Senators, local and federal representatives, and dozens of candidates are leaving Morena Political Party despite the unsuccessful efforts of Mario Delgado to keep the ship afloat. Discontent grows in the ruling coalition
MÉXICO CITY, (May 18, 2021).- In the ongoing electoral process, Morena has lost four senators, four federal representatives, seven local representatives, two municipal presidents, and dozens of candidates for councils, mayors, syndications, aldermen… In addition to local leaders and leaders of affiliate organizations.
Most of them left in April and the first days of May, due to resignation, already in the middle of the campaign. And almost everyone slamming the door. It is the balance of the electoral operation of the national leader, Mario Delgado Carrillo, in the different regions of the country.
Delgado Carrillo also faces, inside and outside the official structures, harsh accusations of corruption due to his intervention in the financial management of the construction of Metro Line 12, in which the elevated structure collapsed causing the death of 26 people and more than 80 injured on May 3.
Delgado’s place in the rulings thrown by the workers’ justice mechanisms regarding the tragedy of Line 12 could depend on Morena’s final numbers in the election. His immediate challenge is, however, to prevent the party from keep bleeding.
SENATORS ON THE RUN
The senators who have left Morena during the current electoral process are: Cristóbal Arias Solís, from Michoacán; Alejandra Gastélum, from Baja California Sur; Primo Dothé Mata, from San Luis Potosí; and Víctor Fuentes Solís, an ex-panista (PAN party), who had requested a license from the Senate to be the Morena´s candidate for the municipal presidency of Monterrey, a nomination he also abandoned.
Cristóbal Arias from Michoacán left the party in the first wave of resignations in the current process, after the appointment of Raúl Morón as Morena’s candidate for the Michoacán government. Arias Solís headed all the polls, but Mario Delgado and Citlalli Hernández had other plans.
Finally, Arias left as a candidate for another Obrador´s party, Fuerza Social por México, to run for the same position. Meanwhile, Morón lost the nomination for failing to comply with electoral legislation.
Senator Alejandra León Gastélum, from Baja California, resigned from her membership on April 11. The legislator expected to be nominated for mayor of Mexicali, but the party decided to nominate Norma Bustamante. “I am not going to cover up the crap that Morena is doing and betraying and lying to the people. That is not the movement that I had to found and for which I worked and dedicated the last 9 years, ” she commented on her social networks. But she went to the PT party, another Obrador´s party.
Senator Primo Dothé Mata of San Luis Potosí resigned on April 29 from Morena and his senatorial seat in protest against the nomination process of candidates led by Mario Delgado.
“No one can deny, without being truthful, that the power mafia is in Morena’s candidacies,” said Dothé Mata. He revealed that in four of the seven federal districts of San Luis Potosí, Morena nominated representatives of “the criminal mafia whose files are frozen by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) as representatives.”
It is relevant to remember that Morena faced an internal conflict in that entity due to the decision to form an alliance with the PVEM party to nominate Ricardo Gallardo for governor, who has been linked to criminal activities. Ultimately, the Green allied with the PT to nominate Gallardo and Morena nominated Mónica Rangel.
Nuevo Leon senator Víctor Fuentes Solís left the PAN bench and agreed to be Morena’s candidate for mayor of Monterrey, but on May 11, less than three weeks before the end of the campaign, he resigned the nomination.
In none of the numerous voting intention polls did Fuentes Solís appear close to winning, and his chances declined as the campaign progressed. Morena decided that he could at least add a senator at the end of the campaign. But Fuentes Solís rejected the possibility.
“At different times and circumstances, I have been asked for a preponderant identity with one of the member parties, to which I did not give in, since it was never the original approach, ” he commented in the statement in which he announced his resignation.
FOUR MORENA´S FEDERAL REPRESENTATIVES LEAVING
Some by resignation and others by expulsion, Morena has lost four federal representatives so far in the electoral process. In the first wave, Claudia Pérez Rodríguez and Claudia Yáñez Centeno resigned from the morenista bench .
Claudia Yáñez, federal representative and former candidate for Morena’s candidacy for the Colima government resigned from that party since the end of 2020. César Yañez’s sister, director of Politics and Government of the Obradorista cabinet, migrated to Fuerza Social por México Party, the Pedro Haces party, where she is a candidate for the same position.
