By RICARDO CASTILLO The stage is set, and all of Mexico is listening. At the last minute, the country’s National Electoral Institute (INE) announced the format for the first debate among presidential hopefuls slated for the evening of this coming Sunday, April 22. The debate will be nationally broadcast on both radio and television. The INE was forced to make shifts in the
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By RICARDO CASTILLO With the Mexican elections now fully underway in a race for a total of 3,416 different posts, it is worth taking the time to look back on history and see how the country got this far into democracy, as well as reviewing the odd shape of the political alliances of nine parties into three separate
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Good Friday will mark the beginning of the 2018 electoral campaign in Mexico. Up for grabs are the nation’s presidency, nine state governorships, 128 Senate seats, 500 Chamber of Deputies seats and 283 municipal mayoralties. There are also a number of state senate and assembly seats being vied for. Competition will be fierce and intense
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Monday morning blues and indignation? You bet. Definitely for two independent presidential hopefuls, it was a weekend full of electoral turmoil. Their candidacies were rejected by the National Electoral Institute’s (INE) Committee of Prerogatives and Political Parties, which last Friday decided that pre-candidates Jaime Rodríguez Calderón and Armando Ríos Piter did not meet the minimum of signatures
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The first of three periods dictated by Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) will come to an end on Sunday, Feb. 11. This period was to denote both political alliances and carry out what in the United States would be considered primaries to select officials running for office. Over the next five months, the INE has programmed two more periods.
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Is Russia meddling in the on-going Mexican electoral process? Is U.S.-born but now-Mexican citizen and National Autonomous University of Mexico professor John Ackerman Russian President Vladimir Putin’s man in Mexico? Ackerman denies it, but that does not stop the Mexican press from pointing him out as the man behind the Russian election interference ploy? Ackerman adamantly repudiates these allegations and the rumor of
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