Here is a sample of news stories from the last few days (to some of these, SinEmbargo has been affixing the slogan, “And while you go on enjoying the World Cup”): skyrocketing “disappearances”; crackdowns on the press; the corruption of the police, political parties and the justice system.

Mr. Peña Nieto seems to regard the plight of his citizenry as a public relations stain that needs to be kept out of sight. Yet it was only a few months ago that Time magazine heralded him on its cover as the savior of Mexico. Outside the country, he was seen as a modernizing reformer and a committed partner in the war against the narco cartels.

But as his dismal approval ratings make clear, many Mexicans see a different Peña Nieto, one who was elected with only 38 percent of the vote, in an election rife with allegations of vote buying and other irregularities. And they see a different PRI — not a new and improved party, but the same institution that ruled Mexico for 71 years of “perfect dictatorship,” before it was temporarily pushed out of power in 2000. The structures and culture of the party that built modern Mexico are still deeply entrenched. Over nearly a century, the PRI perfected nexuses of government, organized crime and corruption. In his new book “Campo de Guerra,” the Mexican essayist Sergio González Rodríguez describes the PRI’s Mexico as “a state that simulates legality and legitimacy, while at the same time it is an un-State: the lack and negation of itself.”

Who could blame those Mexicans who, when considering the proposed energy legislation, suspected a repeat of the privatizing reforms of the 1990s, which created fortunes for a small elite and PRI cronies, but did little or nothing for ordinary Mexicans but saddle them with what is considered to be the world’s most expensive and unreliable cellphone service? It’s easy to see how privatizing Pemex would benefit some foreign oil companies and create some new Mexican millionaires, without “trickling down” to anyone else.