Claudia Pérez from Tlaxcala resigned from Morena in February because she said she suffered political violence from the Obradorista candidate for governor, Lorena Cuéllar. Pérez Rodríguez said: “I do not agree on the way to conduct the electoral political destiny of the party in the entity, which is why I am undertaking the withdrawal.” And she became a PAN candidate for mayor of Tlaxcala.
At the end of April, the scandal of the accusations of rape and sexual assaults against Saúl Huerta Corona, Morena´s federal representative from Puebla, broke out. His party tried to protect him, but eventually had to give in to media pressure and withdrew the legislator’s membership, thus losing another federal representative. Huerta was also a candidate for reelection.
On Thursday, May 13, the State Council of Morena in Hidalgo announced that federal representative Julio César Ángeles Mendoza will be expelled from the party for expressing his support to Irene Soto Valverde, candidate of the alliance formed by the PRI, PAN, and PRD to the federal representative for the same district represented by Ángeles Mendoza.
There is also the federal representative for Morena, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, who has launched a campaign against Obrador´s movement from his own guts, and especially against Mario Delgado, whom he accuses of having illegally and illegitimately prevented his possibility of re-election, although, in fact, he continues in Morena.
Muñoz Ledo also made more serious accusations against the former finance secretary of the government of Marcelo Ebrard (2006-2012).
In an interview, Muñoz Ledo explained: “The one who was in charge of the finances (of Line 12) is called Mario Delgado. (…) During the electoral campaign, in a dirty way, with exorbitant money, Mario Delgado supposedly won, but in reality, he is a spurious political party president, it is estimated that more than 1,700 million pesos were spent, and this is connected with another electoral process that is underway ”.
LOCAL REPRESENTATIVES SAY GOODBYE
Morena has also lost six local representatives in the ongoing electoral process. The most serious case is that of Campeche, where Morena lost majority representation in the local Legislature within a week.
On March 28th, the representative Sofía Taje Rosales resigned from Morena; on March 31, Carmen Cruz Hernández Mateo did the same; and on April 5 Eduwiges Fuentes Hernández left the party too. They became independent. With this, the Morena parliamentary group went from 12 to 9 deputies, falling below the PRI, which has 10.
Sofía Taje declared that she was resigning from the party due to the imposition of candidates; Representative Carmen Cruz Hernández pointed out that Morena steals, lies, and betrays, contrary to what they postulate; and Eduwiges Fuentes condemned the imposition of candidates by Layda Sansores, candidate for governor in the state of Campeche.
In other regions of the country, other local representatives have resigned. The first of them was Héctor Menchaca Medrano, a local representative to the Zacatecas Congress, who from the beginning of the current electoral process separated from the Morena fraction and announced that he would work electorally for Nueva Alianza.
In Sinaloa, local representative Marco Antonio Zazueta resigned from Morena in protest against the formation of the Alianza Morena-PAS. Although he joined the PT.
In Puebla, local representative Emilio Maurer Espinosa separated from Morena on May 9. He released a video in which he strongly criticized the party.
In the State of Mexico, the last resignation was given on Friday, May 14th. Representative Crista Amanda Spohn resigned from Morena and joined the PT, but finally decided to reject both parties.
LOST CANDIDATES
The candidate for the municipal presidency of Monterrey is not the only one who has lost Morena. Also from Nuevo León, Brenda Velázquez Valdez resigned on March 28 from the candidacy of the Together We Will Make History Coalition, led by Morena, to the federal deputation for District 11 with head in San Nicolás.
A week before, Josefina Villarreal González, candidate of the same coalition for municipal president of San Nicolás, had resigned. Both former candidates argued that they had not received support from the Morena leadership or from the other coalition parties.
Rosa Lourdes Hernández Flores resigned on April 9 from the nomination of the coalition headed by Morena, to the federal council for District 1 of Nuevo Laredo. The former candidate is the sister of former Governor Eugenio Hernández.
In Apodaca, Nuevo León, on the same date, Verónica Rodríguez Cruz resigned from Morena’s nomination to a council.
Guanajuato is another state where the resignations of Morena’s candidacies have exploited. In early April, Juan José Balver Reyes resigned his candidacy for the municipal presidency of Pénjamo. He argued that his resignation was due to health reasons.
But in León is where most candidates have resigned. The trucking businessman Luis Ernesto Ruiz Guerrero resigned his candidacy for a local representative in León. On March 8, he was still the leading candidate for mayor of that municipality, with no apparent rivals. But the national leadership decided that the candidate would be Ricardo Sheffield Padilla, who resigned from the Federal Consumer Prosecutor’s Office (Profeco) to assume the nomination.
