Word: pries
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...public opinion in a nation gripped by a crippling recession. Supporters hailed the move as the pro-business President Felipe Calderón's boldest and most effective step toward modernizing the economy - and exorcising the remaining ghosts of the 71-year political monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ended in 2000. The company and its union, they argue, were self-serving, inefficient cartels holding Mexico back. It employed too many at inflated wages, they argue, and provided a terrible service characterized by daily blackouts and power surges. "The electricity workers are not victims. They have been looting...
...Electricity Workers' Union had kept some families on its membership lists through six generations. It had fervently backed the nationalization of electricity grids, and assumed a central role in the state-run Light and Power company when it was formed in 1960. The union had loyally backed the PRI, but as the country moved toward multiparty democracy, the electricity union veered left, supporting the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which claims to defend Mexico's workers' rights. PRD lawmakers denounced Calderón's move as unconstitutional, and demanded that it be reversed by Congress. (Calderón and the majority...
...proven to be a disappointment, too, and many Mexicans seemed willing to give the PRI's still robust political machine another shot at navigating hard times. Calderon has received high approval ratings for his military offensive against the cartels and his generally adept handling of this year's swine flu scare. Still, Mexico's terrifying narco-killing keeps reaching record levels, and the recession-racked economy, which depends inordinately on the U.S.'s economic health, may contract by almost 8% this year. Amidst it all, the PAN's good-government image has plummeted, as its leaders and elected officials seem...
...belong to a family that traditionally votes PAN, but this party became too pragmatic," says Beatriz Jarquin, 28, a voter in the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca who voted PRI on Sunday. "These years have not given us the change we wanted." Moreover, the PAN ran an attack campaign against the PRI that recalled for many voters the ugliness of the PRI's own traditional tactics. "It was very dirty and belligerent," says Mexican pollster Federico Berrueto. "The PAN needs to go back to its origins...
...simply be experiencing the same democratic growing pains that hit Eastern Europe a decade ago. In countries such as Poland, democracy's early disappointments brought former communists back to power in the 1990s. But they couldn't bring back communism; and it's just as unlikely that the PRI, even if it does recapture the presidency three years from now, could ever revive the authoritarian monolith that once suffocated Mexico...