Courtesy of Reuters

Mexico’s next conflict will not be waged in some far away land or against the Zapatistas in the south of the country. Instead, this new war will be fought in the courtrooms. With the ongoing battle against organized crime and drug kingpins waging in the background, President Enrique Peña Nieto today declared war on syndicalism in Mexico when authorities arrested Elba Esther Gordillo at an airport outside Mexico City.

Ms. Gordillo, who has been the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union for over twenty years, has been accused of embezzling more than $153 million in union funds that have gone towards her lavish style: plastic surgery, designer clothes and bags, a private jet, and even houses in California. Jesus Murillo Karam, Mexico’s Attorney General, said the arrest was a result of an investigation that begin in December that looked into money laundering from 2008-2012.

This move, which has sent political shockwaves through Mexico, comes on the heels of the signing by President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico’s biggest and most sweeping constitutional educational reforms in seventy years. After receiving approval from congress and a majority of the states’ legislatures, the reforms will create a system of standards for hiring and promoting teachers based on merit and will also allow for the first-ever census of Mexico’s schools and teachers. Further reforms include extending learning hours in over forty thousand schools, raising the completion rate for middle schoolers to 80% and 40% for high schoolers.

Education in Mexico had been under the firm control of the most powerful union in Latin America: the National Union of Education Workers or SNTE. Under the SNTE, which was headed by Elba Esther Gordillo until her arrest, teaching positions could be sold or inherited, thousands of phantom teachers were on the federal payroll, and teachers were personally hired at times by Ms. Gordillo herself. With the new reforms in place, much of the control of the public education system will return to the federal government.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Gordillo was very against the president’s educational reforms. Despite originally being a voice for educational reform, she has ran unopposed for years and turned herself into the SNTE’s ultimate leader, consequently transforming the union into a vital voting bloc that president after president sought after. Affectionately called “The Teacher,” she had vowed to fight the reforms and even mobilized the members of her 1.5 million-member union into mass demonstrations against it in a futile attempt to derail them.

Is this a sign that Enrique Peña Nieto has decided to take on the old school political bosses that have reigned untouched for decades within his own party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to prove he is serious about distancing himself from its past while restoring power and confidence in the presidency? Or is this just a simple case of Mr. Peña Nieto targeting a political enemy to help push through his reforms?

The answer will be found in whether or not President Enrique Peña Nieto chooses to ignore or heed the call by leaders of the National Action Party (PAN) to continue to go after these union bosses. In a statement, the PAN has already called for Mr. Peña Nieto to target Carlos Romero Deschamps. Deschamps, who is the head of the powerful oil-workers union, has also been in power since the 1990s and has also served as a political kingmaker in the past. The president also vowed during his campaign to privatize Mexico’s national oil company, PEMEX, so any efforts to do so or reform it might also result in the persecution of Mr. Deschamps.

The eyes on an entire nation will be on the courtroom where not only will Elba Esther Gordillo be tried, but the future of Mexican politics will be shaped. It is said that Ms. Gordillo will not go down without a fight and will be using her wealth and political influence to build her case and cause havoc for the government.

In the meantime, President Enrique Peña Nieto has stated that the inquiry will continue to the very end with full adherence to the law. “The resources of the unions are for the members, not their leaders,” he said in a national address to the nation. Without directly mentioning Ms. Gordillo, he followed up by saying that the case is strictly legal and that he had ordered due process and human rights to be respected. “No one is above the law.”

The 19^th-century French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once said that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”

This aphorism seems to resonate in Mexican politics more often than officials care to admit.

When President Enrique Peña Nieto came into office in December, he pledged to reduce the violence created by the organized crime and drug trade in Mexico. He appeared to be on pace to “walk the walk” by introducing to the nation his crime prevention program that would turn the discussions about Mexico away from drug violence.

Recent flare-ups in the state of Guerrero, where a group of masked gunmen gang raped a group of Spanish women on vacation in Acapulco and nine police officers were ambushed and killed, have all but forced the Peña Nieto administration to put this new plan on the backburner and resort to the same tactics employed by their predecessors in the Calderon administration.

The explosions of grenades near the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo and the kidnapping and consequent murder of popular folk group Kombo Kolombia have led some to question if this new crime prevention strategy that Enrique Peña Nieto campaigned on would be different after all. One does not need to look further than the citizens of Guerrero who have formed their own militias out of frustration at the police’s incompetence to see the increased discontent among the Mexican populace. 