Ruiz Guerrero was positioned as a candidate for a local representative for the VI District of León. But he resigned the candidacy on April 10.
And on May 11, seven members of the Sheffield Padilla roster resigned, including candidates for trustees and councilors.
Something similar happened in San Juan del Río, Querétaro, on April 26. The roster of Rosa María Ríos García, Morena’s candidate for municipal president, resigned her nominations: two candidates for trustees and seven candidates for councilors.
On May 12, the electoral authority removed the candidacy for a federal representative from Pedro Carrizales, a Morena member from Potosí better known as “El Mijis.” The former candidate had registered under the formula reserved for applicants of indigenous origin.
Humberto Santos Ramírez resigned his candidacy for local representative in Oaxaca, after it was discovered that he controlled a WhatsApp chat in which pornography was shared.
LEADER LOSES MAJORITY DUE TO RESIGNATIONS
The Morena leader in the Congress of the State of Mexico, Maurilio Hernández, called for calm on May 13th and asked militants to no longer comment on ruptures within his party.
However, Hernández, who is seeking reelection for one of the Tultitlán districts, is blamed by various state leaderships for not having been able to maintain a simple majority in the local Congress due to the resignations of representatives.
Olga Medina Serrano, mayor of Los Reyes La Paz, denounced that Daniel Serrano Palacios, Morena’s representative before the state’s electoral institute, asked her for two million pesos to allow her to be a candidate for reelection.
On April 25, a group of protesters from different municipalities went to the Electoral Institute of the State of Mexico (IEEM) to demonstrate against Serrano Palacios for complaints similar to those of Olga Medina.
However, groups from Atizapán, Lerma, Almoloya and Los Reyes La Paz threatened to resign from the party as well.
That same day, a mob of Morena members took over the Toluca Marriott Hotel, where they prevented entry or exit, even from the hotel restaurant. The angry protesters presumed that the mayor of Toluca, Juan Rodolfo Sánchez Gómez from Morena, who was about to run for reelection, was staying there.
There were protests and roadblocks in different municipalities, but mainly in Ecatepec, Naucalpan, Tlalnepantla, Cuautitlán Izcalli, and Valle de Chalco. In several of those municipalities, whole groups of Morena members resigned.
However, Morena’s delegate in Edomex, Isaac Montoya, said that he had already done a unification work.
And Maurilio Hernández, who also chairs the Morena State Council, said that there is nothing to worry about, that these are just “small landslides.”
However, even in the electoral districts of the municipality for which the Moena parliamentary leader is competing, Tultitlán, there have been disagreements.
LEADERS FLEE
The state leader of Morena in Veracruz, Gonzalo Vicencio Flores , resigned his membership in February and went to Fuerza por México.
Already in the first stage of the process, Lavinia Núñez Amao, a former candidate for Morena’s nomination to the Baja California Sur government, had resigned from that political organization, which he accused of being “an undemocratic party”. She is now a candidate of the Movimiento Ciudadadno political party for the municipal presidency of La Paz, Estado de México.
The mayor of Buenavista, Michoacán, Grodiano Zepeda Chávez, also resigned from Morena, “due to the imposition of Raúl Morón” as a candidate for the state government. He joined the nomination of Cristobal Arias in Fuerza por México.
On May 10, the Peasant State Democratic Front renounces Morena and goes to Unidos for Tlaxcala. The president of the organization, Asunción Licona Bailón, pointed out that the front has 7 thousand members. And that they left Morena as “the result of years of struggle and exhaustion.”
In Sonora, since the announcement of the candidacy of Alfonso Durazo to the government of the state, a group of Morenistas resigned from that militancy to join the campaign team of Petra Santos Ortiz, an independent candidate that will run against Durazo.
“We are dissatisfied with Morena, we have been blocked and limited in the functions of the party, we have not been allowed to participate as contenders and they even wanted to erase us from the list of militants,” said Héctor Abelardo Zúñiga.
“Alfonso Durazo acts as he owns the party,” added Zúñiga, one of the seven resigners.
Numerous exaspiring members of Morena for elected positions have also resigned, to mention a few, Ernesto Visconti, who sought the candidacy for federal deputy for District 8 of Chihuahua, and Flora Canché Flota, who pretended to run for mayor of Kanansín, Yucatán.
Source: Eme-Equis
