What’s the fate of allegedly crooked state governors whose party just lost the governorship and will not have the next guy to cover up for them?
They are most definitely feeling lonely as hell as depicted by the current state of two Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governors who may end up in jail. And if not, they are for sure scared as hell that they may end up in the slammer. They are former Nuevo León governor Rodrigo Medina, and current Veracruz State Gov. Javier Duarte.
Just last week former Nuevo León State Gov. Rodrigo Medina was accused of embezzling over three billion pesos. Current Gov. Jaime Rodríguez, better known as “El Bronco,” opted for seizing a number of properties belonging to Medina and relatives, as well as business partners. As part of the on-going investigation, “El Bronco” was promised as the first independent candidate to win a governorship.
It took Gov. Rodríguez nine months to audit the Nuevo León State finances to discover what he calls “an enormous fraud” that made Medina and his cronies a group of very wealthy people, who would indeed be protected by President Enrique Peña Nieto, who protected his buddy and former Coahuila governor Humberto Moreira and even made him president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Moreira, who was temporarily jailed in Spain for alleged money laundering, stands accused of a 36 billion peso fraud in Coahuila.
Medina, said to opinion leader Raymundo Riva Palacio in a Jan. 20 column that Medina thought Peña Nieto would make him Interior Secretary and protect him against “El Bronco’s” onslaught. Riva Palacio wrote this then:
Medina “is nervous over his future and fearful of going to jail. It’s not clear why he trusts the president, which is what he seems to be relying on. But Peña Nieto, according to garnered information, is not willing, at least in principle, to stick his hands in the fire for him.”
Now Medina has till the end of June to do what he’s doing now: going to the press to claim innocence and accuse Gov. Rodríguez of waging a “dirty war” against him. Rodríguez has stated he will file all evidence against Medina at the end of this month. In the meantime tremble, Medina, tremble because “El Bronco” is out to keep what Medina considers threats, but were electoral campaign promises.
Will “El Bronco” stand by them? We’ll soon find out.
And just over the weekend we witnessed Veracruz State election winner Miguel
Ángel Yunes Linares announce that there is enough evidence at hand, even without an audit, to put current Gov. Javier Duarte in jail.
“I’m absolutely certain Duarte will end up in jail: at a federal level because he swindled over $50 billion from the federal government. We still have to investigate what he did at the state level but I have already detected properties worth three billion pesos.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Duarte called up a press conference to announce that “it’s time for reconciliation and unity” without minding political party affiliation.
On Wednesday pundits were making fun of Duarte’s “reconciliation” statement quoting the old Mexican adage that “fear does not ride on a donkey’s back” but rather flies in an airplane given the speed with which Duarte responded the Yunes’s threats. In Mexican political lingo “reconciliation” translates into “do nothing, let’s negotiate, there’s a cut for you.”
Duarte belongs to the president’s PRI, while Yunes won on a National Action-Democratic Revolution (PAN-PRD) party coalition.
Like Nuevo León’s Median, Duarte is expecting presidential protection, but at this point in the political game the president and the PRI as a whole are opting for not protecting crooked former governors.
Now let’s see if governor-elect Yunes proceeds the way “El Bronco” is doing in Nuevo León or opts for “reconciliation.”
In any case, these two governors were permitted by the Peña Nieto administration to have their way with the people’s taxes and now we’re about to witness the results, which will be great, if it’s not a flash in the pan.
