President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto named aCabinet on Friday that is a mix of old guard figures from his long-rulingInstitutional Revolutionary Party and new, foreign-educated technocrats.
Transition team leader Miguel Angel Osorio Chong announcedthat he will take the top position of secretary of the interior, a job thatwill include overseeing all domestic security and intelligence duties as wellas the federal police if a proposed restructuring is approved by Congress.
Chong, a 48-year-old former governor of the central Mexicanstate of Hidalgo, is known as a political operator and deal maker and he hasheld some of the most influential positions inside the party, the PRI.
Luis Videgaray, Pena Nieto's campaign chairman and closestadviser, will run the treasury department.
Pena Nieto, who is to be inaugurated Saturday, has pledgedto make economic growth and job creation the centerpiece of his administration,and Videgaray, a 44-year-old economist with a doctorate from the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, appears to be the point-man in that effort. He is oftendescribed as the brains behind the Pena Nieto operation and has worked closelyat his side for more than eight years.
Jose Antonio Meade, who currently serves as treasurysecretary under outgoing President Felipe Calderon, will head the foreignrelations department, In another sign of the importance Pena Nieto puts on theeconomy. The new president's transition team said Mexico's relations with theUnited States will mainly focus on economic cooperation and development.
Choices such as Videgaray and Meade are viewed as the newgeneration of the party.
But the old guard of the PRI, which held Mexico's presidencywithout interruption from 1929 to 2000, is well represented in figures such asnew education secretary Emilio Chuayffet and Jesus Murillo Karam, who wasnominated for attorney general. The top prosecutor is the only Cabinet postthat must be approved by the Senate.
Chuayffet, 61, is a former governor and interior secretarywho has famously tangled with the head of Mexico's powerful teachers' union,former PRI member Elba Esther Gordillo.
Murillo Karam, a 64-year-old lawyer and president ofCongress' Chamber of Deputies, has been a member of the PRI since the 1970s,serving as a governor, congressman and senator and as assistant secretary ofthe interior in charge of public security under President Ernesto Zedillo inthe late 1990s
"There is direct line to the old PRI," saidRodrigo Aguilera, the Mexico analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit.
"I don't think there is any such thing as a 'new PRI,'"Aguilera added. "There is a new generation of PRI members, but they don'trepresent any fundamentally different outlook. That doesn't mean that thisCabinet can't do its job well."
After six years of drug cartel battles that have cost some60,000 lives, according to some estimates, many voters were simply looking fora reduction in the violence, something Pena Nieto pledged as a the second legof his campaign.
Before winning the July 1 election, Pena Nieto campaigned onthe promise that his party had reformed and changed. The PRI ruled Mexico forseven decades with a mixture of populist handouts, graft and rigged votes.
The PRI's grip on power ended when it lost the presidency in2000, but the party held on to most of the country's 32 governorships. Thosestatehouses served as a launching pad to recoup the presidency, and PenaNieto's Cabinet represented the influence of what many in Mexico call "thegovernors' club."
Pena Nieto himself served as governor of Mexico State, whichadjoins Mexico City, and almost a third of his new Cabinet members have beengovernors.
Seeking to overcome his party's history of economicmismanagement, Pena Nieto has promised an agenda of free enterprise, efficiencyand accountability. He's pushing for reforms that could bring major new privateinvestment into Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, the crucial but strugglingstate-owned oil industry. Such changes that have been blocked for decades bynationalist suspicion of foreign meddling in the oil business.
He appointed Emilio Lozoya, 37, another young technocratwith a master's degree from Harvard, to head the state-owned oil company.
Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos was appointed as defense secretary,an important post given the military's leading role in the fight against drugcartels.
Pena Nieto couldn't make all the Cabinet appointments he hadplanned to because Congress is still mulling over administrative reforms thatthe president-elect is seeking.
A bill proposed by Pena Nieto would gather the police andsecurity apparatus under the control of the Interior Department and create anew national anti-corruption commission. Those changes are expected to passCongress next week.
