Mexico Elected New President

picture by:  http://mx.ibtimes.com/

Enrique Peña Nieto a fresh face in the old dominant PRI

(AP) - Enrique Peña Nieto return the presidency to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional  (PRI), 12 years after an electorate, fed-up with the corruption, misrule and the repression of opposers put an end to 71 years of autocratic regimes.

Peña Nieto seduces many, but also generates severe criticism in others.

His critics describe him as a product of television marketing, a pretty face who is unable to improvise and who will always require a script, something that, to his followers, are superficial appreciations of a politician who they see a good leader, pragmatic inclusive, who knows how to negotiate, listen to people and, over all, keep his promises.

Educated in catholic schools, his training was linked to the Grupo Atlacomulco, a kind of clan that brings together politicians from that community and is considered a representative of old practices of which the party wanted to distance itself.

A lawyer who graduated from Universidad Panamericana, from the ultra-conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei, and Master in Administration from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Peña Nieto joined the PRI at 18, was a state official and then a local representative. Until then, however, he was not very well known at a national level.

The image of Peña Nieto started to extend when in 2005 he became governor of Estado de Mexico, a position he assumed with an unusual strategy: sing before a notary 608 campaign promises that he would carry throughout his administration, which served to make him known as a pragmatic politician focused less in ideologies and more in the realization of tangible public works.

During his presidential campaign, his main strategy was to promote himself as a man who keeps his promises, although his political opponents say that some of those promises were never carried out in reality, or were left unfinished. 

"What will matter to me and will be my top priority will be to yield results," said Peña Nieto, who has been favored by the fact that part of the population has shown disappointment with unrealized promises  of change and a spiral of drug violence that has affected the country during the governments of the Partido Accion Nacional (PA), who removed the PRI from the presidency in 2000.

His "obsession", he says, will be to promote economical growth to generate more jobs in a country where almost 50 percent of the population lives in poverty. he will seek he says, that the boost in jobs and education is an instrument that allows dealing with insecurity.

Unlike the current president Felipe Calderon, Peña Nieto said his priority will be to reduce violence rather than confront the drug lords, but says he will not stop fighting them.

He said that he will open up greater participation of private enterprise to Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the largest state-owned company in the country, but without privatizing it.

His presence as a politician had  a rise while he was governor while at the same time he put in place a strategy to promote services and national level government works, and included the dissemination of "spots" (ads) involving actors and actresses from Televisa, including Angelica Rivera, who later became his wife in his second marriage.

Opponents of Peña Nieto, who likes to approach people and let them touch and take pictures with him, say he is a sort of puppet of television stations, especially Televisa, the largest network in the country, which  for the candidate is only part of "legends" that are used to attack him.

The politician is seen internally as part of a new generation that provides a fresh face to the PRI, but critics insist it is practices of corruption and authoritarianism that characterized it in the seven decades in power. The old PRI members are often called "dinosaurs" and Peña Nieto as the "baby dinosaur"

source: reflejos newspaper

vol 23 No.28