Is the heat in Mexico’s presidential election increasing on Enrique Peña Nieto as candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)? Coming into the final week of the election on July 1, it is suggested that he is a comfortable front runner ahead by 10 points in the opinion polls in relation to his nearest rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). Since 2000, Mexico has been governed by the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). But with the PAN under President Felipe Calderón mired in the “war on drugs” that has cost some 60,000 lives since 2006, the party’s candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota is struggling to define a sense of difference in her campaign. With security such a hot topic in Mexico, one of Peña Nieto’s policy proposals is to create a paramilitary gendarmerie of 40,000 recruited from the army. In that sense it could well be a case of from the frying PAN into the fire of the PRI.