Felipe Calderon Hinojosa started his six-year term as president of Mexico with a chaotic five-minute inauguration on Dec. 1, heavily guarded by members of the Presidential General Staff. Legislators from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and two allied parties chanted: “Illegitimate!” as Calderon and outgoing president Vicente Fox Quesada, both of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), slipped into the hall through a back door and rushed through the ceremony before fleeing the scene. The podium had been the site of fistfights between PAN and PRD legislators since Nov. 28, when the PAN deputies had seized it to keep the PRD from blocking Calderon’s swearing in.

At around the time Calderon was inaugurated, some 200,000 supporters of the PRD’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador–who narrowly lost the July 2 presidential election to Calderon, according to election officials–began a march through downtown Mexico City from the Zocalo plaza to the entrance to Chapultepec park. Lopez Obrador, who held his own alternative inauguration on Nov. 20 [see Update #876], told the marchers that they would “hold the flag [of democracy] high” during Calderon’s term. Representatives of the PRD and the leftist Workers Party (PT) promised that their members of Congress would resist pressures to collaborate with Calderon’s government, and PRD leader Leonel Cota Montano reminded the crowd that the media had expected the center-left movement to fade away quickly after the elections and that “there wouldn’t be people with Lopez Obrador on Dec. 1.” [La Jornada (Mexico) 11/29/06, 12/1/06]

Two of Calderon’s choices for his cabinet indicate that he is planning to take a hard line with the opposition and with militant grassroots movements. Calderon named Francisco Ramirez Acuna, the PAN governor of the west-central state of Jalisco, to head the Governance Secretariat (the interior ministry) and Eduardo Medina Mora, Fox’s public security secretary, to head the Attorney General’s Office (PGR).

As Jalisco governor, Ramirez led a crackdown on activists protesting the Third Summit of Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union, held in Guadalajara in May 2004. In August 2004 the federal government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) reported that state authorities illegally arrested 73 protesters during the summit, subjected 53 of the prisoners to cruel and degrading treatment, and tortured 19 of them [see Update #760.] PRD senator Tomas Torres charged on Nov. 30 that as public security secretary Medina had ordered the arrests of hundreds of activists in the southern state of Oaxaca, and “should be impeached for the arbitrary detention and disappearances of social leaders in Oaxaca.” PRD general secretary  Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo called Medina an “excellent” partner for Ramirez. [LJ 12/1/06]

Federal Preventive Police (PFP) started executing arrest warrants against Oaxaca activists on Nov. 25, just days before Calderon’s inauguration [see Update #876]. On Nov. 27 the Public Security Secretariat said it had arrested 141 alleged members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO)–a coalition that has coordinated militant protests in the state for six months–and flown them to the San Jose del Rincon prison in the western state of Nayarit, about 600 miles from Oaxaca. All of them “have a highly dangerous profile,” according to the secretariat. [LJ 11/28/06]

On Nov. 29 federal magistrate Ricardo Paredes Calderon ordered house arrest for former president Luis Echeverria Alvarez (1970- 1976) on genocide charges relating to the massacre of striking students and their supporters at the Tlatelolco housing project in downtown Mexico City on Oct. 2, 1968. At 84 and in failing health, Echeverria may never face trial, but his arrest gave President Fox, two days before he left office, the appearance of having made progress in fulfilling his promise to bring officials to justice for atrocities committed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.