From bad to worse

THROUGHOUT the worst crisis of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency, caused by the disappearance of 43 students in September, his inner circle has sought to project an image of calm. What is needed, said a confidant, is reflection on how to reduce lawlessness, not acting “just for the sake of acting”. That was days before the attorney-general on November 7th laid out in grim detail how narco-gangsters in league with police had apparently killed the young student teachers in the southwestern state of Guerrero, incinerated them on a rubbish tip and tossed their bones into a river.

Since then the bad news has mounted. On the night of November 8th demonstrators set ablaze the wooden door of the National Palace in Mexico City, taking to a new level a pattern of arson that has accompanied mass protests since the students went missing. The image of hooligans hurling Molotov cocktails at the president’s ceremonial seat of power without anyone trying to stop them struck many Mexicans as symbolic of a government that is passive in the face of crisis.