Mexico pres seeks to cement legacy in last address - KansasCity.com

 

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY -- As he nears the end of his six-year term, Mexican President Felipe Calderon leaves his country with a better-armored economy - and also more armored cars.
Calderon delivered his final state-of-the-nation speech on Monday, trying to cement his legacy as the president who stabilized the economy and took on the country's entrenched organized crime groups, putting Mexico on the road to rule of law.

He boasted of expanding and cleaning up the federal police, putting nearly $160 billion in international reserves and creating more than 2 million jobs, twice the number during the term of his predecessor, Vicente Fox.
"It's been our generation's job to assume the costs and risks of making urgent changes in politics and security," he said in the speech at the National Palace. "The reform has begun to bear fruit, but real results will only be seen in the future."
Still, the short-term verdict on the Calderon administration is decidedly mixed, starting with the fact that violence-weary voters in the July national elections were so weary of his tenure that they kicked his party out of the presidency and brought back the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
"Mexico is a long way from having strong rule of law still, and a solid economic base has not necessarily led to the kind of jobs that people hope to have," added Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "It's a well-managed economy but it's not a dynamic economy. And that's the legacy."

The sale of armored vehicles in Mexico has at least doubled since Calderon took office and the homicide rate has soared, with decapitations and mass slayings so common they often no longer make the front pages of national newspapers - and with local papers often too intimidated to cover them at all.
Government statistics show 21,500 homicides in the first half of 2012, compared to about 25,000 for the entire year of 2007, Calderon's first full year in office.

No one knows if drug slayings have tapered in the last few months, as his administration claims, because the government stopped providing the official statistics a year ago. Public corruption persists and the economy for everyday Mexicans is sluggish.

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