by the El Reportero’s news services
Enrique Peña Nieto
Enrique Peña Nieto, the current governor of the Estado de México and the opinion poll frontrunner for the 2012 presidential elections, is starting to set the political tone. Some commentators allude to his growing influence by calling him the 501st (and most powerful) member of the 500-seat congress, because he has indicated that he does not want congress to consider the current government’s stalled political reforms in a special session. Congress, which is dominated by Peña Nieto’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), has taken the hint. If there is no special session nothing will be changed in time for next year’s elections.
How U.S. policy will change after Valenzuela
On May 5 Arturo Valenzuela, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, let it be known that he was resigning. Valenzuela is returning to academia: he had left Georgetown University on a two-year leave of absence in 2009. His period as the US’s chief policy maker towards Latin America has seen a major change in the relationship, as President Barack Obama had promised.
The U.S. now has professional diplomats heading its missions across the region and reacts much more calmly to provocative behavior by taunting presidents such as Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The traditional US policy of treating Latin America as its “backyard” has ended. This change has an economic price, as the region’s relationship with China has blossomed. Strategically, however, the region has preferred to integrate rather than to ally itself with rivals to the U.S.
Chávez welds moderate foreign policy to domestic agenda
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez is gearing up for his re-election bid next year with a concerted effort to court the middle class. Chávez never really steps out of campaign mode but his adoption of a more moderate foreign policy, in conjunction with domestic economic policy changes, suggests he feels the need to reach beyond his core support base among the poor to the middle class. This comes as his most likely rival in December 2012, Henrique Capriles Radonski, just 38 and the politician with the greatest chance of defeating Chávez according to recent polls, announced his intention to compete in the opposition party primaries on Feb. 12 next year.
‘ Pacific Alliance’ and ‘OAS without US’ come onstage
The last week of April witnessed the emergence of two regional organizations in Latin America: the Alianza del Pacífico (AP; Pacific Alliance), formed by four countries committed to free trade and enterprise, and the Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (Celac; Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), which includes all countries in the hemisphere save the US and Canada. Presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have fi gured prominently among those promoting these developments: the former in his bid to pull Colombia out of its long period of isolation, the latter seeking to prevent further deterioration of his country’s regional infl uence.
