President Enrique Pena Nieto came to power Dec. 1 with a swagger, according to AP. His Institutional Revolutionary Party, for all its faults, knew how to govern. He promised a new Mexico, an economic powerhouse far from its image as a violence-torn land overrun by drug traffickers. He passed radical reforms for education and telecommunications and proposed more for energy and taxes. But nine months later, as Pena Nieto prepares to give his first state of the nation address on Monday, the new Mexico still looks a lot like the old one. Economic growth projections have been cut nearly in half. The streets are clogged with anti-reform protesters, who have blocked Congress and even forced the president to change the date and location of that state of the nation speech. Drug-related killings are down, his government says without releasing statistics. But kidnapping and extortion, the crimes affecting average citizens that Pena Nieto promised to attack, are on the rise. After 12 years out of office, the once-autocratic party known as the PRI is encountering a more complicated, democratic country than the one it ran for 71 years. With GDP growth projections dropping from 3.1 to 1.8 percent this year, and protesting teachers forcing legislators to shelve a key piece of his education reform, Pena Nieto cancelled a trip to Turkey to rescue the meat of the education reform in Congress. -- SPA 18:47 LOCAL TIME 15:47 GMT تغريد
