Leonel Cota, after a 360 turn, does another turn - back with AMLO

One of the more unprincipled and opportunist characters in Mexican politics, Leonel Cota Montaño, is now back in AMLO's fold, the former governor of Baja California Sur apparently seeking a seat at the federal Chamber of Deputies.

This is the same Cota who was once a member of a far left Trotskyist outfit, then joined PRI, then ditched it in 1999, then became pliant and handpicked  PRD president 2005-08 under AMLO, then left the party, seeking candidacies with 1) The Green Party, 2) PANAL, and 3) back to.... PRI!

They all rejected him.

Even AMLO reproached him for this.

And now, appearing at the Movimiento Ciudadano's candidate registry as a re-re-re invented AMLO loyalist, attacking PRD under the leadership of interim president Acosta Naranjo and then Ortega, 2008-11, for having abandoned AMLO, and even accused the PRD of having taken advantage of AMLO in 2006.

Such brazen rewriting and distortion of very recent history must really assume that people truly have no memory.

Jesús Ortega responds to Leonel Cota, "grotesque and crude." Will AMLO?

PRD leader Jesús Ortega responded to the news that former party president and AMLO ultra-loyalist Leonel Cota has returned to backing the PRI:

"I can't really tell whether PRI will benefit or be harmed by the statement of Leonel Cota, mostly because of the inconsistencies in his militancy."

He's being too measured. Even the label "political prostitute" would hardly cover Cota's trajectory.

Leonel Cota comes full circle: The die-hard AMLO loyalist goes back to PRI

Leonel Cota, the former priísta who became PRD governor of Baja California, then was handpicked by AMLO to be a pliant national PRD president, has now come full circle to back the PRI candidate for governor, if PRI, the Green Party, and PANAL back his bid for the sweet spot as mayor of Los Cabos.

(He'll need quite a push - current opinion polls have him down on 13 percent or so - the sudcalifornianos are not too excited about their former governor, it seems)

I wonder what AMLO's reaction to this will be.

The tale of Baja California Sur: All hell is loose as politics come full circle with governor candidates

Baja California Sur will elect its new governor on Feb. 6 next year, and the processes of choosing candidates for the various parties has been extremely tumultuous and provoked a range of schisms within PRD, which governs the state. The intense internal battle within the left on a national scale has contributed directly to the party's turmoil in this state election. which for the PRD has as much with 2012 as it has to do with Baja California Sur. 


The deadline to register electoral coalitions expired this weekend, and the final make-up of electoral coalitions and their candidates is notable: Sudcalifornia para Todos (PRD y PT), with Luis Armando Díaz as its candidate; Unidos por Baja California Sur (PRI-PVEM), with Ricardo Barroso Agramont, and Alianza es Contigo (PAN and Partido Renovación Sudcaliforniana [PRS, a local party), with Marcos Covarrubias Villaseñor. 


Notably, Convergencia in the end did not join the PRD and PT but will presnet its own candidate. The lack of a common candidate among the three parties on the surface appear to make no sense; in other places, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has much influence over PT and Convergencia, has forbidden the parties to join with PRD if the PRD also want to include PAN, yet this was not the case in Baja California Sur. Yet as both national PRD President Jésus Ortega and Secretary General Hortensia Aragón complained, the election is really about who will control the left ahead of 2012. Again, AMLO will rather see the PRD lose than have it elect a candidate identified with his opponents within the party, yet here he didn't even have the excuse of a PAN alliance to provoke the break-up of the left. 


Politics has really come full circle in Baja California Sur. A quick look at the PRD's internal turmoils is quite instructive here. The state went to the PRD after Leonel Cota Montaño, a prominent PRI politician, failed to clinch his party's nomination for governor and jumped on board with the PRD. After Cota stepped down to later become AMLO's hand-picked national head of the PRD, the PRD kept the state with the election of  Narciso Agúndez Montaño as governor in 2011. Make a note of his second last name. 


When it came to electing PRD's new candidate for governor as well as for key cities and municipal districts, all hell broke loose. Due to much infighting between the supporters of Agúndez Montaño's former interior secretary and favored successor, Armando Díaz, and Marcos Covarrubias, the PRD's National Political Commission, a sort of an overseeing council of elders that is of recent origin and includes representatives of all the major factions in PRD, decided to cancel plans to decide candidates by polls, and the PRD's state council was charged with designating candidates. When they not surprisingly failed to come to an agreement, the party branch leader
Adrián Chávez Ruiz asked the CPN to designate candidates, which drew loud protests from Covarrubias who threatened to leave the party. Notably, Leonel Cota Montaño, despite being governor 1999-2005, wanted to now become mayor of tourist paradise and money cow municipality of Los Cabos, yet when it became clear that he would not be designated candidate, the PRD's former national president loudly ditched the party 


The PRD's CPN finally designated Luis Armando Díaz as candidate, and in a move that admittedly smacks of nepotism further placed Narciso Agúndez Montaño, brother of the governor, as candidate for Los Cabos, and former senator Ricardo Gerardo Higuera for La Paz. 

