PRI candidate for governorship of Nuevo León, Adrián de la Garza. Photo: Google

By KELIN DILLON

Mexico’s Attorney General (FGR), via its Office of the Special Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes (FEDE), announced it was opening an investigation into alleged electoral crimes committed by two current candidates for the governorship of the conservative state of Nuevo León, Adrián de la Garza of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Samuel García of the Citizens’ Movement.

De la Garza is accused of “the purchase and coercion of the women’s vote,” said the FGR, by allegedly offering money to all women who vote for him in June’s midterm elections, conditional on his win of the gubernatorial seat, for a sum of 1,500 pesos bimonthly.

For his part, García was accused by the Secretariat of Finance’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of allegedly financing his campaign illegally, with the help of his father, wife and father-in-law.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), whose own National Regeneration Movement (Morena) saw several of its candidacies cancelled just last month for not reporting funding sources, reacted positively to the news of the FGR’s investigation into candidates from opposing parties.

“Yesterday the spokesmen of the conservatism tore their clothes because the Prosecutor’s Office opened investigations against two candidates from Nuevo León,” said AMLO during his daily press conference on the morning of Tuesday, May 11. “I support that decision of the Prosecutor’s Office. Here I denounced it because it is an electoral crime.” 

De la Garza accused the mutually timed charges against García of being a “simulation” by Morena so that García could easily win the governorship of Nuevo León after getting De la Garza out of the way, saying, “they are trying to tie the score.”

PRI President Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas alleged the charges against his party’s candidate as an attempt by Morena to distract from the ongoing fallout from the tragic Line 12 accident in Mexico City, and based on the fact that De La Garza “leads the polls and will be the next governor of the great state of Nuevo León.” 

It should be noted that De la Garza has a long history of unsavory accusations against him, including enabling police torture during his tenure as Attorney General of Nuevo León, his name attached to taking bribes from and having a relationship with the violent Los Zetas cartel, as well as traveling to Las Vegas on a private jet during his working hours as mayor of Monterrey, among other alleged scandals.