Mexico News Roundup
By RICARDO CASTILLO
Deputies to Vote on INE Councilors
What is going to happen today, Wednesday, July 22, at Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies is anybody’s guess.
Last week, a Technical Evaluation Committee selected 20 pre-candidates, out of long list of over 360, to compete for the Chamber of Deputies vote on the final four, who will become councilors at the National Electoral Institute (INE).
After the final list was made public, evaluator and National Regeneration Movement (Morena) activist John Ackerman filed a “dissident vote” published in the Chamber’s Parliamentary Gazette questioning some of the selected candidates, claiming that there were “conflicts of interest.”
There was an immediate reaction from 75 members of the Morena deputies “radical leftwing,” who sent a letter to Chamber of Deputies Majority Leader Mario Delgado requesting a reversal of some of the selected candidates, who they deemed were “hostile” to Morena.
Ackerman said that the Technical Evaluation Committee toughened and “slanted” the questioning of some candidate, while being easy on others.
Some Morena solons questioned some of the picks, who they claimed had participated in the “electoral fraud” of 2006, while others, they said, are outright hardcore members of identifiable political parties.
Three of the pre-candidates — Diana Talavera, Armando Hernandez and Dora Rodríguez — have filed complaints of biased interviewing by evaluators with the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF). The three plaintiffs have ample experience in organizing elections in Mexico City and the state of Tlaxcala.
But not everyone at Morena agrees with the dissident group, and there will most certainly be a debate today during the video assembly.
If there no agreement on the matter, the Chamber of Deputies may have to ask the Supreme Court to look into the matter.
Morena Deputies Coordinator Mario Delgado said that the selection “will be solved in accordance with the Mexican Constitution.”
In-Bond Exports Up
While April and May registered a significant decline in Mexican exports, June showed that “there is light at the end of the lockdown,” said National Maquiladora Industry (Index) president Luis Aguirre Lang.
“Fortunately, as of the second half of June practically 100 percent of the companies devoted to in-bond manufacturing for export went back to work,” he said.
“We will recover fast. Let us recall that during April and May, (the government) turned off our motors due to the pandemic. During those months, 75 percent of all maquiladora industry was at a standstill.”
Lozoya’s Charges
During his daily press conference at the National Palace, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said Tuesday, July 21, that corruption and embezzlement charges against hospitalized and recently extradited former Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) Director Emilio Lozoya Austin are down to two charges.
One of them, the president said, is for his alleged participation in bribery awarded to him, apparently for use in former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012 electoral campaign, from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in exchange for Pemex contracts, and the second is for the purchase of fertilizer company Agro Nitrogenados, which led to a loss of over $200 million for the state-owned oil company.
“We want to recover money, for example, if there was an overcharge for the purchase of the fertilizers plant,” AMLO said.
“And if it is proven that there was an overcharge of around $200 million, that money has to go back to the Treasury. I believe that in the past this money was applied to drug trafficking related criminals, but not white collar ones.”
Santa Lucía Airport
AMLO is still weathering the “torment of suits” impeding the construction of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base, just northwest of the Teotihuacán pyramids.
One of the final suits still in court, and hard to resolve, seems to be the one filed by a land proprietor named Raúl Romero Zenizo, who claims ownership of 128 hectares in the nearby township of San Miguel Xaltocan.
“We are in the best of dispositions to look into this petition of ownership,” AMLO said, when asked about the case in his morning press conference on Tuesday, July 21..
“We will negotiate, as long as the owner can prove he actually owns those hectares.”