Well I'm back after a bit of an enforced absence, and busy trying to find a role for myself. I wouldn't mind following Marcelo's lead and being the magical realism correspondent. Since he really has taken this as his own, I'll go for second best and try and cover things Mexican. So what better way to get this show started than to look at the news of todays happenings in the Partido Revolutionario Institucional: nothing too important - just a bust up that seems to have split them down the middle. Not only that, voices are already being raised declaring that there has been a 'national coup d'etat inside the legislature'. Oh, there's nothing that can compete with a good family quarrel if its entertainment you're in need of.

The leadership of Mexico's largest party voted Tuesday to oust the powerful head of its congressional delegation, despite warnings that the action could split the party.

The move to dismiss Elba Esther Gordillo, a conciliatory leader who has worked with the administration of President Vicente Fox to bridge differences over legislation, could delay passage of key economic reforms.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party's Political Commission voted to oust Gordillo as the legislative leader of the party, known by its Spanish acronym, PRI.

Gordillo's supporters walked out of the vote. Congressman Miguel Angel Yunes said at a news conference that the action had split the party, though there was no formal declaration of a breakaway. "We're witnessing an attempted coup d'etat inside the legislature," said Yunes, a Gordillo supporter. Yunes said such a split would help Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, by effectively making it the largest bloc in Congress. The PRI lost the presidency to Fox in 2000, ending its 71-year rule, but it holds 222 of the 500 seats in the lower house of Mexico's Congress, compared with 151 seats for the PAN.

Gordillo has been a powerful force in Mexico's national teachers' union that was key in many of the party's electoral campaigns. Leaders of that union have suggested they might even quit the PRI over the Gordillo dispute.
Source: Washington Post