In fact, this discontent has also had an impact on Peña Nieto’s approval ratings. In a poll consisting of a thousand face-to-face interviews with Mexican citizens, pollsters found Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval rating to be at 56% at the start of his term. Compare that to the 58% approval rating for President Felipe Calderon at the start of his term six years ago.

All of this begs the question: is it too early to begin questioning Peña Nieto’s successes on reducing drug violence?

For starters, there is a dispute over the accuracy of the homicide numbers for the first two months of Peña Nieta’s term (December and January). One Mexican newspaper puts the total at 1,939 whereas another newspaper put it at 1,524. A third source gave a figure of 1,758. These are all third-party estimates and analysts are awaiting the release of data by Mexico’s Secretary-General of National Public Safety.

Even with the release of an indisputable and accurate figure by the Mexican government, it is hard to determine how many of those deaths truly are linked to organized crime and the drug trade since police and other agencies use various characteristics to categorize the murders. To further complicate things, it is another matter of discussion if these numbers would indicate a drop (or even increase) in violence when juxtaposed to the data from President Calderon’s tenure.

However, the good news from Ciudad Juarez should not be ignored. There has been a noticeable, and substantial, drop in deaths in what was once called the most dangerous city on the planet. From a peak of 268 homicides around this time last year in the city, that number has dropped to just 26 in the month of January.

Peña Nieto should not be quick to take credit for this enormous drop in violence, especially when the city of Chicago recently named drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Laura its Public Enemy No. 1 – a title not awarded since the days of Al Capone in 1930.

So let us answer the question on everyone’s minds: is it then too early to judge Enrique Peña Nieto’s success in fulfilling his campaign promise on a reduction in drug trade and organized crime-related crime?

The short answer is yes and no.

It is too early to judge just HOW successful, or unsuccessful, he has been due to the statistical inconsistencies in the murder rates and the questions of how to apply them. It is also uncertain whether or not these recent upticks in violence would have happened under Felipe Calderon’s presidency. One could also argue that the slide in disapproval ratings for Peña Nieto is also just a continuation of a general sense of exhaustion and distrust that is pertinent throughout the Mexican population.

In the opinion of this citizen, however, it is not too early. When one campaigns on being different than their predecessor and within two months of office has already capitulated into those “failed policies” he sought to break away with, the words of Alphonse Karr should ring in their ear.

Mexico began writing a new chapter in its modern history last Saturday. Outgoing President Felipe Calderon handed the reigns of power to the fresh-faced “priista” (a term used in Mexico to label members of the PRI) Enrique Peña Nieto as the latter was inaugurated. This marked the closure of the twelve-year rule of the PAN, who beginning with Vicente Fox and ending with Felipe Calderon governed Mexico after over seven decades of unchecked and unrivaled PRI dominance.

As President Peña Nieto accommodates himself and his family at Los Pinos, historians have already began the work of pouring over Calderon’s achievements in office to determine the impact, and otherwise legacy, this man has left on the country he helped steer away from financial collapse while at the same time thrusting into a war against organized crime.

Much like George W. Bush’s eight years in office here in the United States were defined by the War on Terror (9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.), Calderon’s term was characterized by his attack on the drug cartels that operated within the country. At the conclusion of his administration, some 60,000 people were left dead as a result of the conflict, over a 100,000 homicides took place under his watch (a third more than under Fox), and 25,000 Mexicans were still missing.

Furthermore, there are those who say that his war on the cartels has barely left a dent on drug trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico and that the takedown of top cartel leaders has actually fueled the violence as splinter groups formed and became more aggressive than their predecessors. Not to mention the toll that this has taken on Mexico’s image on the world stage, especially in the United States (a major source of Mexico’s tourism industry) where our country is seen as a “failed state” more dangerous than Somalia where beheadings and drugs are rampant.

But we as Mexicans need to give credit where credit is due and Calderon deserves credit. He showed from the get-go, by sending 50,000 troops into the streets in his first month in office, that he was not afraid to do what his predecessors had not by tackling organized crime syndicates, which were allowed to operate under PRI rule in exchange for support. Of a list of 37 cartel leaders, which his administration targeted at the beginning of this operation, 25 have been captured or killed. Violence is also on the downturn in Mexico where beheadings and massacres are fewer and far between and Ciudad Juarez is on pace to see its first year with a drop in homicides.

