Mexico violence persists as Calderon faces last year on job

By Andrea Sosa Cabrios Nov 30, 2011, 2:08 GMT

Mexico City - As Mexican President Felipe Calderon enters his last year on the job, violence remains an unrelenting challenge.

More than 45,000 people have died in Mexico in violence linked to organized crime since Calderon was sworn in for a six-year term on December 1, 2006.

He has made the fight against the country's powerful drug cartels his top priority. But massacres, severed heads and other gruesome images have come to mark his presidency in public perception.

As he approaches the end of his term - one year from Thursday - many Mexicans reject Calderon's approach to fighting the cartels. Author Jorge Volpi, for example, recently wrote that the balance of his years in office 'could not be more disappointing, more negative.'

'There are definitely aspects that are worth praising, like macroeconomic stability, public health insurance, infrastructure. But this period will not be remembered for that progress, but for a death toll that has reached the proportions of a civil war,' Volpi wrote in the daily Reforma.

The last year of Calderon's mandate will in practice be the shortest. Mexican law bars him from re-election, and after the July 1 presidential election he will likely be overshadowed by his successor.

Recent opinion polls favour the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000 and has since been in the opposition to Calderon's National Action Party (PAN), to win the election.

The PRI is fielding a single candidate, former governor Enrique Pena Nieto. The PAN has three aspiring candidates so far, while Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whom Calderon defeated by a tiny margin five years ago, is the single candidate for the left.

'Until the last day of my term ... until the last day we are going to keep trying to make Mexico a fairer country, with safety for its people, for its families, a land of opportunity,' Calderon said.

Political analyst Ezra Shabot told dpa that 'the basic challenge' for Calderon is to show 'an ability to reduce the strength of organized crime,' in the face of a widespread notion 'that the Mexican state had been taken over by these groups.'

And the spectre of organized crime's infiltration of politics remains a concern.

'We have to remember that this presence of drug traffickers in Mexico's political spheres did not come with the PAN. It basically started with the decline of the absolute power of Mexican presidentialism in the 1980s,' Shabot stressed.

'The chance that organized crime is active in the election is real, despite the fact that some want to use it as an argument against the PRI. That does not mean that (the left) or the PAN are exempt from infiltration.'

The 2006 election, in which fewer than 0.6 percentage points separated Calderon from Lopez Obrador, and which the leftist candidate claimed was tainted by fraud, left Mexico's electoral authorities severely weakened.

The challenge ahead now is to have a less tense election.