http://www.counterpunch.org/ross12042006.htmlBut the official swearing-in had been preempted by the unprecedented transfer of powers from Fox to Calderon at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, in the early morning hours with the military brass bearing witness. Never before in Mexico had power changed hands in such circumstances. Swearing the oath read to him by an unidentified voice off camera, Felipe Calderon became the first Mexican president ever to privately assume power - the constitutionally mandated congressional swearing-in was designed to bolster the PANista's dubious claim to the office awarded to him by a razor-thin margin in the fraud-marred July 2nd election.
The militarized spectacle of this post-midnight swearing-in broadcast nationally by the nation's two-headed television monopoly sends a clear signal of just how Felipe Calderon intends to govern this sharply polarized land - with the military and the media.
Indeed, repression is right at the top of Calderon's menu as evidenced by his cabinet appointees, many of them like him chosen from the right wing of the rightist party. The new interior secretary who oversees national security and internal political relations and whose powers are second only to the president, Jose Ramirez Acuna, had perhaps the blackest human rights record of any state governor outside of Oaxaca tyrant Ulisis Ruiz when he ruled Jalisco, never once accepting recommendations from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to curtail flagrant abuses by his security forces.
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A peaceful march by the APPO and its supporters November 25th was cruelly suppressed by the federal troops, unleashing elements of Ruiz's ministerial police who burnt down the Assembly's encampments, raided APPO leader Flavio Sosa's offices, and broke into hospitals and private homes hunting protestors. More than 160 militants detained by state and federal cops have been shipped out of state to prisons as far north as Matamoros on the U.S. border in a concerted PRI-PAN plan to crush the self-designated "Commune of Oaxaca."
As might be expected in the throes of the government-ordered crackdown which accompanies Calderon's ascendancy to high office, and the sealing of the stealing of the July election that has soured many Mexicans on the effectiveness of the ballot to bring social change, the armed option has emerged as an enticing alternative. The first bombings here in six years were staged in mid-November by a coalition of tiny guerrilla cells that split from the all-but-dormant Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) in the late '90s, and caused moderate property damage to the bunker that houses the maximum electoral tribunal - the TRIFE - which confirmed Calderon's victory, the heavily-fortified national headquarters of Ruiz's PRI, and a transnational bank - bombings at transnational banks occurred in 2000.
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