Show us the money

摘要

When the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ran Mexico, budget-making, like everything else, was pretty simple. The PRI president drew up a budget. He handed it down to Congress. And the massed ranks of the PRI deputies acclaimed it and voted for it. The process began to depart from this choreography after the PRI first lost a congressional majority in 1997, but since Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) became president in 2000 the dance has disintegrated further-and the past few weeks have seen it develop into a monumental stand-off between the presidency, the main political parties and, likely soon, the Supreme Court as well.