Proceso has been following up on an interesting story of exactly where the money to buy PRI candidate Enrique P-Nieto’s election came from. There’s a lawsuit in US courts alleging a default on payments and tying P-Nieto to organized crime.
It’s a complicated tale, and Jesusa Cervantes doesn’t tell it in a coherent linear fashion. The cast of characters includes businesses like GAP, HIGO, Jiramos, GM Global, and the Monex and Mifel banks and reaches into Spain, Israel, Italy, and the US. According to Congressman Jaime Cardenas, it’s similar to the “Friends of Fox” network in 2000, which helped elect the first rightist president, Vicente Fox.
The complainant is José Luis Ponce de Aquino, owner of Frontera Televisión Network LLP. He alleges that P-Nieto operatives offered him a 56 million dollar contract to promote PRI in the United States. He says that the money was transferred overnight to Monex and Mifel accounts, arriving from Italy, Israel, and either a Portuguese or Brazilian source into an account held by Alejandro Carrillo Garza Sada’s company Jiramos…but they didn’t pay him as agreed. Ponce de Aquino alleges that he received death threats from C. José Carrillo Chontkowsky, Alfredo Carrillo Chontkowsky, and Hugo Vigues, who told him that this was narcotics money. Alejandro Carrillo Garza Sada threatened Ponce de Aquino that he wouldn’t be able to enter Mexico and that he would seize Garza Sada’s business. The contract he was offered, it would seem, was just a cover for laundering money into Mexico.
Ponce de Aquino is being attacked in Milenio, which claims he has business ties to Julio Di Bella, who has been an adviser to the PAN party, as well as being the defendant in 100 lawsuits and using 5 aliases (see also Proceso, which has confirmed the latter).
Ponce de Aquino may well be a sideshow. But there’s no question that money from unknown sources was used to buy votes. If it turns out to have come from abroad or from the narcotics trade, well, it will be bad for P-Nieto. But he may rest assured that no one north of the border will hear of it. I searched through the LATimes to see if they were carrying any coverage of the Mexican election. The only article they had was from a Univision hack telling us that, just like Al Gore, Lopez Obrador should just shut up and swallow: “Gore knew that democracy probably hadn’t been served, yet he accepted the verdict with grace.” If democracy has not been served in deciding the victor of a presidential election, then what has been served, if not tyranny?
Like this:
Like Loading...