Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas seeks to place his son Lázaro as PRD president

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas will never, ever give up his presidential ambitions. Either he, or one of his sons, will be president of Mexico. While Cárdenas  is much more of a statesman than AMLO has ever been and likely ever will be, he has on a range of occasions displayed exactly the same stubborn me-or-the-highway approach. He has run 3 times for national president and was only blocked from doing so in 2006 as virtually the entire PRD pushed for him to decline. Yet rather than help AMLO win, he hardly lifted a finger in his native Michoacán for AMLO's candidacy, nor did his sons.

Now, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is eagerly jumping in the fray again - as if he ever really left - by backing the plans by the anti-Ortega crowd in the PRD to put his son, former governor (2004-2008) of Michoacán Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, as a new "unity" PRD leader between the pro-AMLO and the pro-Ortega groups, which constitute the most significant division in the party. Be sure that it is also part of the plan to present Lázaro Cárdenas Batel as a similar presidential candidate of unity in 2012, after Marcelo Ebrard and AMLO tear themselves and the party apart. Cárdenas met with the anti-Ortega group, nicknamed G8, and demanded the immediate resignation of Ortega, but refuses to state that he backs his son as the new party president. The old caudillo is fooling no one.

Former party president Leonel Cota renounces PRD to join the Green Party

 Leonel Cota's decision to abandon the party he as president to join the Mexican Green Party (PVEM), an extremely opportunistic electoral outfit devoid of any ideology or programmatic content, let alone care for the environment, is almost poetically logical. Cota, to recall, was a priísta until the late 1990s, but bailed PRI when the party failed to nominate him as its gubernatorial candidate for Baja California Sur. AMLO, then PRD president, encouraged Cota to join the PRD and run on its own label, which he successfully did. In 2005, with AMLO's presidential candidacy seemingly on tracks, he imposed Cota Montaño as PRD party president, a post he held until 2008. I have yet to meet any elite member of the PRD - either pro-AMLO or pro-Ortega, or anywhere in between, who had any good word to say about his leadership; he was universally regarded an absentee landlord, a caretaker president who took no initiatives on his own but followed any command of AMLO. He ended his presidency on a particular bad note, disgracing himself by directly interfering in the internal election to elect his successor, prematurely, and falsely, declaring Alejandro Encinas to be the winner. 


Now, Leonel Cota sought to be the PRD candidate for mayor of Los Cabos, but the PRD's Comisión Política Nacional, which represents all major party groups in somewhat of a council of elders, cancelled what was to have been a statewide poll to elect its candidates, due to disturbances and irregularities in the process. Cota, of course, huffed and puffed and accused the PRD of merely cancelling an internal election he was sure to win. He had earlier threatened to leave the party unless it made him its candidate, his decision to join the PVEM, a long-time enemy of the PRD and close ally of the PRI, is still more than bit shocking, yet given his opportunistic trajectory, ultimately congruent with his maxim: Your own interest first, always.