Latin America: Week in Review, Mexico
Mexico: PRI Wins Michoacan Governor Election, Preliminary Results Say
November 15, 2011 By Staff
Today in Latin America
Top Story — Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in Spanish) took the governorship of Michoacán, according to preliminary results released Monday, in an election that many are viewing as a referendum on the governing PAN’s drug war, which President Felipe Calderón launched in 2006. Calderón’s sister, Luisa María, lost a hard-fought gubernatorial election to PRI candidate Fausto Vallejo, who won 35 percent of the votes. Public security dominated the election, overtaking economic issues including poverty and migration. But Calderón’s pledge to continue her brother’s frontal assault on drug cartels did not motivate voters enough to get her into office. The leftwing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD, in Spanish), came in third, though the party had held the governorship of Michoacán for the last 12 years. The PRI, which governed Mexico for seven decades until the PAN unseated it 2000, hopes to retake the presidency in elections scheduled for July.
Read more from The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor.
Headlines from the Western Hemisphere
North America
- Despite a toughening stance on immigration from Republican presidential candidates, census data show a rapid decline in illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Growing numbers of Mexican fashion designers are drawing inspiration from pre-Columbian traditions.
- Mexican officials say soldiers searching vehicles for hidden drugs found 140 Central American migrants crammed into a tractor-trailer rig.
- The MS-13 gang, started by Salvadoran immigrants in the 1980s, is expanding into new territory and becoming more deeply involved in sex trafficking.
Caribbean
- The United States and the Dominican Republic signed an agreement to share millions of dollars in forfeited assets from a Medicare fraud scheme.
- Cuba accused the United States again on Monday of enabling illegal Internet connections on the island and said authorities arrested several people in April from profiting from wireless networks.
- Police in Puerto Rico captured alleged drug smuggler Carlos Morales Dávila, who is sought by the Florida authorities, as he rode off in a speedboat.
Central America
- The Costa Rican economy grew over 4 percent in September, year-on-year, according to the country’s Central Bank.
- InSight Crime has more information on the 500 percent rise in attempted lynchings in Guatemala, originally reported Sunday.
- A group of Central American women who traveled through Mexico for two weeks in search of missing relatives ended the journey with the discovery of one of their sons, a spokeswoman said Monday.
Andes
- After gunshots scattered a crowd at a campagin event for Hugo Chávez challenger María Corina Machado on Saturday, former Caracas mayor Freddy Bernal said that Machado’s appearance in eastern Caracas was a “provocation.”
- Human Rights Watch and Argentina’s Center for Freedom of Expression and Information of the University of Palermo asked Ecuador’s courts to repeal defamation laws protecting public officials.
- The burial of Peruvian villagers killed in a 1992 massacre by the Grupo Colina death squad has highlighted the need for investigation of disappearances during the country’s 20-year armed conflict.
- The Colombian military said that it rescued two Polish kayakers who had been stranded for five days after their kayak overturned on the Yari river.
Southern Cone
- Police invasions of Rio de Janeiro favelas may be causing the drug trade to move to other parts of the city, according to former drug czar Walter Maierovitch.
- Citing an expired statute of limitations, a Chilean judge dismissed charges on Monday against former priest Fernando Karadima, accused of molesting at least four teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
- The Brazilian government has granted permanent residence to a Spanish citizen to live with his Brazilian partner, the first time that Brazil has allowed residence based on a same-sex relationship.
- Uruguay has become a net creditor of the IMF and has helped to bail out countries like Ireland and Angola.
Image: Sincretic @ Flickr.
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[…] Mexico: PRI Wins Michoacan Governor Election, Preliminary Outcomes Say Top Story — Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in Spanish) took the governorship of Michoacán, according to preliminary results released Monday, in an election that many are viewing as a referendum on the governing PAN's drug war, … Study more on Latin America News Dispatch […]
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