Sunday’s elections in Mexico brought
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back into power under
Enrique Peña Nieto.

Reuter’s today tracks some of Nieto’s
early goals:

Peña Nieto has promised to lift economic growth to about 6
percent a year, create jobs and draw the heat out of a war with
drug gangs that bogged down Calderon’s administration. The conflict
has killed more than 55,000 people since late 2006. …

The U.S. State Department said it expected close cooperation
against organized crime to continue under Peña Nieto.

Just prior to the vote, Robert Beckhousen of Wired’s Danger Room
warned that we should not
expect to see a different attitude toward the drug war from
Nieto:

Last week, Pieña Nieto recruited Colombian General Oscar Naranjo
— a veteran of the war against the notorious drug lord Pablo
Escobar — as his top security adviser. Peña Nieto wants to boost
Mexico’s Federal Police, and he’s for creating a new national
paramilitary police force to fight the cartels.  His campaign
has also been “highly solicitous” of the United States, notes
Patrick Corcoran of InSight, an organized crime monitoring
group. This could mean a bigger U.S. role. Naranjo is also
reportedly close to U.S. officials.

PRI’s previous “corrupt” history of negotiating with cartels to
keep a lid on violence has been raised in news stories as the party
returns to power after a 12-year absence. Beckhousen doubts it’s
even possible to go back to the old system:

Peña Nieto’s political party, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (or PRI), formerly maintained uninterrupted single-party rule
for most of the 20th century. But when it lost power 12 years ago,
it also lost a patronage system between regional party bosses and
the cartels. This system meant drugs were allowed to flow
relatively freely, provided physical disputes between the cartels
didn’t get out of hand. But losing a (note: corrupt) system of
checks and balances, beef between cartels escalated.

Nor is it likely that such a deal could be
made today. In some states that maintained PRI rule, these
networks were maintained but still failed to stop the surge in
violence. Some of the state-level politicians with ties to the
cartels are now being purged. In any case, the PRI will be
governing a different Mexico: one in which corruption is still a
major problem, but in which a single party is not able to maintain
control over the entire governing apparatus. Another problem is
that today’s cartels are smaller, a lot more numerous and
increasingly decentralized. With so many cartels operating in
Mexico today, who do you cut a deal with?