Mexican politics
I regularly use 3 computers. It's like using three different desks. Sometimes things get lost. In the past week, the complexity has been complicated by loaning a computer to my wife (after her computer died and had to go to the geniuses to be resurrected) and by painting the room in which I often work.Here's what got lost. If you subscribe to The Economist or if your library has a copy of the February 17 issue, you can still access the article excerpted below.
The 17 February 2007 edition of The Economist had a very good article on Mexican politics (p. 39).
Online the article is The Institutional Revolutionary Party: Can the old Mexico play its part in forging the new?
"FOR seven decades, until Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed Mexico. Its political monopoly did not begin to wane until the 1980s, when its own left wing broke away to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and it was challenged from the right by Mr Fox's National Action Party (PAN). In last year's presidential election, the process of gradual decline produced the worst result ever for the PRI. Its candidate, Roberto Madrazo, an old-style political boss who never shook off an aura of sleaze, came a distant third, with 22% of the vote, failing to carry a single state..."
Here are things in the article that students would need to know to understand it (besides the meaning of fissiparous*):
- "PRI"
- "political monopoly"
- "PRD"
- "PAN"
- "north"
- "poorer south"
- "big reforms"
- "moderniser"
- "life in opposition"
- "position in the centre"
- "undisciplined period in the... [PRI's] recent history"
- "modernising technocrats"
- "dinosaurs"
- "Ulíses Ruiz, the governor of Oaxaca"
- "give the PRI an incentive to be seen as the party that gets things done"
*"fissiparous: factious, tending to break away from a whole" (BTW: When I looked this up, I found it to be used frequently in current political science contexts and in conservative political opinion pieces, e.g. "... fissiparous PC and multiculturalist causes..." Perhaps it will be the political science world of the year.)
posted by Ken Wedding @ 1:08 PM
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