The course of the election for governor in the State of Mexico has not even started but truly worrisome political red lights are blinking. Several no-nos that are echoes from the past federal government interferences with electoral processes are already present in that one election which happens to be President Enrique Peña Nieto’s home state.
This is a case that reminds me very much of the way Czar Donald got elected, and that was when in the heat of the electoral process FBI director James Comey came up with the leak that he was investigating the e-mails of who the U.S. Czar called “Crooked Hillary.” Comey’s blatant interference in the U.S. election was indeed dirty Republican Party politicking, and by doing that he literally “murdered” candidate Clinton and got away with it.
If the FBI director can get away with political murder, why not Mexico’s Attorney General (PGR) — and literally this nation’s FBI leader Raúl Cervantes? This is just the current case in the State of Mexico.
The fact is that last week Raúl Cervantes leaked to daily El Universal documents of an ongoing investigation in which the father and six brothers of State of Mexico candidate for governor for the National Action Party (PAN) Josefina Vázquez Mota, which are being investigated by the Treasury and Public Finance Secretariat (SHCP) for money laundering.
My commendations go to El Universal editor-in-chief Roberto Rock for getting “the exclusive” or the “scoop” in this news item. That’s what’s we in the press are all about, getting fresh scandalous info but also for cranking the Interior Secretariat’s (Segob) payola and outright interfering in what is hoped to be a clean election, if such a thing ever existed. Is that good and honest journalism?
But shame on both Raúl Cervantes, as well as the federal government’s SHCP head of the Financial Intelligence Unit Alberto Bazbaz Sacal, for this very sensitive leak which in the eyes of onlookers is definitely politically oriented to discredit candidate Vázquez Mota.
As a side note it must be said that Alberto Bazbaz was the State of Mexico prosecutor for Peña Nieto while he was State of Mexico governor. He was booted out for being incompetent, but that has nothing to do with the issue at hand, so I will not go into Bazbaz’s record as a failed state prosecutor.
In the case of the leak of the Vázquez Mota family money laundering scam, it is evident that the federal government is intervening in the already heated State of Mexico electoral proceedings.
But the crux at this issue is not the State of Mexico election itself, but the performance and behavior of Cervantes.
Cervantes is a former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) senator and twice deputy (born in Mexico City in 1963) and currently the front-line nominee for the Anti-Corruption post in which if elected, would serve for nine years and no president can repeal him, just like FBI’s James Comey in the United States. (Who said Mexico is not a copy-cat of the USA?)
So in the background is President Peña Nieto’s agenda for the future. Winning the State of Mexico election for his blood cousin Alfredo del Mazo is definitely one of them, but perpetuating PRI rule in the long run and leaving behind Raúl Cervantes as Anti-Corruption czar is another one.
But the real problem at hand is neither the State of Mexico election nor whether Cervantes gets the Mexican Anti-Corruption appointment, but the credibility of the federal government now blatantly interfering in what, if it were not for Peña Nieto, would be just another normal electoral procedure.
In short, the general outcry is for President Peña Nieto to keep his hands off the State of Mexico election, but then, knowing how our beloved president behaves, that would be too much to ask for.
