Struggles abound

AN EDITORIAL Thursday in Bogota’s El Tiempo lamented the humanitarian catastrophe in New Orleans (with some rather trite references to jazz and Mardi Gras) and identified the culprit: global warming and the U.S. government’s failure to address it. Madrid’s El Pais expressed its horror at the deaths of at least 965 mostly Shiite pilgrims in Iraq. “No one now guarantees the security of the residents” of Iraq, Thursday’s editorial states. “The native forces that the U.S. and its allies are trying to form are still scarce, and the American Army, whose soldiers tend to expose themselves as little as possible, don’t offer much [security] either.”

The Mexico City dailies, meanwhile, focused on the internecine struggle within the country’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The feud between Roberto Madrazo Pintado, the former party chief and a likely presidential candidate, and Elba Esther Gordillo, the union leader snubbed by Madrazo when he picked someone else as his successor, is threatening to split the party as the 2006 presidential election nears. The PRI is desperate to regain the presidency, having lost its seven-decade stranglehold on the office in the 2000 election. Even without the disarray, the PRI might not be in a position to beat the front-runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party. In assessing the potential PRI meltdown, the center-right El Universal chided the party’s leadership Thursday for showing little connection with its members, accusing the PRIy of taking “steps backward in the way of doing politics.” The leftist La Jornada blasted the PRI for displaying “the dirtiest face of politics.”