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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2005 
Encinas: Feds to Add More Charges
 Wire services
| | Alejandro Encinas, acting mayor of Mexico City. |
Alejandro Encinas, acting mayor of Mexico City, said at a press conference Monday the government plans to heap more charges on Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He said the government has "no scruples" at all and that its intended policy is to stop López Obrador from running in the 2006 presidential elections.
Encinas' attack was the latest in a war of words and legal battles over the stripping of López Obrador's legal immunity to allow him to be prosecuted for defying a court order. The fight heated up over the weekend when the city legislature launched a Supreme Court challenge to the right of Congress to subject him to the desafuero process.
The mayor has said he will not pay bail and yesterday called on the authorities to charge and arrest him "in one go," so that he could launch his campaign from prison if he were selected as his party's presidential candidate, as reported by the Financial Times.
Under Mexican law he would lose his right to run for office once arrested and charged with the offense, the British newspaper said.
Carlos Vega Memije, the prosecutor at the federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) with responsibility for his case, said that a decision on whether to seek his arrest could take 15 days leading the mayor's supporters to claim that the delay would give prosecutors time to find a compliant judge, the Financial Times said.
The PGR refused Monday to give a time frame in which López Obrador would be prosecuted for defying a court order. Memije said at a press conference that the government is still going through the thousands of documents that Congress handed it for the case.
He confirmed Monday that in his office's view López Obrador no longer heads the capital's government. Congress's stripping him of his legal immunity, which prepares the way for prosecution, also removed him from office, Vega said. |
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