Yet the story hardly ends there. Even though Ortega controls the party's national executive committee and not the CPN, Cota loudly accused Ortega of "treason" and criticized the state government for promoting Armando Díaz as its candidate, declaring the worst that could happen to the state would be a candidate of continuity with the style of Narciso Agúndez. Irony of ironies: It was exactly Cota Montaño, with AMLO's blessing,  who imposed Agúndez Montaño, his cousin, as the left's gubernatorial candidate in 2004. 


More: Cota Montaño left the PRD to join none other than the Green Party (PVEM), which is truly Mexico's most cynical and opportunistic party. As local PRD deputy Víctor Castro noted, the PVEM is not only rightwing, but also an ally of PRI, the supposed arch enemy. Even AMLO expressed his displeasure with Cota's choice of new partner. 
Then, Cota announced that he would be candidate for mayor of La Paz rather on the party label of Convergencia - a party with very little presence in the state, but which would now see an influx of the supporters of Cota. As Milenio observed, this PRD rupture was fully sanctioned and supported by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Cota's sister, to add, is currently mayor of La Paz.


And there is even more: Marcos Covarrubias, former mayor of Comondú. who had loudly attacked his own party for treason and inconsistency and what not when it cancelled the poll, resigned from the PRD to join... the PAN! The party announced last weekend that it had successfully recruited Covarrubias as its candidate. Many other key PRD members are reported to have left the party. PRI, for its part, with the PVEM declared its candidate to be Ricardo Barroso Agramont, the leader of the party's state branch


It is hard to decide who deserves the price for blatant opportunism in Baja California Sur, a place where politics appears to have come full circle. While the current governor may succeed in imposing his former interior secretary as the next governor, Armando Díaz has had to fend off accusations of ties to the narcos, propelled by hardcore anti-PRD commentators such as Ricardo Alemán, who openly accuses Díaz of being a narco. The PRD, in turn, responded that the party is convinced Díaz has no narco ties, and asked the federal attorney general, PGR, to make public whether he is under any kind of investigation. 


As for the race, due to PAN's and AMLO's maneuvers, my bets are on the PRI, though it remains wide open, and as recent events serve to demonstrate, in la política sudcaliforniana, nothing is remotely certain. 

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. 

Who will lead the PRD after Ortega?

It seems like only months ago that Jesús Ortega was finally granted the party presidency of the PRD, after a ruling by TEPJF, the electoral tribunal. The party election was amazingly held by mass vote by the party base, even though every single election through this mechanism has led to a disaster, and particularly since the party by 2008 was more bitterly divided than at any point in history. My heart sinks just thinking the thought that the next election might in the end be held by this manner again.

It is my opinion that the PRD´s disastrous electoral result in 2009 was hardly the fault of Ortega, but rather of the refusal of his internal party opponents to accept his leadership and instead continue their "friendly" fire, and of AMLO´s decision to turn his back on his old party and campaign for the PT and Convergencia in that year's federal mid-term election.

This article in El Universal gives a decent run-down of some of the frontrunners, yet I digress strongly with its warning against trying out the proposed new method of electing party president, namely by a 60% supermajority in the PRD's national council. First, given the many cochineros of internal elections in the past, isn't it worth trying? How many times shall one keep doing the same thing and expect a different result? As for the internal division in the PRD I believe it remains as strong as ever, and now a new fault line as well is adding to the others, namely whether to push for AMLO in 2012 or not. And so what if this means the corrientes will need to pact a majority agreement? Isn´t that exactly the point? The andresmanuelistas has again and again showed they are terribly poor losers that generally tend to refuse to accept losses, particularly within PRD's own institution. This might serve to keep them on, rather than a zero-sum pro-AMLO or a pro-Nueva Izquierda president. Moreover, a supermajority requirement would be (somewhat) akin to a version of parliamentarism, which many in the PRD has long advocated.

The post also mentions Dolores Padierna as a possible candidate. It is my opionion that if Padierna, wife of the infamous René Bejarano, gets control of the PRD, the party is truly doomed. No one has done more to sow internal party division and create bad blood than the people of the corriente IDN, which, to recycle an overused saying,is hardly of the left but socially conservative and stalinist (I for izquierda), certainly not internally democratic but lead with an iron hand by Bejarano/Padierna (D for democrática), and hardly national (N for nacional), as its main strength lies with the clientelistic networks maintained by Bejarano in Mexico City. Only Nueva Izquierda, of Ortega et al, has proven capable, or rather, bothered to build a national organization. Padierna yet again recently called for Ortega to step down, demonstrating yet again IDN's failure to accept its loss. 

One candidate that is not mentioned is Michoacán Governor Leonel Godoy. Every single perredista in the upper echelons of the PRD that I´ve talked to have been full of praise for Godoy´s 2003-2005 interim presidency of the PRD following the utter disastrous presidency of Rosario Robles. The contrast to his successor Leonel Cota, who was regarded as completely subservient  to AMLO, was also remarkable.
He could again be somewhat of a, for lack of better word, "unity" candidate.
Yo voy con Godoy.