Felipe Calderon is now at Harvard UniversityWant to give former Mexican President Felipe Calderon a piece of your mind about his insane "war on drugs" in which 50,000+ Mexicans have been murdered? He can be found at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts after his term of Mexican President ends!!!Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon heading to Harvard By Daniel Hernandez November 28, 2012, 10:10 a.m. MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Felipe Calderon will head to Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., after his six-year term ends Saturday. He will be a teaching and research fellow in 2013, the university and the president's office said in statements Wednesday. The announcement put to rest one of the most pressing questions in Mexico's political chatterbox: What's the next post or destination for Calderon, who declared a military-led campaign against drug cartels that left scores of civilians dead or missing across the country? For his next move, the politically conservative Calderon will be named Inaugural Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School for next year, allowing him to lecture, teach and conduct research as he pleases, the school said. Calderon received a mid-career master's degree in public administration at the Kennedy School in 2000. He also holds a law degree and a master's degree in economics from institutions in Mexico. In inviting him to Harvard, the school emphasized Calderon's "pro-business" economic policies and his government's reforms in areas such as climate change and healthcare. "President Calderon is a vivid example of a dynamic and committed public servant, who took on major challenges in Mexico," David T. Ellwood, dean of the school, said in the statement. "I am thrilled he will be returning." Earlier this year, Calderon was in negotiations to take a post at the University of Texas at Austin, sparking protests among students and faculty there. One organizer of a petition against inviting Calderon to the University of Texas told a local news outlet in September that his presence there would be "like saying, 'We don’t care about your pain ... We don't care that your country has been ravaged.' " Elite private universities in the United States are friendly ground for Mexican presidents. Calderon gave the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2011. Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, is currently a professor at Yale University. On Saturday, Calderon hands over Mexico's presidential sash to Enrique Peña Nieto in a ceremony at the lower house of Congress to launch the country's next six-year presidential term. Exiting Mexican Leader to Go to Harvard By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY Published: November 29, 2012 MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón, who unleashed the military to take on drug traffickers and saw violence spiral out of control during his tenure, will move out of Mexico shortly after leaving office on Saturday. In January, Mr. Calderón will join the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as the first Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders fellow, a one-year position created to give high-profile leaders leaving office time to write, lecture and generally share their experiences. Mr. Calderón, 50, who earned a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School in 2000, will focus on “the many policy challenges he encountered while serving as president,” the school said in a news release that did not mention his biggest challenge: confronting the drug-trafficking organizations that have terrorized the country and fueled a war that left tens of thousands of people dead during his six years in office. The school’s statement praised other achievements, including his stewardship of the economy, which stabilized after a recession and is now growing faster than the United States’. Mr. Calderón, who has a wife who has dabbled in politics and three young children, was long expected to leave Mexico, either because of safety considerations or to follow a custom of departing Mexican presidents, who generally do not stay. “It’s a tradition,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “to give your successor a little bit of space.” Shortly after leaving the presidency in 1994 under a cloud, Carlos Salinas de Gortari went into self-imposed exile, traveling to New York, Montreal and Havana and finally settling in Dublin. He sought to be named the head of the World Trade Organization, but withdrew after his brother was arrested on charges of ordering the assassination of a Mexican politician. His successor, Ernesto Zedillo, joined Yale University, his alma mater, as director of the Center for the Study of Globalization. Vicente Fox, Mr. Calderón’s immediate predecessor and a fellow member of the National Action Party, remained in Mexico in recent years. He started a research group and kept his hand in politics, causing a stir last summer when he all but endorsed Enrique Peña Nieto of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party for president. Mr. Peña Nieto won and takes office on Saturday. Some analysts contend that security problems in Mexico would make it difficult for Mr. Calderón to stay, despite the government’s provision of an extensive security detail for former presidents. “Calderón is going to pay a high personal cost for having had the courage to take on the cartels, and part of it entails having to be away with his family for some time,” said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst and consultant. Mr. Calderón’s job hunt has brought some controversy. After The Dallas Morning News reported in August that he was in talks with the University of Texas about a teaching position, students and faculty members started circulating a petition across the country blaming him for the deaths of young people in the drug war and calling on campuses to bar him.
Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue the insane drug war???Mexico has a new President!!!!Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue Felipe Calderon's insane drug war??? I hope not, but from articles like this it sounds like Enrique Peña Nieto will continue the American financed Mexican drug war, which is really a war on the people of Mexico, like the American drug war is a war on the citizens of the USA. Incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto inherits a bruised Mexico By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times November 30, 2012, 5:58 p.m. MEXICO CITY — When Enrique Peña Nieto assumes the Mexican presidency on Saturday, returning to power a once-autocratic party that ruled for seven decades, he will immediately confront a sluggish economy and a bloody war against drug gangs. How he will handle those two problems is the biggest question surrounding the incoming government. Peña Nieto, 46, and his Institutional Revolutionary Party want to shift the focus away from the battle against drug cartels that consumed and ultimately haunted outgoing President Felipe Calderon. But Peña Nieto is inheriting a bruised, terrified and polarized nation that has lived through its most violent period since its revolution a century ago. Tens of thousands of people — mayors, police, journalists, lawyers, officials, businessmen as well as criminals — have been killed. Thousands are missing, and human rights abuses by authorities have skyrocketed in the six-year campaign against the drug gangs. Despite the elimination of several top drug lords, the flow of narcotics has not slowed. The gangs have only extended their influence from the border with the U.S. deep into southern Mexico and beyond. Calderon, meanwhile, will take on a teaching position at Harvard University, swiftly leaving the country he ruled since 2006. Presidents are limited to one term in Mexico, and Calderon's National Action Party came in a poor third in last summer's election. The PRI finished first, but with only about 38% of the vote, limiting the mandate that Peña Nieto will enjoy and complicating his ability to push through ambitious reforms he promised. He will have to struggle to balance competing forces within his party: the so-called dinosaurs who evoke old-school, heavy-handed politics versus the U.S.- or Europe-educated modernizing younger members. His Cabinet, announced Friday, contains both. "The most serious problem for Peña Nieto is his desire to draw a line between those traditional PRI practices … and the image of modernity that is incompatible with the old way of doing politics," commentator Ezra Shabot said in an El Universal news column this month. Instead of the drug war, Peña Nieto would like to talk about the economy, foreign investment and jobs. But security issues will be unavoidable from Day 1. The new president has pledged, rather vaguely, to "reduce violence" and cut the homicide rate as a way to return to besieged Mexicans a sense of safety and tranquillity. Critics fear that means pulling punches when it comes to persecution of drug gangs. In the past, the PRI was known to enter into pactos, or deals, with cartel leaders to keep the peace and share the profits. Peña Nieto has angrily denied that he plans to cut deals with drug gangs, something that would be more complicated today because of their fragmented nature and the acute viciousness of one of the newer and now-dominant groups, the Zetas. He has said he will keep the army deployed throughout the country, as Calderon did, at least initially. In addition, he will demote the U.S.-backed federal police while building up a national gendarmerie that in theory would eventually replace the military in the drug offensive. Despite the PRI's long nationalistic streak, Peña Nieto says he intends to maintain and would like to expand Mexico's close cooperation with the United States in security matters. Currently, the U.S. supplies intelligence data to Mexican authorities for the tracking of traffickers and is training thousands of police officers, judges, prosecutors and others as part of a $2-billion aid program. He has already hired Gen. Oscar Naranjo, retired head of the Colombian national police, as a special security advisor. Naranjo is beloved by the Americans and is expected to bring on board U.S.-promoted tactics from the Colombian conflict, including the increased use of small, vetted police or military units for raids. Calderon's strategy was faulted for concentrating on military force and underestimating cartel strength while failing to go after the money, much of it laundered through Mexican businesses and banks. Peña Nieto is promising a new, reformed PRI, one that will not revert to its old habits of election-rigging, paying off supporters, co-opting the opposition and occasionally beating them up. The Mexico of today is very different from that of nearly two decades ago, when the last PRI president was elected. Some, but certainly not all, of its institutions are stronger, such as the Supreme Court and the news media, and can provide a counterbalance to the presidency. Yet six years of bloodshed have left a dispirited society that may be willing to give ground to organized-crime kingpins if it at least means being left alone. Polling data released this week show roughly equivalent portions of Mexicans saying the drug war was Calderon's most important achievement and his biggest failure. And about two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed the cartels were winning the war. Serious systemic problems, like impunity and corruption — perfected under the long PRI reign — will continue to hinder any progress Peña Nieto hopes to make. On the economy, Peña Nieto has stressed his plan to open up the state-run oil giant Pemex to private and foreign investment, long a taboo here. To do so means challenging the Pemex unions that have long allied themselves with the PRI. Already, another key reform, on labor workplace rules, passed the Legislature only after the PRI gutted measures that would have forced powerful unions to be more accountable and transparent. wilkinson@latimes.com
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