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Under a white tent set up on the lawn of the official Presidential residence, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto delivered his State of the Union address Monday, nine months after coming into office.  

It was an energetic defense of an ambitious reform agenda, delivered at the residence because the streets of the capital city were blocked off by thousands of protestors angered by the President's efforts to change the educational system.

Peña Nieto is telegenic and optimistic. In his Monday speech he called his reform agenda a “grand transformation” of Mexico, and pledged to continue to fight for change despite a “demanding, arduous road that requires of us great strength.”  

In fact, Peña Nieto’s road has likely been more arduous than he bargained for.  When he came into office, there was talk of this being a new era for Mexico.

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times was one of the leading prophets of Mexican resurgence when he wrote, in a February 2013 editorial:  

In India, people ask you about China, and, in China, people ask you about India: Which country will become the more dominant economic power in the 21st century? I now have the answer: Mexico.

There were statistics then to back this up. A booming economy, growing at nearly 4 percent compared to more anemic figures in the United States. A sense that China’s growth was slowing, maybe stalling, and that manufacturing costs in Asia were starting to come on par with those in Mexico. A growing Mexican-American constituency and demographic in the U.S. that naturally looked for economic, political and cultural ties between the old country and the new.

But, perhaps sadly and predictably, the gloss of the new Mexican administration has faded in its first nine months in office. Ambitious reform has spurred radical protests, especially from teachers who see Peña Nieto's campaign to change the educational system a threat to entrenched interests. 

Further reform agenda items, including the opening up the sacred oil and gas sectors to foreign investment, are likely to be equally contentious. 

Meanwhile economic growth has slowed significantly in the last few months, contracting in the second quarter for the first time in four years. The Wall Street Journal says Mexico has become a “weak patch” in the global economy. The Mexican Finance Ministry announced last week its 2013 growth forecast would be cut from 3.1 percent to 1.8 percent.

These figures are not likely to make anyone happy, and certainly fly in the face of claims that a new “Mexican middle class” is on the rise. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly to many foreign watchers, Peña Nieto’s claims that his new approach to the drug war has resulted in a significant decline in violence and murders are widely disputed by critics and security analysts.

When he came into office Peña Nieto pledged a new kind of security policy that would dampen the horrific drug wars that had plagued Mexico under the former President Felipe Calderon. 

With U.S. backing, Calderon emphasized taking down cartel kingpins. But that strategy is credited as creating more chaos and bloodshed across the country as it pitted cartels against each other as they warred for dominance in the drug trade. Despite claims of change, Peña Nieto’s administration appears to be following much of the same line, with major drug figures captured week after week.

The latest was Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, or “Ugly Betty,” allegedly the head of the Juarez cartel. His capture was announced this past weekend.  

In his speech, Pena Nieto repeated a claim that murders due to organized crime – i.e. the cartels – were down some 20 percent. But his administration gives few statistics to back this up and critics believe the numbers are far higher than are publicaly announced.  

All this has created an atmosphere of pessimism where once there was Mexican boosterism.  The Los Angeles Times quotes from the newspaper El Universal, where Alberto Aziz Nassif of the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology says:

What's left of the Mexican moment?  An expectation, full of smoke, that disappeared in the face of a lack of growth. The poverty that remains, the violence that hasn't diminished, the inertia of regression, … the reforms that, at the moment, are blocked.