Politics: Did Corral outmaneuver the Peña gov't?
A little over a week ago the curtain fell on the political stand-off that had pitted the Chihuahua state and the federal governments against one another in recent months. At a joint February 3 press conference, Chihuahua Governor Javier Corral and federal Minister of the Interior Alfonso Navarrete announced they had settled their differences in cases involving allegations of campaign finance fraud, torture and federal officials' withholding funds to punish the state for having investigated members of the governing party on corruption-related charges.
As we have been reporting, the dispute between Corral and the federal government could have major repercussions on the 2018 presidential elections. After the Chihuahua state government concluded that federal officials were doing nothing to help win the US extradition of former governor César Duarte and were taking revenge on the state's finances due to its arrest of a PRI official on charges he illegally channeled public funds into his party's 2016 gubernatorial campaign, Corral began to lead a protest caravan to the nation's capital, with considerable national coverage by the news media.
The administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, meanwhile, botched efforts to lay to rest concerns about what happened to 900 million pesos Chihuahua said it had been promised, and soon found itself increasingly on the defensive about its role, or lack thereof, in bringing Duarte back to Mexico to face justice.
An initial reading of the February 3 outcome suggests that Coral effectively emerged in a position of strength, with the missing 900 million pesos headed to the state, and progress toward winning César Duarte's extradition in an implicit confirmation by the federal government of yet another PRI state governor's engaging in widespread corruption.
However, Corral will also pay a price, with some supporters already accusing him of selling out on the matter of Alejandró Guttiérrez's imprisonment and his challenge to federal discretionary management of transfers to the states. Moreover, by showing that the PAN and PRI can bargain even in an election year, the joint press conference provided Andrés Manuel López Obrador with further evidence of the supposed political symbiosis ("PRIAN" in AMLO's lexicon) and partisan abuses of the judicial system he has long alleged.
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