The silence of Los Pinos

IN THE first 18 months after he became Mexico’s president in December 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto enjoyed extraordinary success. Through deft political manoeuvring he enacted a series of structural reforms of his country’s sluggish economy that had eluded his three predecessors, including a historic constitutional amendment overturning a ban on private investment in energy dating from the 1930s. But then it all started to go wrong.

First a heavy-handed tax reform alienated private business. The murder of 43 student-teachers in September 2014 by drug traffickers in cahoots with local authorities in the southern state of Guerrero shocked the country. The revelation that the president’s wife and his finance minister had both acquired luxury houses with the help of Grupo Higa, a construction company that had won government contracts, pointed to conflicts of interest at the top (though all denied wrongdoing). The transport minister then hastily cancelled a contract he had awarded to a consortium including Grupo Higa to build a $3.6 billion high-speed railway.