New Pres blah blah wealth divide blah blah

Well, it looks like barring some kind of revelation about vote tampering Philipe Calderon will keep PAN in the president's chair for another 6 years. Vote tampering is no stranger to Mexico. There is considerable proof that elections have been tampered with in the past; especially during the 75 year tenure of the PRI party. We gave directions to an observer on election day so it's good to know that there are some people looking out for the uh, "fairness" of it all. At any rate it's going to make the whole issue ugly now that the closest opponent Manuel Obrador is fuming mad about the results and demanding a re-count. A friend of mine works in the Elections Department and I didn't see any new sports cars parked outside his building so that's a good sign, but the reality of having such a close vote is that no matter what happens, people are going to feel cheated.

What i think it means is that Mexico will continue along the same way it has for the last little while barring any economic meltdown in the US. Foreign investment will continue to come in and Mexico will continue to top the charts with Brazil as one of Latin America's top "growing economies". I think little can be done in the long term about crime as Calderon seems to favor a gloves off approach with more police and "special units" which are notoriously corruptible and probably will be underfunded. The PAN party did not win many seats in the senate which will make for a lot of governmental gum-flapping I'm sure. What really happened was that the middle class (which many people seem to think is growing and often refer to it as "Mexico's Growing Middle Class" but I've heard from others that it's actually shrinking) and the rich voted for Calderon and many poor people especially in the south and in Mexico City voted for Obrador. The elections mirror the wealth divide, have brought the anger and disillusionment of Mexico's poor into relief and even possibly polarized many to stand behind the flags of the PRD. Perhaps they will be able to cash in on it in 2012. Until then it seems to be Business As Usual with a capital B - and I'm not talking about the platinum Men At Work album. ...hmmm, and in case you wanted more information that you could've gotten just by watching the news, uh, Italy won the World Cup-bye.