A PRESIDENTIAL election is due next summer in Mexico, and
Enrique Peña Nieto, the early front-runner, has to get his
message out to 100m Mexicans. So why announce his latest
campaign proposals in a newspaper 5,000 miles away?  Last week
Mr Peña Nieto used Britain's Financial Times to set out a four-
point plan to reduce the spiralling drug-related violence in
Mexico. It was an unusual move: whereas Felipe Calderón, the
president, penned a piece for Le Monde in August, that was a
rebuttal to a critical story that the same paper had run a few
days earlier.  Mr Peña Nieto's ploy seems to have paid off. So
far I've seen about a dozen follow-ups in the Mexican press,
mainly warm. Whereas newspapers only reluctantly cover stories
generated by their rivals, a paper in another country doesn't
really count as a competitor. So the repeat coverage has
multiplied, giving Mr Peña Nieto more exposure than he probably
would have got by writing in a Mexican publication.  The
strategy won't work as well the second time around.