BY KATHERINE CORCORAN

Newly elected President Enrique Pena Nieto says he will continue combatting all illegal drug production and trafficking in Mexico, including marijuana, despite its legalization in two U.S. states and liberalized use for medical purposes in others.

In an interview with The Associated Press late Monday on goals for his new administration, Pena Nieto was asked if votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado would make him rethink Mexico’s drug-war policy.

“The short answer is no,” said Pena Nieto, who added that he remains personally opposed to legalization. “My government will continue mounting a real fight against the trafficking of marijuana and all other drugs.”

He has proposed focusing on reducing violence in Mexico rather than capturing top drug lords, a change from his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. Many have viewed that as a signal that as long as drug gangs don’t attack civilians, they would be left ... Read More

“IT IS time to get Mexico moving,” declared Enrique Peña Nieto (pictured) on December 1st in his first speech as the country’s president. As an audience of politicians and diplomats stood to applaud his inaugural address in the national palace, masked youths smashed the windows of banks and hotels a few blocks away. The Alameda park, recently reopened after a $20m facelift, was daubed in graffiti denouncing the new government.

The return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran Mexico in authoritarian style for seven decades until 2000, was always likely to attract protests. A handful of congressmen loyal to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-winger who came second in July’s election, heckled Mr Peña as he took the oath of office, claiming (with no evidence) that he had stolen victory. Attacked on the street and lacking a majority in both houses of Congress, can Mexico’s new president ... Read More

MEXICO’S incoming president, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), will be sworn in on December 1st. Today the members of his cabinet and presidential staff were announced in a brief ceremony in the capital. The 17 men and three women in the cabinet, plus a handful of other senior appointments, represent a mixture of young technocrats and familiar faces from PRI governments of the 1990s.

Luis Videgaray, Mr Peña’s closest advisor, will go to the Hacienda, as Mexico’s finance ministry is known. Mr Videgaray, an MIT-trained economist, was Mr Peña’s finance minister during the latter’s time as governor of Mexico state, from 2005 to 2011, and is seen as the intellectual force behind many of the new administration’s proposals. The economics ministry will be headed by Ildefonso Guajardo, an economist with a career including a stint at the IMF as well as assorted roles in government.

Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, ... Read More

BY ERIC MARTIN & NACHA CATTAN

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto took office pledging to reduce crime, erase the budget deficit and spur competition in communications industries, where the world’s richest man has a near monopoly in phone service.

Wearing the green, red and white presidential sash, the 46- year-old president said in his inaugural address Dec. 1 that he’ll create a national crime prevention program after more than 57,000 people were killed in drug warfare since 2006 under his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. He called for austerity in government spending while saying infrastructure investments should be accelerated.

“It’s time for us to break the myths and paradigms and everything else that has limited our development,” Pena Nieto said at the National Palace before dignitaries including U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Peruvian President Ollanta Humala. “It’s now up to us to take advantage of this platform to boost growth and achieve the most important economic objective — improve the economy for ... Read More

BY ALFREDO CORCHADO

MEXICO CITY — When President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto visits President Barack Obama at the White House on Tuesday, the two will begin the process of building trust at a critical time, with their two countries facing dicey issues including border security, immigration reform and even the legalization of marijuana, analysts say.

The top question going into their first meeting is whether the two countries will continue to move closer, particularly through cooperation on security, a process begun 12 years ago with the election of President Vicente Fox, who unseated the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and continued with his successor, Felipe Calderón, analysts say.

“This will be a chance to start a more personal relationship between both presidents while beginning to rebrand and put a new stamp on the relationship,” said Eric Olson, a Mexico expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “What that new stamp ... Read More

BY WILLIAM BOOTH

MEXICO CITY — The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has left Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto and his team scrambling to reformulate their anti-drug strategies in light of what one senior aide said was a referendum that “changes the rules of the game.”

It is too early to know what Mexico’s response to the successful ballot measures will be, but a top aide said Peña Nieto and members of his incoming administration will discuss the issue with President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington this month. The legalization votes, however, are expected to spark a broad debate in Mexico about the direction and costs of the U.S.-backed drug war here.

Mexico spends billions of dollars each year confronting violent trafficking organizations that threaten the security of the country but whose main market is the United States, the largest consumer of ... Read More

BY E. EDUARDO CASTILLO & MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN

MEXICO CITY — The legalization of recreational marijuana in the U.S. states of Washington and Colorado will force Mexico to rethink its efforts to halt marijuana smuggling across the border, the main adviser to Mexico’s president-elect said Wednesday.

Luis Videgaray, head of incoming President Enrique Pena Nieto‘s transition team, told Radio Formula that the Mexican administration taking power in three weeks remains opposed to drug legalization. But he said the votes in the two states complicate his country’s commitment to quashing the growing and smuggling of a plant now seen by many as legal in part of the U.S.

“Obviously we can’t handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a different status,” Videgaray said. “I believe this obliges us to think the ... Read More

BY NACHA CATTAN

Mexico’s President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto has the leadership to bring together members of his party and the opposition to pass laws opening up the oil industry to private investment, his top economic adviser said.

Pena Nieto has “the conviction for the reforms, the political experience and the leadership of his party,” to push through the changes, Luis Videgaray, co-head of the incoming president’s transition team, said in an Oct. 26 interview. “It implies building a political consensus. It’s what we’ll do with energy.”

The toughest resistance may come from within Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, a traditional ally of unions that have opposed past energy overhauls, said Lisa Schineller of Standard & Poor’s. Already, labor legislation presented by outgoing President Felipe Calderon and initially backed by Pena Nieto to ease the hiring and firing of workers is facing delays in Congress as PRI lawmakers refuse to approve some ... Read More

BY IAN TALLEY

WASHINGTON—Mexico’s new government plans to pass energy-sector legislation early in the new year that should help boost the country’s petroleum production and fuel its growth prospects, Luis Videgaray, head of the president-elect’s transition team said Wednesday.

The energy legislation is part of a broad-ranging strategy that Mexico’s next president Enrique Pena Nieto plans to roll-out when he takes office in December. Mr. Videgaray, who is widely tipped to be named Mr. Pena Nieto’s chief of staff, called energy legislation the “low-hanging fruit.”

He said Mr. Pena Nieto plans to send the legislation to Congress after first dealing with the budget. “We hopefully will get it done early next year,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Videgaray led a Mexican delegation in Washington this week to meet with top White House and State Department officials, jump-starting the international dialogue for the next administration on trade, drug trafficking, border security issues.

“We’re at a ... Read More

MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s PRI, poised to retake the presidency this year after more than a decade in opposition, sought on Wednesday to distance itself from a prominent party member accused by U.S. authorities of taking bribes from drug cartels.

Tomas Yarrington, who governed the border state of Tamaulipas from 1999-2004, “should face his individual responsibility before the courts,” the Institutional Revolutionary Party said in a statement.

Steps are being taken to suspend Yarrington from the party, the statement added.

The party spoke out a day after U.S. federal prosecutors filed forfeiture cases involving two properties in Texas they say were purchased by Yarrington using funds he received from drug traffickers.

“The PRI exhorts Mr. Yarrington to fully cooperate with the competent authorities to clarify the deeds imputed to him,” the party said.

The statement was issued hours after the coordinator of the campaign of PRI presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto urged Yarrington to “explain ... Read More