Now with a national turmoil over the disappearance of the 43 students in the State of Guerrero and the direct involvement of a PRD mayor and his wife plus the ineffectiveness and resignation of the PRD state governor, the PRD has reached the bottom of the political well.
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has resigned from the party he founded in a letter to the Party Chairman. Twice he was the Party’s candidate in the 1994 and 2000 presidential elections.
“I am resigning irrevocably as a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution.”
His reasons, the party’s direction, leadership and office holder participation in the disappearance of students on September 26th.
After the Party’s embarrassment of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s shameless refusal to accept defeat, the resignation of its founder appears to be a political DEATH RATTLE for the Mexican political Party of the Democratic Revolution. Good!
Contreras formerly wrote for the New America News Service of the New York Times