This amigo presides over a failed state

When the wildly over-hyped "Three Amigos Summit" played out in Ottawa last summer, the news consuming public was treated to a tsunami of bullshit about how great NAFTA has been for all concerned and how photogenic the two most recently elected amigos were.

We haven't heard much about Mexico since, probably because when you spend virtually all your news resources smearing one Donald J. Trump, there's really not much room left in the schedule to broadcast actual news.

Frankly, I had no idea that three Catholic priests were murdered in Mexico in September in the space of a week, or that fifteen priests have been murdered in the past four years, until I accidentally stumbled over the story at the Guardian. But I sure was acquainted with Mr. Trump's potty-mouth, which has been by far the biggest story in American media for the past few months.

That British website certainly indulges ample anti-Trump fear-mongering on its own account, but at least they still find the energy to report other stories.

That's quite an interesting stat plopped in there near the end; over 97% of crime in Mexico is either never reported or never investigated. A further stat the story doesn't mention; of the less than 3% of crimes reported and investigated, over 90% are never solved.

Those are failed-state kind of numbers, are they not?

Can the PRI save Mexico?

The Institutional Revolutionary Party had their way with Mexico for a long time. Ostensibly a leftist party they had long since abandoned any pretense of speaking for the dispossessed by the time they were turfed out two elections ago.

But the PRI is finding new life. Fed up with President Calderon's disasterous war on the drug cartels, which after claiming 45,000 Mexican lives has not made the slightest dent in the availability of drugs in the US, the people of Mexico are ready for a change.

But the PRI is running into trouble. Their star hopeful, Enrique Pena Nieto, is a slick American style politico with an American style campaign and American political advisors. How is all that north-of-the-border advice working for him? Not that well apparently.

At a recent photo-op Nieto was asked what books he'd read that mattered to him. Here is his list: the Bible.

That worked for W once upon a time, but it won't work in Mexico. Mexicans have higher standards.

When asked if he knew the price of tortillas, he replied that the little woman looks after the tortilla department in his house, so he didn't know.

When asked if he knew the minimum wage in the country he wants to be president of, he didn't know that either.

I think the PRI man is toast. Mexicans are consistently screwed over, but they're not stupid.

Hell, I know more about tortillas and the minimum wage than Enrique does, and the last book I read was by Malcom Gladwell, although I think the Bible has more depth.

The Mexican people are desperate to get out from under Calderon and his American sponsored war on the cartels. I don't speak much Mexican, but I'm thinking of taking a run at the Presidency.

The Mexican minimum wage when converted to dollars is about 80 cents an hour.