A mockery. An abuse. A simulation. A hoax. A montage. This is how Moreno senators Susana Harp and José Ramón Enríquez define Morena’s internal process for the selection of candidates for governor in Oaxaca and Durango.
Both Harp and Enriquez filed complaints with the party’s National Honesty and Justice Commission (CNHJ) to challenge the Agreements of the National Executive Committee (CEN) of December 22 and 23 through which the candidates for the governorships of the six states where there will be elections in 2022 were designated. The mayor of Reynosa, Maki Ortiz, also filed a challenge before that internal body.
This Friday, Harp denounced that the judicial body of Morena declared her appeal inadmissible, so the Oaxacan senator announced that she would appeal to the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) in demand that the internal process of selection of candidates be replaced.
After the @CNHJ_morena decided not to discuss substantively equality or assert my political rights, I will go before the upper chamber of the @tepjf_informa.
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— Susana Harp Iturribarría (@SusanaHarp) January 7, 2022
Enríquez has declared that he will follow the same route in case the Moreno CNHJ also rejects his challenge. The Duranguense senator leads a walk from his home state that arrived in Mexico City yesterday.
The #CaravanaDeLaJusticia reached the last leg of its route!
We are in “El Caballito” in the 📍Mexico City, informing and raising our voices 🗣 so that the decision of the people of Durango is respected. pic.twitter.com/AyZnXiCDiD
— José Ramón Enríquez (@DrRamonEnriquez) January 7, 2022
Under Delgado’s leadership, the party defined that it would choose its candidates through polls: one by the National Elections Committee and three other “mirrors” that were commissioned to three demoscopic companies. Results on which candidates were best placed in each state were presented on Dec. 22.
However, there are internal documents, consulted by Political Animal, which show that, in the case of Durango and Oaxaca, the candidacies were defined and registered since December 18, that is, four days before the official announcement of the results of the polls.
Without Enríquez or Harp being aware, in those documents the CEN defined as candidates for the government of Durango the mayor Marina Vitela and in Oaxaca the senator Salomón Jara.
In response to a request from this media, Mario Delgado’s social communication team said that neither the party leader nor any other member of the CEN would make a position on the accusations of Harp and Enríquez.
“It was a terrible mockery, this was already decided a long time ago, at least four days ago, and surely, to sign those documents, because it was the decision before. Any party can make the decisions of who their candidates are going to be, but why get into this complex procedure if it is not going to be real?” questioned Senator and singer Susana Harp in an interview.
“At least they would have invited us to dinner and better give us the news and that’s it; it was really terrible, it was hours waiting, there was nowhere to sit on that floor of the hotel where we were summoned, it really was not necessary so much abuse.”
“Why the simulation? It was a montage, a simulation and a deception, it was a play the marathon meeting on December 22,” said the senator and former mayor Enríquez. “They have provoked the division of Morena, they did it with the simulation of December 22, they made an agreement in the dark, they assigned the states as if we were tokens.”
They expose irregularities
Both Morenistas point out that gender parity was a criterion strategically used by Morena’s CEN to appoint women in states where the party is less competitive and more likely to lose.
According to the results of the polls presented on December 22, Oaxaca is the state where Morena has the best chance of victory over other parties. In that state, however, a male candidate (Jara) was defined.
Instead, the Moreno CEN appointed women candidates in Durango and Aguascalientes, where the party faces the worst electoral scenario.
In Durango, Enríquez obtained a measurement of 9.75 points, while Marina Vitela, the designated candidate, obtained 0 points. For her part, Harp was the second best evaluated among all the Moreno candidates, below the Quintana Roo Mara Lezama, in addition to oaxaca being the state where most citizens surveyed said they preferred a female candidate.
“The substantive gender parity is so that women can reach decision-making spaces by also applying the criterion of competitiveness. The state of Oaxaca is the most competitive state for Morena, it is the one with the highest acceptance score, and in my case I was the second best evaluated woman of the six that remained as finalists, “explained Harp.
“Let the process be replenished, let them do what is convenient, but you can’t stay anything else like that, pretending that nothing happened when everything happened.”
The senator said that since the early morning of December 23, she informed Delgado that she would challenge the decision of the CEN, and that the president of the party told her that it was her right to do so. Since then, he said, they have not engaged in communication.
“Of course I am in my right, and I am basing myself on the rules that they themselves as a party proposed, and I am respecting them, but not doing so, because it would also be unethical, how can I not defend what is fair? Because I’m also not talking about me, I’m talking about all women, I’m talking about a project that we had built for Oaxaca uniting many groups, many leftist currents of Morena, it is an issue that concerns us all, and not raising our voices would be unethical,” he added.
Harp felt that the simulation of an internal selection process caused an unnecessary split in the party.
“We could have saved ourselves this internal process of momentary separation. We are not asking people to take sides belligerently, of course that is not the intention; I would not betray, I would not leave Morena or ask anyone to do it, but I have to finish this process and I want to take it to the end,” he said.
For his part, Senator Enríquez criticized that the CEN has registered Marina Vitela as a candidate when the polls in Durango had not even finished rising (the period of uprising was from December 15 to 18, and the CEN agreement was signed on December 18).
“It is unfortunate, it is outrageous that they have not even bothered to see what the citizens of Durango thought; for the National Elections Commission it did not matter what the Duranguenses thought; the uprising was not finished and a candidate had already been assigned, and we must remember that those polls were paid for with public resources,” he said.
Enriquez, who was mayor of Durango, accused Delgado of making “agreements in the dark,” and pointed out that the criterion of “competitiveness” used by the CEN to assign discretionary candidacies is not provided for in the party’s statute.
He added that there is an “aberration” and an “incongruity” between the values for which the Morenistas have fought for years and the practices of their leadership.
“We fight for honesty, for transparency, for accountability, for democracy, and what are they doing? To put an end to a struggle of many years of Mexicans to have a democratic country. Today they have no forgiveness.
“The moment we are living is very dangerous, because we always had the discourse of honesty against corruption, the mafia of power, the old politics, the dedazo, and today that is being done and more, because now it is demonstrated (with documents), it is a precedent, that is why it has to be reversed, it is less expensive for the movement and for the country that the circumstances of Durango and of course of Oaxaca are corrected,” Considered.
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