Baja California Sur elections: Party splits, fragmentation, and plenty of opportunism

I've earlier done an attempt or two at summarizing the extremely complicated political situation in Baja California Sur, which is holding elections on Feb. 6 this year - barely a month away.

Here's an excellent and slightly updated article from La Jornada in this regard.

A profile of Humberto Moreira Valdés, soon-to-be PRI's national president

From El Universal, a brief but very useful and quite balanced biography of Humberto Moreira Valdés, whose odds at becoming the next national party president of the PRI are about a million to one in his favor.

He appears a man not easily pigeonholed: He is very close to the rightwing Governor of Mexico State, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the leader of SNTE, Elba Esther Gordillo, whose choking grip on education in Mexico is tragically holding back the country, yet he also has critics within the PRI who call him a "leftist," given the quite substantial social spending under his government - the vast majority of it, lest we forget, resulted in a huge rise in that state's debt.

PRI rushes to dismiss Encinas on legal grounds

Quite predictably, PRI, in the form of Federal Deputy Alfonso Navarrete Prida, immediately noted that while of course he has "great appreciation and esteem" for Alejandro Encinas, regrettably he does not fill the constitutional requirements of "effective residency" in the state. Thank goodness we have the PRI to remind us on the importance of strict constitutionality in such matters.

So it is official: Encinas is going for the candidacy

It's official: Alejandro Encinas is going for the candidacy of the PRD, as well as its not-too-reliable partners the PT and Convergencia, as candidate for governor of Mexico State/Edomex.

Some PRD members, notably its party president Jesús Ortega Martínez, and Luis Sánchez Jiménez, leader of the PRD in Mexico state, emphasized that Encinas is not a candidate yet: Other aspirants for the candidacy exist. Encinas will clearly have to go some form of party vote, such as a closed or open primary, and the PRD have yet to decide on how to proceed with this.

PAN, meanwhile, as noted earlier, remain enthusiastic on the national level, yet not too keen on the local level: PAN party president of the Mexico State branch said that Encinas "is not a unity candidate."
Yet should PAN nonetheless be convinced into voting for Encinas, which would include the unlikely of not presenting its own candidate, Encinas does have a shot at winning.

More good news from Oaxaca II: Cué denounces non-tendered contracts

Governor Cué Monteagudo also expanded on previous statements from his comptroller, noting that public works under Ruiz' administration "never went to tender; they were only assigned, and we have seen companies that repeatedly benefited." He also criticied the previous information for not providing information on the state of the administration to the incoming government. Cué is upping the ante here by himself directly taking on the Ruiz administration.

More good news from Oaxaca.