Ladies’ first

Two women having declared themselves candidates for their country’s presidency, and there was a rather sourly tongue-in-cheek suggestion that a third may be in the offing,

Sandra Torres, presently married to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, announced a week ago Tuesday (2-March) that she will run for president in September’s general elections.  Torres, who is a politician in her own right, being one of the founders of the ruling UNE (National Unity of Hope) party, hopes to profit not just from Colom’s relative popularity, but from the power-base she has built up among municipal leaders as president of the Consejo de Cohesión Social (Social Cohesion Council), a government umbrella organization coordinating “social investment” program (literacy campaigns, food assistance and the like).  Shades of Eva Peron”

There is a problem:  while she may be extremely popular (or at least she says she is), the spouse of a sitting president cannot be a candidate for president.  Torres is the third Mrs. Colom (the President was widowed once, and divorced his second wife) and the Colom-Torres marriage is largely a political one.  While there is always the possibility of changing the Guatemalan Constitution, or of “convincing” the Supreme Court to rule in favor of her candidacy, the country also has rather simple “no fault divorce” laws.

Josefina Vásquez Mota, Felipe Calderón’s campaign manager in the 2006 election, announced her intentions to seek the PAN candidacy for the July 2012 Presidential elections.  While Vásquez Mota has a respectable enough political record (she was the Fox Administration’s Secretary of Social Development, and was expected to be named Secretary of Interior (Gobernacion) by Calderón (whose string of Gobernacíon secretaries have become more and more non-entities through his administration) , but was shuffled off into the “women’s work” of Secretary of Public Education… which she left to run for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.  Presently, she is PAN party leader in the Chamber.

She’s probably as qualified to lose the 2012 election as any other PANista you could name, but — with Calderón himself suggesting the party might better pick someone from outside their own ranks (perhaps Calderón smelling defeat absent  a marriage of convenience with the leftist PRD) — Andres Manuel López Obrador offers an intriguing third woman Presidential possiblity:   Elba Esther Gordillo, sometimes known as “Mrs. Jimmy Hoffa” — not because she slathers on enough makeup to hide the disappeared U.S. labor leader, but in recognition of her skills as Teachers’ Union President, like those of Hoffa, lay in preserving personal power (even if a few dissident local leaders have… um.. accidents) and managing to thrive despite repeated corruption scandals… and for putting her union at the disposal of conservative politicians, much as Hoffa was willing to back Richard Nixon to further his own power in the U.S. Teamster’s Union of the 1970s.

Lopez Obrador made the comment during a speech in Culiacán, where he was mention Gordillo as one of what calls the “mafia of power” — the tight-knit circle of conservative economic and political leaders who he believes work “hand-in-glove” to prevent genuine economic and social change in Mexico.  Elba Esther’s “PANAL” party is largely credited with throwing the elections in Oaxaca State to Calderón, probably costing Lopez Obrador’s “Benefit of All Coalition” a clear-cut victory in 2006.  His suggestion that Calderón was thinking of  Gordillo as a candidate isn’t totally nuts, but it sounds like he was simply engaging in some hyperbole, his humor tending to run that way.

As it is, I wonder if Calderón, as I suggested, hasn’t concluded that he really screwed the pooch as far as his party’s chances go in 2012 and the only way PAN can remain viable at the national level is either to form a coalition with PRD against PRI (the price presumably being a non-PAN candidate