Félix Salgado Macedonio, this Wednesday at a rally in Acapulco.David Guzmán / EFE
The electoral authority has canceled by majority the candidacy of Félix Salgado Macedonio, from the Morena party to the governor of Guerrero.
The National Electoral Institute has indicated this Thursday that the candidate did not present the report with his pre-campaign expenses, which means losing the candidacy according to the Law. The lack of transparency in the accounts becomes the slab that prevents Salgado from continuing in campaign and appear on the ballot in the elections next June.
The decision can still be appealed.
The candidate has said in his last campaign act in Zihuatanejo that neither he nor the people of Guerrero will remain "with their arms crossed" and that the decision made by the INE will fight before the Electoral Tribunal.
"My Morena party never registered with the electoral authority any internal process, other than the one referring to the survey to define its State Coordinator of the Committees of the Fourth Transformation," Salgado Macedonio wrote on his Facebook account.
"If [parties and candidates] can evade the law by saying that there was no pre-campaign, we open the door to opacity on the origin of economic resources," said electoral councilor Ciro Murayama during the session.
For almost 12 hours, the councilors evaluated the candidacy of Salgado Macedonio and those of a hundred more candidates from other parties who were also ignored when submitting their expense reports.
Salgado Macedonio denies having spent a peso during the months in which his application was defined, marked by controversy after hearing two complaints of rape and at least three other allegations of sexual harassment against him.
The senator justifies that he was never a pre-candidate as such, but rather coordinator of the fourth transformation in Guerrero, López Obrador's political project.
The INE has been blunt in the face of these statements.
Whatever they call it, participating in a selection process implies doing a pre-campaign and therefore the candidate has the obligation to present an expense report.
"The parties cannot deny that pre-campaigns exist, either through a survey or a direct appointment," said counselor Adriana Favela.
In total, the INE has sanctioned Morena with a fine of more than six million pesos for not reporting the campaign expenses of 60 of his candidates.
Despite the fact that Salgado Macedonio denies having made a pre-campaign, the INE has compiled several promotional videos from his social media profile with proselytizing events held since last year.
Among them, one that corresponds to December 4, 2020 where he refers to himself as the "Pre-candidate of Morena in Guerrero."
In many of these events, a certain infrastructure such as chairs, stages, sound equipment, dancers and bands is observed, which the INE considers as expenses that were not reported to the electoral authority.
Since 2014, the electoral institute is the guarantor that the rules related to the origin and destination of the resources that the parties and candidates use in the campaign are met, with the intention of making the process as transparent as possible.
The electoral authority has indicated that the pre-campaigns have so far moved more than 13,000 million pesos at the federal level.
"There may be a pre-candidacy that did not have expenses and the report would have to be zeroed, but if said documentation of the pre-campaign is not presented, the consequence is the refusal of the registration," the former INE counselor, Pamela San Martín, tells this newspaper .
“Some INE advisers want to downgrade more than 60 candidates from our movement in states where we have a great advantage: Baja California, Guerrero, Mexico City, Sonora, Zacatecas ... They argue that no pre-campaign reports were delivered, when in our calls for candidacies pre-campaign periods are not established because people decide through polls or consensus ”, the party president, Mario Delgado, wrote on social networks.
The accusations against Salgado, investigated by the Guerrero Prosecutor's Office, unleashed a political storm inside and outside Morena that forced the party to carry out an internal investigation and make a local process transparent that ended up becoming a matter of national interest.
The party's Honesty and Justice Commission concluded after its investigations that the complaints made against the candidate were "inappropriate" and "unfounded" and that it could not withdraw his political rights.
After a new poll, the candidate returned to the political arena and the electoral campaign by touring several municipalities.
The INE's inspection has achieved what neither the feminist grassroots nor the women's movement in the streets did, to get Salgado Macedonio out of the race for the governorship of Guerrero.
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