Felipe Calderon, most importantly, saved his country from collapsing during the global financial crisis by ensuring fiscal stability. As a result, Mexico is outgrowing Brazil (and will continue to do so) and will now be a bigger ally to the U.S. than the Americans realize as wages in China and oil prices go up. Speaking of our neighbor to the north, the L.A. Times has congratulated Calderon on his openness to cooperate with them and “[rewriting] the rules under which foreign forces could act here in matters of national security.”

So as Calderon heads off to Harvard University, he leaves Enrique Peña Nieto with a foundation and a blueprint with which to move my country forward. And that’s something President Peña Nieto cannot take credit for if he is successful and in fact different from his PRI predecessors.

Photo Courtesy of Bloomberg

On November 6^th, the American people reelected President Barack Obama to lead their country for another four years. Shortly after, both current President Felipe Calderon and President-Elect Enrique Peña Nieto called Mr. Obama to congratulate him on his victory. Despite being virtually shunned in the American media during campaign season, overshadowed by a “rising Chinese threat,” these two men will meet with Mr. Obama in Washington D.C. later this month.

Surely these men will have no shortage of talking points to discuss and now that Mr. Obama has been reelected (we all remember how he told then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he would have more flexibility after his reelection), he will have no excuse to avoid addressing the meteoric rise of its friend and ally: Mexico. For those of you that have been focusing your attention elsewhere these last few weeks (Israelis and Palestinians going to war will do that to you), allow me to explain why that sentence was not a misprint.

Mexico’s economy outpaced that of powerhouse Brazil’s 4% to 2.7% and is expected to grow twice as fast this year, giving it the fastest growth of all Latin American economies by the end of the year. Fewer Mexicans are coming to the United States and more are emigrating out of it due to the United States’ fragile economy and an unemployment rate that is twice that of Mexico’s. In fact, unemployment in that country fell to 4.7% in September, which was the lowest in four years, marking a comeback from the devastating recession of 2009. Even the demographics of immigration to the United States have changed. Legal Mexican residents now outnumbered undocumented immigrants, Mexican women are having less children (from an average of seven in the 1960s to just two), and within a decade the fertility rate in Mexico will be lower than that of the United States. 

People will still claim that Mexico, the same country the Pentagon warned was in danger of becoming a “failed state” three short years ago, is still the Mexico of old despite these impressive developments. They will claim it is still an impoverished third-world nation fighting an ever escalating and violent drug war. Nearly half the population (mostly centered in the south of the country) is poor, but this is being offset by universal health care policies. The crime rate in Mexico is falling slowly, but surely, dropping to its lowest level in five years and is concentrated in a few hotspots of the country (a third of Mexican states have lower crime rates than Louisiana) despite the failed drug policies of countries like the United States whose citizens spend billions on drugs and openly allow the purchase of guns and other weapons that inevitably fall in the hands of these drug kingpins. 

To the observant eye it would appear that the Mexican people are getting their act together. So why should Mr. Obama and those on the right who continue to stall immigration policy care? Because Americans are notorious for loving cheap manufactured goods. It is no secret that the United States receives most of its imports from China, but in the past decade, wages at these Chinese factories that produce said imports have quintupled and the price of oil worldwide has tripled in that same span. Meanwhile, Mexico has become a cheaper alternative that is awash in petroleum. Mexico itself has a GDP just greater than that of South Korea, is the world’s biggest exporter of flat-screen televisions, BlackBerry’s, fridge-freezers, and climbing up the ranks when it comes to the automobile and aerospace fields. If these trends continue, the United States will import more from Mexico than any other country by 2018.

If Mexico is to continue this remarkable expansion and growth, President-Elect Enrique Peña Nieto must prove he is serious about pushing the country’s economic growth to 6% by the end of his term by doing what his PRI predecessors would have not: taking on his party backers and liberalizing near-monopolies in the country. Telecommunications and television would be the first to go and breaking state-run monopolies on petroleum, also allowing the oil to flow freely, would follow. And if Mr. Nieto is even more serious about cutting the crime rate in Mexico by half, he must expand the federal police and their counterparts at the state level in ways Mr. Calderon could not do.

All of this will undoubtedly lead to fights between Mr. Nieto and his party (a PRI senator is the head of the oil workers’ union), the powerful unions (the teachers’ union is stifling education reforms), and the workers of Mexico themselves (who feel undermined by recent labor reforms).

If Mexico is to avoid letting this progress go to waste in hopes of cementing its status as a top ten economy and member of the first world, then Mr. Nieto must not just pick these fights but win them as well because Mexico (and the United States) will be better for it.