Sunday

During a bolster in momentum after Friday's victory over the powers that be, presidential candidate Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO) is making big noises about declaring himself the next president and authoring a new constitution for México.* Friday the PRD, ALMO's party, created a calamity on stage at the Informe, or yearly state of the union address, preventing Fox's last chance to address the congress during his six-year presidency. PRD lawmakers sympathetic to ALMO's cause have announced the plan to do the same on December first, preventing Fox's ostensible successor, Felipe Calderón, from being sworn into office. Side note: in the article cited above, the Herald Tribune has transposed AMLO's first two names, probably accidentally, making his initials MALO, which means "bad man" in Spanish. Fox, for his part, after leaving the chaotic scene at the congressional building, hopped a plane to hurricane-devastated Baja California,* where John has weakened into a smallish tropical storm and continues pounding towns with massive amounts of rain. As John hit land and beat a path straight up the single-highway strip of the Baja peninsula Friday, he washed houses away, flooded fifteen towns, and closed all escape routes. There have been no reported fatalities. Emergency supplies are being delivered via helicopter.* Now the violence: since always, and also since the arrest of Tijuana Cartel's Javier Arellano Felix, drug killings have increased, not in border states near Tijuana, but in the south central Mexican state of Michoacán.* Why? Maybe because of power vacuums and supply issues near the Sinaloa Cartel's hometown of Mazatlán, maybe because enforcers are watching what's happening in México City and Oaxaca; I don't really know. I don't think that the current police crackdown* on Guatemalan heroin farmers is going to help matters any, though. At least not in western México. [Cavin]