I was reading the WaPo and found an article about Mexico city making gay marriage legal. In Mexico of all places... What stroke me more in that article is the amount of time that the PAN and Calderon, PAN's president of Mexico, are wasting in the issue, worthy of all the reactionary move in the US (I say reactionary because I include as well GOP bigots and California "colored" Liberals that had no problem in trashing the gay marriage there while voting for Obama).
I am disappointed because I thought that Calderon would have been a better president than what he is turning to be. His war on drug cartels in the North is not going anywhere fast. His world ambition blinded him during the Cancun summit to the point of hugging Raul Castro while this one was finishing off political prisoner Zapata, African American and humble worker, the irony of the name and race for Calderon! And other earlier missteps which made lose a comfortable lead he had in Congress to, of all political parties, a resurgent PRI!
On the economy a case can be made that he is doing somewhat better, but with he world crisis we really cannot tell how much of Mexico "recovery" will be due to Calderon own actions or to the NAFTA link with the US.
I was talking with someone lately who happens to have inside info on Calderon. Well, nothing big, just someone informed of what goes on in Mexico. Apparently Calderon is a devout Catholic, something you can read in the WaPo note mentioned above. This already is a problem when ruling a country who has been officially secular for decades. But also Calderon would actually be anti US for personal reasons, of which his Catholicism is no stranger. I do not know whether this is really true but it certainty would explain some of the failings of Calderon. So we have the paradox of a Nationalistic Mexican right wing president who must deal with a US where he probably finds Obama as a dangerous Liberal and thus pushes himself to hug Raul Castro. The ironies of life when you let your personal convictions rule over the state logic.
Calderon does not realize that these inner contradictions are in fact helping those he believes his enemies as well as those who are his real enemies. If Fox was considered a semi failure I am afraid his historical image will improve once Calderon passes in about two years. And it seems that we can say goodbye to the PAN for the next Mexican elections.
The WaPo note also gives us the irony that gay rights overall have advanced in Latin America except for Venezuela where civil unions are not even considered by the glorious bolibanana revolution. Then again as the IACHR report tells us, Human Rights have been generally retrograding in Venezuela, where even antisemitism exists now. What can you expect from a lout macho barrack president?