Felipe Calderón Obrador

Political reporter and editor Jorge Zepeda Patterson and Chilango magazine’s Salvador Camarena have co-written “El presidente electo” on the past and future Felipe Calderón.  Kelly Arthur Garrett (Zepeda’s only peer when it comes to an indepth knowledge of Mexican politics) reviewed the new book for the Mexico City Herald.  They recommend what I’ve suspected Calderón would be forced to do anyway… adopt AMLO’s program:

Mexican poverty is so bad that when the percentage of the poorest of the poor dropped from 22.5 percent to 20.3 percent, Fox hailed it as a vindication of his administration’s policies. The truth, of course, is that with population growth, the raw number of Mexicans living in abject poverty was and is rising.

But inequality — the dry tinder of social unrest — is even worse. Zepeda points out that European countries have nowhere near the poverty Mexico has, but they don’t have a Carlos Slim either.

The arithmetic tells us that the richest 10 percent in Mexico get 40 percent of the economic pie; the poorest 10 percent get about one percent. Zepeda provides another way of looking at that shocking statistic: If an extra million pesos were magically injected into the Mexican economy tomorrow, the richest 10 percent would suck up 400,000 of those pesos, while the poorest 10 percent would divvy up 13,000.

In that scenario, poverty would have declined a bit, since the poorest 10 million or so Mexicans would each have a few pesos more. But inequality would have increased.

Indeed, things worked that way in real life during the Fox administration. We all remember that GDP didn’t grow much during the first four years. Neither did inequality. But when GDP finally started to inch up, so did inequality. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Can Calderón grow the economy? Better to ask if he can create an economy at all.

As everybody knows, Mexico has been surviving on three undependable resources — high petroleum prices, dollars sent home by emigrants, and a recently dynamic U.S. economy. Zepeda adds a fourth source — the narcodollars that flood poor communities, bringing in perhaps as much wealth as the drug cartels cost the nation in lost investment and tourism.

The current balance can’t be sustained forever, obviously, and Zepeda sees Calderón’s best course of action being to rein in, perhaps via some kind of pact, the monopolies and oligarchies that are strangling the legitimate economy. At the same time, he needs to upgrade social programs for the poor from cosmetic to high-impact.

Will he? López Obrador proposed both those things during the campaign and was called “anti-business” for the first idea and “a danger to the nation” for the second. But elections are one thing, a successful presidency quite another. If taking on the powerful, most of whom supported his candidacy, is the only path to investment, jobs, crime reduction and environmental salvation, why not do it?