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The Prelude to Mexico's 2006 Presidential Election
While the US government fights an inconclusive war 6,200 miles away in Iraq, social controls continue to erode in Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile-long border with the United States and whose uncertain fate is intertwined with the United States' own. Several events late in 2004 epitomize the progressive fraying of Mexico's social fabric during the administration of Vicente Fox, whose failed presidency has weakened institutions crucial to the advance of democracy, the rule of law, and stability south of the Rio Grande.
On November 23, 2004, hundreds of people watched as an angry mob seized, beat, lynched, and burned to death two Mexican federal agents in San Juan Ixtayopan, a neighborhood of poor urban peasants in southeast Mexico City. TV camera crews managed to Aim the Dantesque executions. However, municipal and federal authorities behaved like perverse Keystone Kops, who neither cooperate nor communicate with each other. They played the blame game to justify why it took them several hours to reach the scene of the atrocity. This horrible crime revealed the disdain of Mexicans-especially the "have-nots"-towards law enforcement officers. Their sentiments confirm the findings of Transparency International (TI), whose 2004 Global Corruption Barometer identified Mexico's police as among the most corrupt in the world.
After the November 2004 incident, authorities found Enrique Salinas asphyxiated in his automobile, a plastic bag tied around his head. The deceased was the younger brother of despised ex-chief executive Carlos Salinas, whose actions precipitated an economic crisis in December 1994. Meanwhile, his brother Raul is serving a 27-year sentence for masterminding the killing of their former brother-in-law, an official of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Enrique's murder, which followed Proceso magazine's exposé of the Salinas family's ill-gotten fortune, bore all the earmarks of a gangland slaying. Ever the Cassandra, Fox found nothing "political" about this macabre incident.
On New Year's Eve, a fellow inmate murdered the younger brother of narco boss "El Chapo" Guzmán inside the La Palma maximum security prison near Mexico City. In retaliation for a federal crackdown on cartel operations, six employees of a maximum-security prison in Matamoros were killed and their bodies dumped outside the facility.
Just as these lynchings and murders burst into the headlines, the...