Mexico president aims to limit governors’ powers

By MCT Information Services/Mexico City

Barely a quarter-century ago, Mexico’s all-powerful presidents could run any of the nation’s 31 governors out of office at will. Then the pendulum began to swing. In the last decade, the power of governors grew to such levels that they became known by the moniker “little viceroys.”

Now the pendulum is swinging again, with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and his political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, pressing several initiatives designed to cut the power of governors.

One, adopted in November, forces state and municipal governments to reveal more details of how they spend their money.

A second initiative, under discussion this week, would affect state elections, which historically have been manipulated by governors who control the voting apparatus in each state. Under the proposal, state elections would be run by the federal electoral institute, not the states.

“The president has the governors on the run,” said Joy Langston Hawkes, a political scientist at the Centre for Research and Teaching of Economics, a Mexico City think tank.

Currently, state governors enjoy little oversight and torrents of money from Mexico City. They control state health and educational services, run state elections, operate state police, play a huge role in the federal Congress through their hand-picked candidates, finance state judiciaries and wield power over the state media through the purchase of advertising. Many grow inexplicably rich in office.

Ironically, Pena Nieto is a former governor, who ruled the state of Mexico during the height of the buildup in governors’ power.

Pena Nieto has lots of reasons to want to rein in state governors’ autonomy - or at least not let them thwart his sweeping changes in Mexican law that will define whether the PRI is a different party now from when it last controlled the presidency.

Pena Nieto’s already ushered through changes in education law that ended the teachers union’s hold on hiring and is pushing a reorganisation of telecom regulation intended to break monopolistic control of the sector. He’s proposed a revamp of tax and banking regulation and is expected to seek approval later this year for a plan to open up the energy sector to foreign investment.

All those changes require passage in both houses of Congress and approval by a majority of state legislatures - where governors have strong influence - to become enshrined in the constitution.

“You’ve got a PRI president who has a lot of fish to fry and doesn’t want scandals in the states,” said John J Bailey, a Georgetown University political scientist who has been following Mexico for more than 40 years.