More than half of Mexicans surveyed suspect foul play in plane crash
As we reported last week, Mexicans don’t have much faith in the word of their government. The natural reaction of many here in Mexico following a plane crash last week that killed Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño as well as former top anti-drug prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos has been suspicion.
Some statistical, rather than just anecdotal evidence, emerged of that this morning in a survey published by the Milenio newspaper here in Mexico. The telephone questionnaire, based on 500 telephone interviews with people over 18, reports that more than half of all Mexicans – 56 percent – won’t believe that the plane crash last week that killed the country’s interior minister was an accident, even if a government investigation declares it so.
Furthermore, 48 per cent of respondents said that if the government investigation into the crash does in fact find that foul play was at work, the authorities will bury the facts.
Of the remaining respondents, 41 per cent said that the government WOULD inform the public if foul play was found, but that they’d hide some of the details, and the other eight percent said that they didn’t know.
A plane carrying Mexico’s Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and eight others crashed in central Mexico City last week, killing everyone on board and at least four other people who were in the street when the plane came down.
The death of Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos as well as Mouriño spurred theories that the plane crash could have been the work of criminal gangs because both were key players in President Felipe Calderon’s fight again organized crime in Mexico. But opinion differed last week as to the impact the deaths of the two men would have on calderon’d fight against crime and the country’s powerful drug cartels.
The Christian Science Monitor reported that the death of Mouriño and José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos was a “colossal setback” to Mexico’s battle against drug traffickers. But analysts interviewed by the LATimes Ken Ellingwood said otherwise.
Mouriño’s death seems unlikely to significantly alter the course of Calderon’s 2-year-old, uphill campaign against drug traffickers.
“He may have been incredibly important, personally, to the president. But it’s hard to see where the ship of state has been affected,” said Daniel Lund, a Mexico City-based pollster and political consultant.
Whatever the outcome of the investigation currently being carried out by Mexican, British and American officials, it looks like many Mexicans have already made up their minds about what happened last week.
Category: journalism
