Word: calderã
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Unlike a lot of the pugnacious leaders Latin America is known for, Felipe Calder??n doesn't look the part of the tough guy. The new President of Mexico is short and bespectacled, an owlish lawyer and economist who evokes technocrats like Michael Dukakis. When he visited Mexican troops battling drug gangs in western Michoacán state earlier this year, Calder??n donned an olive green army jacket and a five-star general's cap and was later photographed in a military Hummer. That incongruous image conjured unflattering comparisons to the tank ride that doomed Dukakis' U.S. presidential hopes...
...Calder??n's act is going over well in Washington too. After 100 days on the job, he is emerging as President George W. Bush's anti-Chávez--a conservative counterweight to a resurgent Latin American left led by Venezuela's gringo-bashing President Hugo Chávez. Leftists won seven of 11 Latin presidential elections last year, and Calder??n beat his left-wing opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, by only half a percentage point. Losing Mexico, the U.S.'s third largest trading partner, would have sunk America's foundering influence in the region. Instead, when Bush...
Despite his wonkish appearance, Calder??n is a savvy operator. Born into a provincial, lower-middle-class family, he won scholarships to top Mexico City schools, earned degrees in law and economics and later received a master's in public administration from Harvard. His father, a schoolteacher, helped found the National Action Party (P.A.N.) in 1939, but the party was shut out of power by the dictatorial Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), which ruled Mexico from 1929 until 2000. The elder Calder??n left the P.A.N. in the 1980s because he felt it had abandoned its Roman Catholic ideals of social...
...Calder??n has smartly gained presidential footing by launching a military assault on Mexico's horrific crime problem, which includes drug traffickers who have been tossing rivals' decapitated heads into streets and nightclubs. But his biggest challenge is bridging the country's epic gap between rich and poor. Almost half of Mexico's population lives in poverty--a big reason that so many are flooding the border to work in the U.S. Keeping more Mexicans at home will almost certainly require Calder??n to rein in, if not break up, the entrenched monopolies that suck vital investment from small...
...BECKHAM'S old team is doing the sports-world equivalent of writing nasty graffiti on the girls'-bathroom wall. After Beckham's $250 million job with the U.S.'s Major League Soccer was announced, Real Madrid barred Beckham from playing in any more games. And team president Ramón Calder??n said the English midfielder is joining the Los Angeles Galaxy because no other team wants him. "David Beckham is going to be some sort of film actor living in Hollywood," Calder??n scoffed. Unfazed, Beck's wife Victoria scoped out Hollywood homes, and American sports fans contemplated something novel...